Foundr Magazine publishes in-depth interviews with the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. Our articles highlight key takeaways from each month’s issue. We talked with Nik Mirkovic and Alex Tomic, founders of Hismile, about creating a smile-care brand ready to compete with industry giants. To read more, subscribe to the magazine.
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The Hismile guys aren’t selling, so don’t ask.
In just nine years, Nik Mirkovic and Alex Tomic built their smile care brand into a category disruptor on track to earn over a billion in annual revenue by next year. The suitors are knocking, but Mirkovic and Tomic clearly understand their vision.
“The offers are there to inject [capital] straight into Hismile,” Mirkovic says. “But we would [skip] 10 years of learning […], and something’s going to crumble because we’re not ready for that yet, clearly, because we haven’t achieved [it].”
Mirkovic and Tomic don’t want shortcuts, so they’ve remained bootstrapped since they started Hismile at ages 19 and 20.
Hismile’s teeth-whitening kit has become an internet sensation, making the brand a favorite among influencers and celebrities.
But the co-founders aren’t resting on success. They want to make Hismile a category champion and take on businesses with an extra century of experience.
The competition is on.
Coming From the Gold
Nestled in the Eastern point of Australia lies Gold Coast, a suburb of Brisbane home to desirable beaches and surf. The tourist destination is not where you’d expect a billion-dollar oral care startup to emerge.
“Being on the Gold Coast, we do our own thing, run our own race,” Tomic says.
The duo describes the distance from the rest of the world and the epicenter of business in Australia—Melbourne and Sydney—as a physical manifestation of their attitude toward Hismile. Their strategy is to stay isolated.
“We’re not looking at what the other guys are doing, whether you’re big, small, medium, left, or right,” Tomic says.
“We’re doing our own thing, and we’re loving to do it.”
Instead of relaxing on the golden sands of Broadbeach, Mirkovic and Tomic spent their young teens playing soccer together. They met through their moms, who worked at one of Gold Coast’s few recognizable businesses, Sea World.
“We’re probably the only two people born and raised [and] living on the Gold Coast that don’t surf,” Mirkovic says.
Besides sharing a love of soccer over surfing, the two studied brands like Nike, Apple, and Adidas. Tomic remembers diagnosing brands battling with new product launches and marketing campaigns.
“That intuition is the thing that [created] the hunger for business. It was something natural. It’s not necessarily from any one place but just the interest and the intrigue in the world of business and always keeping my eyes open,” Tomic says. “And that’s where me and [Mirkovic] joined forces.”
The pair observed there wasn’t a middle-ground option for teeth whitening besides going to a dental office or doing it at home.
Pricey and scheduled dental visits weren’t an easy option for their generation, leaving the sticky over-the-counter whitening strips as the fallback for brighter smiles. The problem was the mass-market at-home strips contained peroxide, which causes soreness and sensitivity.
“We just knew we could do something better. It wasn’t solved. No one had this great product that everyone wanted to get behind,”
Tomic says. “We found the oral care business and teeth whitening to be the one to really target and solve the problem there and make something great out of it.”
Mirkovic says their naivete allowed them to jump in headfirst without fear of how chemists and pharmacists reacted when they called them in the early days. Their research found a formulation similar to professional whitenings that they could ship directly to a customer.
All Smiles
In 2014, a year after the idea’s inception, Hismile launched its teeth-whitening kit. The kit consisted of a liquid whitening formula placed in a mouthguard activated by LEDs.
Within the first few days, Hismile generated five sales. But Mirkovic and Tomic forgot to connect their payment gateway on the website, so their first sales were not actual sales.
“Honestly, there are about a million stories like that where we took learnings, [but] we paid the price at the time,” Mirkovic says.
“Looking back, we wouldn’t change a single thing. I think the fact that we took those learnings on ourselves and we felt those pain points is why the business we believe in is [in] the place it is today.”
Even with a less-than-profitable first week, the Hismile cleaning kit began to gain traction because of the co-founders’ willingness to give away free products to influencers.
“The only reason people think of Hismile as this influencer brand is because that’s how we started,” Mirkovic says.
“We didn’t have the budget to market this product, but we thought this product was so unique and so different in how it worked.”
The brand’s teeth-whitening kit captured the internet’s gaze with its whitening tool that looked like a bulky, opaque sports mouthguard. Testimonial after testimonial on social media catapulted Hismile as a trendsetter in a dated industry.
Soon celebrities, including Conor McGregor and Kim Kardashian, and everyday influencers were sliding the mouthguard into their jaws and showcasing the before and after results.
“It looked cool enough, looked unique enough, and it delivered results in a different way,” Mirkovic says. “And at that time, people weren’t being paid to post or paid to promote, so people were just sharing it. They felt a value in that product and the value in the brand that we’re trying to create.”
Hismile was doing things differently. The cleaning kit captured a demand, encouraging customers to evangelize the outcomes.
By 2019, Hismile was an ecommerce darling. Mirkovic and Tomic were leading a team of 20 employees, and their whitening kit was on the feeds of influencer marketers worldwide. Then one day, the co-founders met in their office after another profitable week.
They both had a gut feeling that something needed to change.
The post How Hismile Transformed from Internet Sensation into a Category Contender appeared first on Foundr.
