Heather: It goes all the way back to when we were kids. John and I are siblings and we grew up in a small town in North Dakota. Our Dad's a dentist. When John was studying design and I was in law school we both became passionate about sustainability. We wanted to use our talents to fuel a more sustainable world.

During the brainstorming process, we talked about a lot of products but we kept coming back to a toothbrush. And we thought, what's better than something you use every morning and every night? And it's really a space that has been lacking innovation. There aren’t a lot of people who actually care about their toothbrush.

Heather: In 2012 and 2013, we built our first prototype: the bamboo brush. We had a great reception with thousands of orders. But when we switched from making a few hundred at a time to making ten thousand at our manufacturer facility in China, we lost the precision and the quality we needed. As a result, 50% of our orders were thrown away.

We turned our heads back to the U.S. and found a bio-composite company in North Dakota. They produce a bio-composite material from the plant waste you find at farms. We used that to make our awesome toothbrush. Now, we supply all of our materials and manufacture everything right here in the U.S. It creates jobs and the local economy and we can connect with the very people who are making our vision a realty.

Our re-launch last fall proved there’s still a demand for our product. Customers have come back and reordered their brushes.

John: Like never before, customers demand products with meaning and purpose. People know that the purchases they make reflect the values they want to see in the world.

I think you can draw a connection to Method, who makes household cleaning products. They were the first products on the market that had an eye for aesthetics and an environmental awareness. They've since expanded and become really a big a household brand with a lot of recognition and trust. If you want a beautifully designed household cleaning product you get a Method product.

We want Bogobrush to be the same way. Because To us, the ethics of a product are just as important as the aesthetics, and everything we create has a mission to bring smiles to people’s homes, their communities, and our planet.

Heather: We’re raising $50,000 to use for marketing, including press (which has been really successful for us), PR, and creating new partnerships with retailers. If we raise anything above $50,000 that will go to purchasing new tooling equipment which would allow us to scale our production by four times and reduce our margins significantly. We’re actually talking to a couple larger retailers right now but in order to handle that order, we’d have to invest in these machines.

John: Bogobrush is definitely taking some market share from the high end toothbrush market—these are the people who care about quality products and are usually buying electric toothbrushes.

But for direct market competitors there's a company called Preserve that makes toothbrushes from recycled plastics. They're similar on the environmental side of things but aesthetically, they're not much of a competitor. They don't represent themselves as a beautiful object and they don't have a social component. But they're the toothbrush that's most presented in a lot of places like Whole Foods.

Since we launched our original bamboo brush, a few other companies have come along selling bamboo products, but they have the same quality issues that we decided to elevate ourselves above by changing materials and improving our supply chain here in the USA.

Heather: Right now, the price is a good reflection of how much it costs to make a toothbrush. Because we’re still small, our machinery is also small. Our machines are making one brush at a time—and is something we're looking to upgrade to increase our margins and possibly decrease the price tag. But the price also reflects the buy one, give one aspect. You’re essentially paying for two brushes.

John: $9.50 also creates a distinction from the standard $5 brush . When you see the price, you take a moment to think about why it cost $10 and then discover that okay, I’m not just buying one, I'm giving one to someone in need. And I'm not just buying a piece of plastic, I'm buying something I can easily recycle or compost and I'm not buying something I'm just going to hide away. I'm buying this piece of art that you can display in your home.

It’s our inherent mission to transparently bring out the true cost and true value of a product. There’s a cost to making things locally. There's a cost to doing things sustainably, to doing things with a social mindset. We want people to understand that and to be excited to support something that takes those costs into account.

Heather: We've built a great relationship with C2Renew and trust them entirely. But, if something should happen beyond our control, we know there are a few other companies working on similar materials, and we could turn to them as a new supplier

John: Beyond Heather and I, we have a network of people we work with depending on the tasks at hand. We have a team of contractors, from factory machinists and material scientists, to product photographers and dental hygienists. These are people who have been with us from the beginning and understand our business inside and out. We are an eclectic group on a mission to do something that matters.

John: For us, there’s business success and then philosophy success. Concerning our philosophy, we want to address the issues that got originally motivated us: there are 450 million American toothbrushes going to landfills with no other option and there are 80 million Americans who don’t have access to oral healthcare. It's not just their oral health that's affected. They can't eat well so they don't have good nutrition. And it affects their entire body. We want BogoBrush to be an object that raises awareness for those issues.

From a business prospective, we want it to be an example for other companies that you can incorporate social and environmental value into the cost of your product and it will be successful because of that. Not in spite of it. Our goal is to be a thriving, functional company where Heather and I can focus more on the vision of the company with a team of people working with us to execute that vision.

Heather: We set out to demonstrate that you can have a sustainable business that makes money and makes jobs for people and it does good for the environment, it does good for you.

Beyond a sustainable business, we want to become part of communities, learn what problems they face, and see how we can help be part of solutions to those problems, just as we are working to solve problems with Bogobrush. From there, possibilities for positive change are endless.