The real money always comes from in-house ideas. In the early 1990s, when Dickie first started thinking about electric toothbrushes, they almost uniformly cost upward of $100, and the technology was so heavily patented that most low-cost manufacturers didn’t bother to compete. What Dickie realized was that all of the existing patents put the motors’ transmissions in the units’ handles. Dickie’s invention kept the motor in the handle but put the transmission into disposable brush heads. “All our technology is in the last inch,” he says. Now the transmissions didn’t have to be built to last: They had to work only as long as the bristles did. The design suddenly made it possible to manufacture a cheap electric toothbrush.
Dickie made sure the innovation wouldn’t infringe on any existing patents. “If you miss one, that will be the one,” he says. “And it will be owned by someone like GM. You’re going to get killed.” The corollary applies too. “If something’s successful and you don’t have a patent, it’ll just get taken away, right about the time you’re ready to recoup your money.” As he always does, Dickie patented every way he could think of that a competitor might try to knock off his toothbrush design.
Dickie, thanks to his experience at Northern Technologies, is an expert at manufacturing. “When you know how to make things, you know how to get other people to make things, and you should never do it yourself. Never.” He had a graphic designer knock off the logo and packaging from Crest, the toothpaste brand owned by Procter & Gamble, and made up a case of toothbrushes. “Usually when we make a presentation to a company, we try to have the product there, with the company’s name on it, fully functional, a whole case of them,” he says. “They have less imagination than you think.”
In 1996, Dickie flew down to Procter & Gamble headquarters and dropped a case of the toothbrushes on the boardroom table. P&G licensed the technology, but later cancelled the contract, following a corporate shake-up. In 1997, Spark licensed its technology to Butler, which makes Gum toothbrushes. A few years later, disappointed with Butler’s sales, Spark cancelled the contract and joined with former Shoppers COO Stan Thomas, marketing consultant Paul Cira and other investors to form a new company, BrushPoint Technologies. BrushPoint began selling the product line to retailers’ private labels—a field that was just then beginning to boom.
BrushPoint remained a virtual company even as it began to steal shelf space from the national brands. It operated largely out of Spark’s offices, with Spark’s CFO and logistics manager running much of the day-to-day, and Spark designers customizing packaging and shelf displays. BrushPoint finally hired its own contract finance and logistics staff late last year.
BrushPoint updates its product line regularly. It has developed an electric toothbrush for denture wearers. “Thirty-three million Americans have dentures and they brush them by hand, like this,” Dickie says, looking as though he’s trying to saw a limb from an ironwood tree. “Now, the first power denture brush. Electric. Rechargeable.” Even that video-gaming toothbrush might actually have a chance, albeit in a slightly different form. (“After a while, we realized that kids weren’t going to be carrying their toothbrushes around with them to play video games.”) And every one of those technologies is backed by the patents to keep them bulletproof.
They have so many more ideas, although they’re naturally coy about the details. There’s something called the Turkey Blanket. There’s a tool for putting leaves into garden waste bags. And we might all soon be seeing commercials for a product line called Transformers. Copeland came up with the idea after buying an exercise machine for his wife a few years ago: The machines are too big and ugly to put where people actually want to use them. Or, as Dickie puts it, “They end up being a clothes hanger in part of your basement.”
Not any longer. Witness U.S. Patent and Trademark Office applications 20080280734 and 20080280735, for “folding treadmill” and “folding elliptical exercise machine”—workout equipment that pops out of a coffee table.
The Wii Workout people had better be worried.
