by Ryan Donaghy
Reinventing the Art of toothbrush design – Super-high Performance, Much Longer Battery life & Personalized to several Styles & Designs
To mark the important 4th of July celebration in America we will be adding an addtional Style to the T.Brush range: The Patriot – USA Edition.
Dot Company is a team of innovators that have observed that dental care products have started lagging behind in the world of product design and personalization. We feel the big companies are producing new products but with the same old boring designs that the consumers, who are interested in personalized and contemporary design, find dull and uninteresting. T.brush is reinventing the art of toothbrush design by providing a compact and lightweight electric toothbrush, personalized to several styles and designs, with an overall performance better than the leading products in the market.
So what exactly makes this toothbrush so much better than the big branded products…
T.brush comes in seven different and fashionable styles and is presented in quality packaging
1) Battery Life – custom designed lithium polymer battery delivers 70% longer battery life than comparable brushes and takes 3 times less to reach full charge.
2) Perfect Travel mate – 60% more compact and lightweight than comparable brushes, with its universal voltage and USB travel charger allow it to be used anywhere in the world.
3) Technology – uses oscillate-and-rotate technology, proven to be the most effective cleaning method, removing 100% more plaque than a manual toothbrush. A custom designed motor that delivers 9000 rotations per minute, and for that prefect dental clean it has 5 brushing modes, 2 min timer and quadpacer
Unboxing the first prototype.
T.brush has a very strong mission: to bring Style to your Smile…but we live in a world where the fact that we can afford to buy an electric toothbrush means we are very fortunate indeed. But there are millions of people in the world that are not even able to smile.
The Adventurer Brush was designed after a very special man and one of the very first member’s of the T.brush family and was the inspiration behind a lot for what we are trying to achieve. Alex’s own mission was simple: he wanted to bring happiness and positively touch the lives of everyone person he met…and so he traveled for 3 years circumnavigating the world to reach and influence as many people as possible, especially those in deprived socio-economic regions….some who had never seen a white man before.
On Alex’s passing he was helping poverty stricken children in orphanages across India.
In honor of this great man, our longer term aim is to establish a project that aims to give “One child a smile” for every Adventurer brush we sell and help children from all over the world who are unable to receive or afford even the most basic dental hygiene, get the smile they deserve…so help us along in this journey so we can “Give a Child a Smile”
It all started with a dream…haha… not really a dream more of a eureka moment! After many years working in the consumer goods industry, specifically on electric toothbrushes, I realized there was something missing with this everyday accessory…
Although, I had an extensive background in sales and marketing with some of the world’s largest brands, I was missing so many different elements to bring this product to life.
Designing the product, engineering the product and the actual manufacturing of the product is where the journey REALLY began…So late in 2012, I teamed up with a very skilled product designer, Paul, to start working the initial sketches and translating these into CAD digital versions.
FIRST OBJECTIVE- create a brush a fraction of the size of the standard rotate brushes, without losing any performance or capability.
SECOND OBJECTIVE- create a range of really cool styles and make the overall aesthetics of brush and packaging more beautiful…so that we weren’t just manufacturing one brush fit for all, but many versions so that t.brush users could feel more identity in this very personal appliance.
THIRD OBJECTIVE- address and find a solution for all the frustrations travelers have with their electric toothbrush: short battery life, unable to charge in other countries due to incorrect voltage, having to use an adaptor to charge in the bathroom, and also not being able to charge on the go (i.e. USB).
So with the product designs agreed, the next stage was to head to the Orient on a research trip to get the best engineers and manufacturers to help to develop the product.
After many visits to some of the sketchiest looking factories in Shenzen, and too many bowls of chicken feet broth, I decided to work directly with an engineering company in Taiwan instead of going straight to the manufacturer, mainly because of the level of skill required to design a world class product
It seemed my objective of creating the slimmest and best performing toothbrush, proved to be a little more challenging than I first imagined. It took more than 12 months of rigorous testing, mechanical and electrical engineering, circuit board design and an incredible amount of money to get the final prototype developed. After being told by the engineers, several who left in protest, it was impossible to fit all that technology into the slim designed we had provided…after 20 different custom designed motors and 15 different types of battery, and the circuit boards now folding in half using both sides…we did it! What an engineering feat that was!
Being able to hold the very first t.brush prototype was an amazing feeling, after all that hard work and perseverance. We sourced a high end manufacturer (who’s factories create medical devices for hospitals, so quality control is exceptionally high), and secured all the parts suppliers etc.
We even made an agreement with the UK’s largest high street retailer to sell the products from July 2014 and we were close to signing a deal with some of the UK’s largest supermarkets. At this point the excitement about bringing this amazing product to market, and re-inventing the way people see electric toothbrushes, was at an all-time high.
Unfortunately, the next big task of securing investment did not go as planned…. the risk of requiring the money (to produce production moulds and working capital) 5 months before receiving a first order, was too great for potential investors. As a result, we missed out on another opportunity to sell with major retailers in Summer.
We even tried our hand on the big screen, with the TV debut on BBC 1’s prime time show, Dragon’s Den, in Feb 2015.
After getting everything right, but still walking away with no money, it seemed it was the perfect time to come to Kickstarter to get the support needed to finally make your daily brushing experience fun and bring t.brush into your bathrooms. After all, if you have read this far, you obviously love the idea of a cool and funky toothbrush, and we very much appreciate your help making t.brush a reality
Let’s spread the word about t.brush. It would mean the world to us if you could share our campaign on social media using our #tdotbrush hashtag. Don’t forget to tag or mention us, we’re @thedotbrush on Twitter, tdotbrush on Facebook and t.brush on Instagram.
DOT (www.thedotrange.com) is a new upcoming start-up with the aim of bringing to the market a range of appliances, not only fashionable but also developed to the highest technical level.
We have spent the last two years developing and testing this product…it has been through so many hoops it is scary, so we are completely confident in the quality of t.brush. However, as it is a hardware project we are aware that with the complexity of manufacturing and production (& shipping delays etc), that sometimes there are certain challenges to overcome… but this is the fun of creating a new product:) Nevertheless, we promise we will work 100% to find a solution to overcome any obstacle and still fulfill our promise to you, our backers!
With the component suppliers and manufacturers we have aligned an initial order run of 5,000 handles and they are expecting the factories to go into production by the end of summer…so in this respect we are confident that if we raise the kickstarter investment, you will receive the product by the delivery date proposed.
There is also a lot of bad feedback from KS campaigns that have not factored their BOM costs accurately or have not correctly calculated the pricing strategy of their products… I can assure you we have been through two years already understanding these things in detail (which made the process a lot longer I suppose but at least we have complete and clear direction now), we understand margin expectations with the retailers (which is extremely high!), hence we can offer a discounted price on Kickstarter and still be able to provide a sensational electric toothbrush directly.
We will keep you with us at each stage during and following the Kickstarter campaign, with any updates on our progress.
WATCH VIDEO: https://d2pq0u4uni88oo.cloudfront.net/projects/1653902/video-549161-webm.webm