How Onyx Global Group Built AquaSonic And Pure Daily Care Into Amazon And TikTok Shop Leaders
Dave Dama didn’t always plan to be an entrepreneur.
He expected to become a dentist, but, instead of going to dental school, he founded Pure Daily Care, a beauty tool brand inspired by his aesthetician mother, who’d been hunting for effective, skincare devices able to be transported to her clients’ homes, in 2015 and two years later oral care brand AquaSonic. He figured, if Philips Sonicare could sell electric toothbrushes for $100 a pop, he could sell them for $30. The margins were nonexistent, but business boomed.
Today, AquaSonic’s Black Series moves over 1 million units a year. It’s the No. 1 privately held oral care brand on Amazon and trails only Phillips and Oral B in the category. During the Black Friday/Cyber Monday period last year, AquaSonic achieved a seven-figure sales total on TikTok and TikTok Shop and ranked among their top five personal care brands.
Two years ago, bootstrapped AquaSonic and Pure Daily Care parent company Onyx Global Group, which has less than 10 people on its team, brought on Jonathan Cohen, former CMO of Lancer Skincare and e-commerce manager at Dermalogica, as CMO. In 2024, AquaSonic grew 90% and Pure Daily Care grew 50% from the year before.
Beauty Independent spoke to Cohen about how he’s working to scale AquaSonic and Pure Daily Care on Amazon and TikTok Shop, retail distribution, the impacts and marketing opportunities of President Donald Trump’s tariffs and Onyx’s brand incubation project.
Why did you join Onyx?
I hung up on the recruiter 20 times who called me because he said, “I have an Amazon brand that’s interested in you.” I was like, “Please stop contacting me.” He got my phone number because someone from Dermalogica said, “This is the guy you need to talk to if it’s digital.”
I met Dave, he was like, “We’re exploding. We’re about to hit $20 million this year. With the pandemic, everyone’s bringing beauty devices in home. I heard you’re the skincare guy.” He was still doing Amazon customer service on the weekends despite doing millions of dollars in sales.
He brought me on board because he realized, “I’ve done something good, but, how do we get replenishment? How do we make this sustainable? How do we expand the line? How do we take advantage of new trends?” They didn’t have was a strong sense of branding and how to keep those audiences and grow the brands.
When I came on, Dave said, “This Black Series Electric Toothbrush is as big as it’s going to get. We need to come up with new brands and new products.” I was like, “No, you haven’t even touched the tip of the iceberg.” I saw so much potential in the way that COVID reshaped how people were shopping and in TikTok. I knew this was going to be huge. I bring a digital marketing lens and discipline. The focus is on those two brands, but, as we grow, there will be more brands coming.
Onyx Global Group has been operating as a brand incubator, developing and launching multiple product lines across Amazon and retail over the past decade. Over the last couple of years, we’ve been exploring an exciting next step: partnering directly with creators to build brands from the ground up.
It’s not the typical endorsement model or even what you usually see from brand incubators, and while I can’t get into all the details yet, we’ve already kicked off opportunities that we’re excited about. We’re bringing our full expertise in product development, sourcing, branding and go-to-market strategy, especially our success launching on Amazon and TikTok Shop.
How is it going with AquaSonic and Pure Daily Care on TikTok Shop?
We launched AquaSonic on TikTok Shop in February last year. The challenge with TikTok Shop is they still have Temu-style brands selling direct from China and pricing toothbrushes at $6 or $7. Pure Daily Care has a viral product called the NuDerma High Frequency Wand. It oxygenates skin, helps with acne, anti-aging. It’s the No. 1 high-frequency wand.
We launched that on TikTok Shop last year and [Pure Daily Care] was the No. 1 personal care shop for part of Black Friday Cyber Monday in 2024. Right now, we’re in the top five of all personal care shops. That brand has exploded on TikTok with the strategies we’re doing. AquaSonic I think will be next, but right now retailers are breathing down our necks to get AquaSonic in stores. They pay attention to Amazon.
Is either brand in retail yet?
We just launched AquaSonic in 1,500 Walgreens stores. We’ve been matching expected sell through. We’ve been in Best Buy stores for about two years, and that was fascinating because people are like, “Who buys a toothbrush at Best Buy?” They sell washing machines, they sell the Theraguns, and now the Therawave LED masks. As soon as we got into stores, it started flying off the shelves.
I think most of it is the price point, and also we’re really focused on technology. The packaging conveys tech when you look at it. We’ve also launched different color variations of the original Black Series.
Another thing that was unique about AquaSonic was [it comes with eight brush heads]. It comes out of the naïveté of the founder going, “Why don’t we include eight brush heads?,” not realizing that replenishment is the strategy of Oral B and Phillips. We found we have customers for life. They come back and buy five more toothbrushes for their friends and family.
Influencers for Amazon, they’re going to get a bigger commission if they sell an Oral B, but they have allegiance to AquaSonic because they appreciate the value. It’s actually easier for them to sell 10 $40 toothbrushes than five $100 toothbrushes. That’s where the virality factor comes in. People are proud when they get a deal or get something that they feel is better than a Phillips or an Oral B and they unlocked this price.
Pure Daily Care had the bestselling LED mask on Amazon, the bestselling high frequency wand and the bestselling facial steamer. The growth has been fueled by the messaging that the consumers create. When I came on board, I never sat Dave down and said, “Let’s do what Phillips would do,” or “We have to double our prices.” I had take what was already working and amplify it.
Are the prices for Pure Daily Care similar to AquaSonic?
All of our products are priced accessibly. When I came on board, the big brand in facial steamers was Vanity Planet. They were so influencer-focused, millions of dollars in influencer marketing. Ours was priced at $39.95, which was below Vanity Planet, but not by much. One thing that we always try to provide with every product is an added value. So, we included a skincare extraction set with the steamer, which people loved.
Because we were Amazon first, it was the added value and the social proof from everyone knowing that, when you read an Amazon review, they’re going to tell you the real deal. They’re going to tell you if they hate that product. So, people gravitated toward us.
How do you work with content creators?
We have affiliates that have 100 followers on TikTok that can sell a thousand NuDerma units in one video. There’s people that are earning $40,000, $50,000 in commissions that we’ve never spoken to, never sent a NuDerma Wand to, never sent an AquaSonic to, but their messaging about the brand is for their audience, and we embrace that.
We don’t give them rules. We let them tell their authentic story, and that’s what our secret is: Take what’s working for [the creator’s] audience and figure out a way to amplify it.
AquaSonic just partnered with The Shade Room, which reaches over 29 million followers on Instagram, to empower its community with safer, smarter oral care solutions. To coincide with TSR’s “TSR Investigates” documentary exposing the dangers of the booming black market veneer industry, AquaSonic launched an exclusive $39.95 bundle featuring its Black Series Electric Toothbrush.
How do you approach new product development?
[Beauty brands are often] working on three- to four-year development roadmaps. My development roadmap is at most six months. I launched our bestselling NuDerma Wand last year. It took me three months from concept to get it onto TikTok Shop, including shipping. I was like, “Let’s air ship this because it’s going to be huge for holiday,” and we sold out. We misforecast.
I watch TikTok videos on how people use the wand or what they’re saying when they’re talking about AquaSonic. People are like, “I love my AquaSonic, I keep it right next to my Waterpik.” That’s a problem. Where’s my version? We hold a ton of patents. We don’t just put AquaSonic on a product that’s ready to go. We do the development, the design, the features, the engineering. We will work backwards from both what we think is trending, but also what the consumer tells us.
We have to also weed out what’s just hype. We pick and choose, do we want to follow the most trendy or do we want to find the underlying messaging behind that? If someone wants a tightening mask, they want something visual. Consumers are asking for X, Y, Z, and we pivot from there.
One of the most challenging aspects is the smaller team. To even give up an hour to try to think of something new, we have to have a strong bet it’s going to work. Dave and I are really proud to say that a lot of our ideas fail. We love to brag that we’ve had a ton of failures. Dave has had a ton of failed brands, but they fail so fast. We don’t hold onto dying brands.
How are you impacted by tariffs?
Both brands are well-positioned for when there’s fear in the consumer market. COVID was the explosion of NuDerma and AquaSonic because people wanted to save money. They didn’t want to go get expensive dental work. They wanted to extend time between facials and also they couldn’t leave the house.
In Trump’s first term, Dave saw the writing on the wall with the tariff situation, and we managed to move about 80% of our production from China to Vietnam, which is going to transform how we are able to compete.
For brands like us who dominate on Amazon, going out of stock has a bigger implication than going out of stock on DTC. There’s an incredible amount of momentum that you have in how they rank with their algorithm for bestseller status. The second you go out of stock, you lose a lot of momentum. Not only do your ads stop and the organic traffic stops, but, when you relaunch, you don’t see it pick up right away. It’s like a mystery backend Amazon algorithm. That has a ripple effect because then you need to spend more on advertising, you get even lower margin on your newer sales.
What we’re hearing from a lot of other brands on Amazon is there’s this scramble now of, do we just take that huge hit to margin because we know it’s preserving our space until tariffs go away and then we can order the new containers? There’s different phases of production happening. We have containers that are already on the ocean coming to us and depending on what day they land, we could be paying 145% or we could be paying 50%.
How are you structuring campaigns to deal with the impact of the tariffs?
There is pain not just being felt by brands, but also the people that promote brands. We have tens of thousands of creators that promote our TikTok Shop. There’s some that from one single video can earn $25,000 from us. These are creators that sometimes only have 500 to a 1,000 followers, so they don’t get big brand deals. They make videos that are truly about their experience with the NuDerma Wand, then go viral and capitalize off the actual results they see.
For the campaign we just launched, we’re reaching out to targeted creators on TikTok and saying we’re increasing their commissions in a targeted plan. We used to give them anywhere from 10% to 15%. We’re going to be giving them 30% for the next month. TikTok is also doing what’s called a co-funded coupon, meaning they’re going to be giving 15% off to consumers, and they absorb the cost.
On top of that, we’re doing a discount on NuDerma Wands. We did raise the price about 10% to 15% as soon as Liberation Day happened because we hadn’t raised prices in four years, but I also initiated this sale to give a talking point to the creators, which is, “Tariffs are affecting skincare devices, but right now NuDerma is cheaper than it’s ever been, and this is the time to take advantage of it.”
We were like, not only are we giving you the 30% off, but customers don’t care about that, right? Creators can’t say, “Hey, I’m getting an extra high commission, so I’m promoting NuDerma Wand now.” We have gotten a wild reception from the creators and the agencies that manage creators. We had to do both the creator-driven message and then the consumer-driven message, which is, “You’re going to get NuDerma Wand more affordably than before Liberation Day.”
