Better & Better Turns Toothpaste Into Bathroom Eye Candy

Vladimir Vukicevic and Jerry Hu want to replace crumpled-up toothpaste with a classy alternative.

The duo is reimagining toothpaste with their brand Better & Better, which takes a design-forward approach to an oral care category that’s historically been pretty bland. Its primary packaging feature is a nine-inch-tall white pouch shell with a chrome-plated cap that houses its toothpaste. A stylish miniature hourglass that counts down two minutes, the recommended length of a good teeth cleaning, is thrown in to boot.

“We thought about how we can innovate toothpaste packaging to reduce waste and, then, integrate that with a piece of hardware, a dispenser,” says Hu of the Instagram-friendly oral care equipment intended to elevate bathroom décor.

To put inside its dispenser, Better & Better offers two toothpastes: Remarkably Pure and Fully Charged. The later contains vitamins B12 and D3. Other ingredients in the formulas include blue agave, coconut and peppermint. Better & Better depends on natural preservatives like salt and radish root to ensure its toothpastes hold up.

Better & Better sells its products direct-to-consumer through a membership subscription plan for $2.99 (Fully Charged) or $4.99 (Remarkable Pure) a month per person, and the Toothpaste Starter Set is included for free with each membership. Currently, the brand has a holiday sale, and customers can get a year of toothpaste for $29.94.

“We want to have tens of thousands of subscribers in year one,” says Hu. “And that’s actually how we look at our business. Obviously, revenue matters, but it’s more about how many people are members and subscribers of this toothpaste because it’s that relationship that we’re trying to build over an extended period of time.”

Better & Better is among a number of emerging brands trying to kick Crest owner Procter & Gamble, Sensodyne owner GlaxoSmithKline and Colgate owner Colgate-Palmolive off of their toothpaste thrones. A few of them are Bite, Moon, RiseWell, Spotlight Oral Care and vVardis. Colgate’s acquisition of Hello Products earlier this year demonstrates that the behemoths are watching the budding players shake up the category they had a stranglehold on.

“The toothpaste category is filled with brands that are just purely focused on function—whitening, cavity fighting, breath freshening—and we wanted to do all those things, but do it with cleaner ingredients.”

Better & Better’s origins can be traced to Vukicevic’s absentmindedness. He kept forgetting to take his vitamins, and it occurred to him that he wouldn’t forget to do so if his toothpaste was infused with them. He started digging into toothpaste formulas to learn if they had vitamins in them. He discovered a lot of ingredients he couldn’t pronounce from mainstream toothpastes and experiences he didn’t enjoy from natural brands. Their flavor and foam just wasn’t quite right.

Vukicevic shared his findings about the drawbacks of existing toothpastes with his friend and longtime business partner Hu. Vukicevic and Hu met freshman year at New York University and bonded over immigrating to the United States at 6 years old. Vukicevic came from Serbia and Hu from China. In 2014, they launched Meural, a digital photo frame company purchased by Netgear in 2018.

Prior to Meural, Vukicevic co-founded RocketHub, a crowdfunding platform that helps entrepreneurs, artists and scientists raise capital. It was acquired in 2015 by eFactor. Hu previously was at FreshDirect developing its private-label brand program and rationalizing its assortment to zero in on trending merchandise.

“I said to Jerry, ‘Let’s do this. Let’s take our experience at building products, building supply chains, building brands and take it to a different industry, but still an industry that we all can relate to,’” says Vukicevic. Hu chimes in, “The toothpaste category is filled with brands that are just purely focused on function—whitening, cavity fighting, breath freshening—and we wanted to do all those things, but do it with cleaner ingredients.”

In 2019, Vukicevic and Hu began brainstorming the concept that would become Better & Better, and the brand debuted on Oct. 27 of this year. While they initially set out to revamp toothpaste formulations, their ambitions broadened to packaging design and sustainability. The brand name Better & Better encapsulates their process of trying to make oral care better and better.

“People care about ingredients, but they’re indoctrinated with function. There’s very few people that can connect function with an ingredient,” says Hu. “A part of our job is educating people so that they understand, ‘This is what’s going into your toothpaste and here’s why, and this is what we’re replacing it with.’ Because with most natural formulas, you’ll see that the toothpaste doesn’t foam as nicely as a traditional Crest or Colgate, and that’s because some of the ingredients used in those formulas are really focused on that function.”

“We realized there was a big opportunity in this space to really turn routine into self-care.”

The pandemic presented Vukicevic and Hu with unanticipated obstacles. “The major challenge for us was working with suppliers in different states,” says Hu. “Our dispensers are made in Montana, our toothpaste is produced in Utah, and how each state handles lockdowns and regulations around COVID is different, so that obviously disrupted the cadence with which we can work with them directly and also get samples and get production underway.”

However, there were positives to introducing a DTC brand at a moment when people were increasingly shopping on screens and nesting. Next year, Better & Better plans to ramp up influencer marketing, brand collaborations and retail outreach. For collaborations, tie-ins with artists and designers are possibilities. Vukicevic and Hu are interested in thinking outside the box for retail partnerships. Better & Better crosses interior design, health and beauty categories, and could enter retailers specializing in any or all of them.

“Where can toothpaste be that it has never been before? Because there’s plenty of toothpaste at Target or Walmart, but there’s no toothpaste at West Elm or Crate & Barrel, very little at Bloomingdale’s or Sephora,” says Vukicevic. “We can fit nicely in design-, lifestyle- and beauty-focused stores.”

Better & Better has a staff of five people. CMO Mary Costa and engineer Ciaran Murphy are veterans of Meural. In 2021, Vukicevic and Hu expect to enlarge Better & Better’s team, expect expand its toothpaste variety and delve into other oral care products. “For me, the hardest thing is not going crazy in terms of adding more features,” says Vukicevic. “We had some wild ideas around what toothpaste can be, and we plan on implementing those, but it might take five years or ten years.”

Vukicevic and Hu are angel investors and business mentors on the side. They believe in paying it forward and readily advise fellow entrepreneurs. “If you think about it, most brands, if they launch a product, and people have one good reason to buy it, it’s already going to be a very successful brand,” says Hu, “Now, you add reason two, reason three, reason four…The major lesson for us to learn is that, with tried-and-true categories like toothpaste, there’s a lot of competition, so there is a need to innovate and differentiate.”

Vukicevic and Hu are optimistic that Better & Better is addressing a myriad of toothpaste consumer pain points by delivering clean ingredients, upscale design and a 50% reduction in plastic through its monthly subscription service. Hu says, “We thought a lot about routines, and we realized there was a big opportunity in this space to really turn routine into self-care, to turn something that’s mundane like brushing your teeth into a delightful experience.”