 What's the worst consumer feedback and best consumer feedback you've got? Worst consumer feedback, toothpaste tastes like SHIT. Best consumer feedback, the toothpaste tastes absolutely f***ing amazing. Cody Levine, co-founder of Twice Toothpaste. You're ready to answer some questions? Let's do it. What is your brand? Our brand is a next-gen oral care brand that is hopefully going to empower some people to take better care of their oral health. Give me your investor pitch. 100 million Americans don't brush their teeth twice a day. So clearly there's an issue and if we're not brushing our teeth twice a day, we're not taking care of our overall health. The toothpaste you use every single day, traditional toothpaste is filled with unnecessary and harmful ingredients, yet they're actually effective. But on the flip side, if you're brushing with all natural organic toothpaste, those sound great. We live a healthier lifestyle, but those don't have effective, active ingredients that are actually preventing, protecting, and creating a healthier environment for your mouth. What did you create first, the brand or the product? We created the product first. We said, let's create one formula of toothpaste and then while we were building the brand identity, the name came and actually the two unique formulas came. How'd you come up with the name? My brother came up with it. He's actually an expert nameer. We were obsessing over talking about oral care and we said we brushed twice a day and that clicked and we said twice. It works. What other names did you consider besides twice? Brushed, Rufus. We had some silly names. Your branding looks great. Who did it? What was the brief? We worked with the branding agency in New York called Zero Studios. The brief was to create one product that everyone's going to love, but ironically we ended up with two. How do you convince people they need two different toothpaste? Educating on what's inside your toothpaste and ultimately what could happen if you don't brush your teeth twice a day. What could happen if I don't brush my teeth twice a day? The smallest of things like a cavity can turn into infections. Infections can lead to anything from cardiovascular disease to Alzheimer's or diabetes that can all be forecasted in the mouth. So people think that toothpaste is just to clean your teeth. It's really not. It's to prevent cavities, protect against sensitivity and ultimately create a healthier mouth. What is premium toothpaste? Premium toothpaste for us is redefining the category. Taking it outside of the drugstore, taking the best of it, which is conventional toothpaste that works, mixing it with modern wellness-focused ingredients, bringing those two worlds together is going to elevate the category. How much is a tube of toothpaste? It's $17 for the duo, and if you subscribe it's $16. So $8 a tube essentially? It's about a buck or two more than your traditional toothpaste aisle, but because of the formulation, because of our active ingredients and our kind of wellness-focused ingredients, we're paying a buck or two premium. Why do I need a different toothpaste for morning and night? Better brushing habits. If you don't brush your teeth twice a day, there are over 120 systemic diseases that come from inflammation in the mouth, so we want to take care of your overall health. Right, but why do I need a different skew for the morning than I do the night? Really unique experiences, right? I think we're conditioned to use the same toothpaste every morning and every night, and offering that choice for someone to say, hey, early bird's my morning and twilight's my night, we're changing behavior, and we're seeing customers love it. So is that, call it, marketing tactic a way to reward people for brushing twice a day? Yeah. Because arguably the formula is to effectively clean should be no different. The formula from a benefit perspective, cavity prevention, sensitivity, whitening is the same, but there's different flavor experiences, one that's more awakening and one that's more relaxing at night. Listerine and vented helitosis do need to create a fake disease to cure. Oh man, do we need to create a fake disease? No, I think that as you get older and as you go to the dentist and if you're not taking care of yourself, dental bills just go up, right? So it's expensive and that I guess is a disease in itself, right? Spending a lot of money on your dentist. What's wrong with Colgate? Nothing bad to say necessarily other than they have effective ingredients that are clinically proven, but there's a ton of stuff you don't want in there, sulfates, parabens, carrageenan, alcohol, you name it. And there's not a ton of loyalty or brand love and we want to change that. I find that hard to believe because I feel like toothpaste is Crest or Colgate and when you say there's no brand love, I feel like you're one of the two, like a Coke and Pepsi and that's it. Right. And you mostly get your loyalty from maybe your dentist. They say, hey, use this, but I don't think there's been any introduction with any other products out there that are going to make you say, hey, I'm going to switch out or there's something better. We really wanted to upgrade the category and upgrade the products and take a very different approach to it. What do you consider scale? Scale for us is a household name in oral care, you know, to be on the bathroom countertops of households around the country. Who are your customers? Poor customer, 30 to 45 year old women, major Metro cities who are conscious about the products they're buying. How did you decide on your brand aesthetic? We wanted to elevate the category, right? Toothpaste looks similar across the board. It's got flashy looking colors and when you walk down the aisle, it's a bit of sea of the same. We wanted to take an approach to more beauty. So we were looking at a ton of beauty brands in the space. So even though your DTC launched DTC, you were still looking at the aisle as an indicator of how you want to build the brand? Yeah, as a majority of where people are purchasing, you know, in the aisle on Amazon and through your dentist, that's the majority of where people traditionally have bought toothpaste. If you had to give a dictionary definition of your design aesthetic, what would it be? Clean, sophisticated and elegant. What brands do you look up to? Supergoop, Ritual, a lot of these more modern skincare wellness brands that are educational. Where are you going to next after toothpaste? The category is big, but we love toothpaste. You know, we see toothbrushes out there, it's a saturated market, it's busy, which is exciting. But for us, we see a lot of opportunity in toothpaste and then down the road, we'll introduce some other products. Have you seen CopyCats? Yeah, we had a brand that took all of our photography and put it up online and rebranded and put their logo on it. We've seen some other players like take the morning and night model. We have two experiences, so we think it's flattering. How important is the taste? Paramount. I think taste is subjective, but nonetheless, traditional toothpaste might taste a little chemically and all natural toothpaste might not taste great, so we wanted to make our toothpaste taste as best as we can. What does it taste like? Our evening is like this smooth, subtle, delicious, relaxing peppermint-vanilla lavender. And our morning is like just the right amount of morning mint to get you going, but nothing too overpowering. They're pretty mellow, yet elevated taste profiles. What are the key indicators you look to determine the health of your business? Retention. You know, as a subscription-based business, if people are staying with you, when it's a product like toothpaste that we all need every day twice a day, people love it and they stay with us, that's health. Have you had that moment yet that founders talk about where you saw it in the wild? I could be meeting someone at a wedding or somewhere I wouldn't expect and I talk about what I do and someone's like, oh my god, I use your toothpaste. It's amazing. That's happened a few times and it feels really good. What's been the biggest media marketing and investment you've made today? Facebook and Instagram ads. How important is community? Community is everything. I mean, we're not just a product that sits on a shelf, we're voices and people who stand by our product at our mission and word of mouth is really, really crucial. What's the worst consumer feedback and best consumer feedback you've got? Worst consumer feedback, toothpaste tastes like SHIT, best consumer feedback, the toothpaste tastes absolutely f***ing amazing. Funny which words you choose. Yeah, I don't know what's the protocol here. What's been the biggest moment in the company's history? Lenny Kravitz is our third business partner. He went on Ellen to talk about the work we do, our mission and talk about twice. It's healthy toothpaste that works and it's the best toothpaste. What individual PR marketing media influence or effort has been the most impactful? Ellen, the Ellen show is massive for us. What's your social media strategy? Content created around product, community and culture. I think we want to be modern, we want to be fresh, but we want to share our perspective and educate. PR or influencers? I think they're very intertwined. I think PR is very influential and so are influencer voices. Do you work with influencers? If so, how? We gift product, we want to get product in the hands of influential voices to really introduce our brand. We don't necessarily pay for activation, we're really just building organically. If you could start all over again, what would you do differently? Maybe would have bootstrapped it less, but nonetheless it's a learning experience and a journey, but probably would have injected with capital earlier. How important is efficacy? Crucial. As sons of a dentist, we didn't want our toothpaste to just say it does something, it needs to be clinically proven. What do you love about yourself? I love that I can wake up tomorrow and see it as a new day. Depending on the challenges I have today, tomorrow's a new one. What do you hate about yourself? My desire to execute a million things at once. Could you ever have done this without having grown up in a dental family? Yeah, I think it would have been a lot harder. Family dinners are talking about world care and toothpaste and products and how we want to build our business. It's a family-run operation. Cody Levine, co-founder of Twice Toothpaste, thanks so much for coming on here and answering some questions. Thanks so much for having me. I'm Ian Wishingrad and we'll see you next time on I'm With the Brand.