HiSmile founders cash in on male vanity, social media for booming business

Meet the twenty-somethings that could be worth $500m — thanks to the booming business of male vanity.

HiSmile founders Nik Mirkovic and Alex Tomic at their headquarters on the Gold Coast. Picture: Glenn Hunt

Call it the booming business of male vanity.

So successful have 23 and 25-year-old Gold Coast duo Nik Mirkovic and Alex Tomic been in targeting millennial males with their HiSmile teeth-whitening kits and toothpaste that they claim their business could be worth up to $500 million.

Canny social media marketing strategies including employing celebrities such as mixed martial arts star Conor McGregor and ­reality television identities like Kylie and Kendall Jenner to promote their products to millions of fans around the world is the secret to HiSmile’s success.

The controversial McGregor, set for a comeback to the Ultimate Fighting Championship circuit in October after pleading guilty to disorderly conduct for an attack on a bus in Brooklyn in April, has been a HiSmile brand ambassador since last year and is credited with helping produce a large increase in sales of the whitening kits to image conscious young men.

“We’re now skewing about 60 per cent [sales] to males and 40 per cent to women and Conor has been a big part of that,” Mirkovic tells The Weekend Australian.

“A year ago it was probably 80 per cent to women. So we’ve made a conscious effort to change our marketing and branding to appeal more to men. White is now our main colour brand on our packaging, for example, whereas before it was pink.”

The HiSmile founders claim their company is on track to record at least $100m revenue this year, compared with $40m a year ago, and that it has spent $25m on Facebook advertisements since the ­beginning of last year while targeting a similar outlay with Snapchat this year.

The company sells teeth-whitening product kits including an attachable mouth tray and LED kit that costs $79.95, and toothpastes, gels and coconut oil mouthwash.

So rapid has the company’s growth been that Mirkovic claims he and Tomic have already fielded offers from investors that would catapult them into rich list territory only four years since they started their business after a dinner discussion about how online influencers could help promote brands. The childhood friends invested $10,000 each and Tomic dropped out of a commerce degree and, after 12 months researching the cosmetics sector, they decided to target an oral hygiene industry they believed to be “boring”.

“We’ve had offers from private equity, including one based in New York, that would probably get us towards the $500m mark,” says Mirkovic. “And if you added in the offers we’ve had from retail outlets like supermarkets to also stock our products, the revenue we would have got if we’d done that would take us well past that figure we think.”

While Mirkovic will not reveal the exact details of the offers, he and Tomic’s wealth will have at least doubled from an estimated $46m last year.

The estimated value of Hi­Smile also means they would be among the 20 wealthiest young entrepreneurs in Australia under 40, though Tomic says they have big plans to turbocharge the growth of their business and keep spending up to half their revenue on marketing and advertising ­online.

“We really want to dominate the oral hygiene market and we’ll be doing a lot of work on new products that should see us grow a lot over the next six to nine months,” Tomic says.

The big revenue increase has been achieved by only selling ­directly to consumers via the Hi­Smile website. The products are manufactured in Shenzhen and shipped from a Gold Coast warehouse.

About 40 per cent of sales are to consumers in the US, boosted by social media promotion via the Jenners, of the Kardashian family reality TV fame, 30 per cent to the UK and the remainder to Australian customers and Europeans.

Sales increase each time a ­celebrity endorses a product online, with HiSmile often sending social media influencers their products for free in the hope they will post videos and pictures of them using the product.

A McGregor video promoting HiSmile’s subscription service that sends products to a customer each month has been viewed more than 750,000 times and a Facebook ad last year in which McGregor said “When I use Hi­Smile day and night, my smile is beautiful and bright” was seen 2.5 million times.

HiSmile’s Instagram account has about 802,000 followers and its Facebook page has been “liked” more than 1.7 million times.

“We’ve really ramped up Snapchat in the past three months and are seeing some good results from that,” Mirkovic says. “We want to continue with what we are doing, and don’t want to sell or bring in other investors. We only want to answer to ourselves.”