Walking down the oral care aisle in a New York City drugstore, Craig Dubitsky—a founder of Eos Products and an early investor in Method cleaning products—noticed nothing but images of extracted teeth, unappealing packaging and shame-based marketing tactics with phrases like, “If you’re not whitening, you’re frightening!” and, “The dentist is going to drill, fill and bill you!” Not to mention, he realized these products were made using unnatural chemicals and ingredients, some of which had been banned by the FDA.
And a lightbulb went off in his head.
Despite being a $40 billion industry, few dare to break into oral care, which has been dominated by the same three behemoths for decades. But in 2010, Dubitsky decided it was time to change that.
He created Hello Products, the “friendly” oral care brand dedicated to delivering natural and effective products like toothpaste, mouthwash, floss and toothbrushes. The cool, minimalist packaging made for an added bonus.
Dubitsky hit the nail on the head with the concept and watched as Hello made its way into big-box retailers like Target, Walmart, Whole Foods and Dollar General as well as a slew of ecommerce merchants like Amazon and Thrive, making it accessible to everyone.
In just 18 months, Hello grew from 19,000 stores to 45,000, while simultaneously launching its own ecommerce website. It was tremendous growth for a company of less than 30 people—growth that can often cripple an unprepared business.
The volume of sales did, in fact, challenge the company’s ecommerce site and legacy systems, causing bottlenecks in processes and ultimately order delays. And that’s when Dubitsky, and Hello’s VP of Finance, Adam Levison, realized it was time to make a change to the company’s business management solution.
After doing some research about what other fast-growing startups were doing, they decided to implement Oracle NetSuite—a “seamless” transition, as Dubitsky describes it. The company re-platformed its ecommerce site onto NetSuite and through the unified platform, tied together its business operations and financial management.
“It allowed our really talented people to spend more time thinking about how to improve our business and our brand—not on entering inputs—and now they get better outputs,” Dubitsky says. “Now they can analyze that with greater certainty and clarity, and that helps us make much better business decisions.”
Watch the video above to hear more about how Oracle NetSuite helped Hello Products continue to grow successfully and where the company plans to grow with NetSuite in the future.