Transforming toothpaste has rocketed two young Gold Coast entrepreneurs into The List
Take two Gold Coast lads, a $10,000 loan, migrant family pressure not to be a ‘bludger’ and suddenly dental care is looking pretty hot. About $1bn a year hot.
By turning a laborious twice-daily chore into a global sensation, Alex Tomic and Nik Mirkovic have quickly made their fortune. And it’s all thanks to making toothpaste taste better than you might ever have imagined.
Mirkovic, just 28, and Tomic, 30, are the brains behind Hismile, a business they built after finishing high school on the Gold Coast. Only 10 years later, their product is stocked in some of the biggest retailers in the world, from the likes of Walmart, CVS and Walgreen in the US, to Sephora in Europe, Boots in the UK, and Coles, Chemist Warehouse, Terry White and Woolworths in Australia.
This article is from The List — Australia’s Richest 250, published March 15, where Tomic and Mirkovic appear for the first time.
The pair say they sold almost $300 million worth of colourful toothpaste last year, with flavours including chocolate – a collaboration with the latest Willy Wonka movie – blue raspberry, cotton candy, mango sorbet, grape and vanilla. It’s radically different from traditional brands that use mint flavouring to mask the product’s taste.
“You can add flavours to toothpaste, but it still tastes like toothpaste,” Tomic says. “We all know that fundamental flavour. That’s the difference. Ours doesn’t taste like toothpaste. We’ve really worked hard on that.”
The duo have spent about $12 million on the research and development facility at their Gold Coast headquarters, doubling the space for laboratories to test flavours and products to about 5000sq m. Cameras and videos capture the action for social media.
Crucially, social media also provides a valuable source of information for future product launches.
Sales could triple this year, say Mirkovic and Tomic, as teens in particular go wild for Hismile toothpaste and teeth whitening products. The company uses its social media feedback from a whopping eight million followers across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube to figure out what to launch next.
“It’s like a nonstop feedback loop,” Mirkovic says with a smile. “We’ve got about 12 to 14 flavours now, and the majority of our innovation [comes from] what the customer is requesting. Making toothpaste into a decadent taste, making a chocolate toothpaste … that just makes no sense. But when a customer responds and you’ve gone out on a limb to do it, it’s amazing.”
Putting a fresh look on an old product – one that’s ubiquitous yet boring – may not be unique to Mirkovic and Tomic, but their clever use of marketing, including taking the product global via social media channels to quickly build a company, encapsulates the changing nature of The List.
This year, 38 members of the Richest 250 are aged in their 40s or younger – the highest number in six years. Whether they’re cryptocurrency gambling magnates such as Edward Craven and Tim Heath, technology titans such as Canva co-founders Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, or travel booking boss Robert Chamberlain, these younger entrepreneurs have surfed the ecommerce and online boom to make their money faster than ever.
In Hismile’s case, the creators have taken something that children, in particular, have never enjoyed doing – brushing their teeth – and somehow made it cool.
“For so long the discussion has been about poor oral health, which is leading to significant issues with heart disease and all these different things, and everyone has tried to solve it,” Tomic says. “But we’ve solved one of the biggest things – we’ve got kids brushing their teeth three times a day for three minutes because they love to do it. We’ve made it fun and exciting, and at school they’re talking about brushing their teeth.
“These teens are going to school and the toothpastes are becoming like [collectable craze] Pokemon cards. It’s a badge of honour to have a certain flavour. It has caused a lot of hype.”
All of which would not have been possible without a key pivot for Mirkovic and Tomic only a couple of years ago – less than a decade after they started in business back when Mirkovic was a teenager and Tomic had yet to celebrate his 21st birthday.
The childhood friends, both from migrant families with Serbian backgrounds, have a habit of finishing each other’s sentences, and they share the same office space.
Their mothers both worked at the Dreamworld theme park, and Tomic says family members on both sides instilled hardworking values. “They were very on top of what their kids were doing,” he says. “You can’t do things half-arsed, you can’t be a bludger. Whatever you do, do it well. Do what you want to do, but do it well.”
There was also a determination for their children to go to university, but Tomic barely lasted six months studying commerce before dropping out and spending a year with Mirkovic researching the cosmetics industry to look for business opportunities.
They each spent $10,000 from savings (Mirkovic borrowed money from his brother) and settled on oral hygiene or, more specifically, teeth-whitening kits, costing $80 each. They packed them at their houses and shipped them from the local post office.
It was 2014, and the newly popular Instagram would play a part in Hismile’s rise in what was then purely an online business. There were some rocky moments, including the pair’s first few sales, when the payment processing system on their website wasn’t set up properly, but eventually some canny marketing strategies paid off.
Hismile sent kits to – and eventually employed – celebrities such as mixed martial arts star Conor McGregor and reality television identities Kylie and Kendall Jenner. Sales took off, particularly in the US.
“The teeth whitening idea was really fresh at that time,” Tomic explains. “Not many people were doing it. It had its limitations, and it was painful and messy. We had a way that simplified that without it being painful, in a kit format.”
It was a success. The products were manufactured in Shenzhen, China, sold only online, and shipped from a Gold Coast warehouse. About 40 per cent of sales were derived, mainly via regular subscription, from the US, where Kim Kardashian also posted support for the product.
About four years ago, with profit margins falling, Mirkovic and Tomic decided to focus on toothpaste. The move got them into retailers and considerably widened their customer base. So successful has it been, they don’t sell the whitening kits any more.
“Our key product was $80,” Tomic says. “And we’re now operating between $10 and $40. It’s much more attainable for everybody, instead of just the higher-end market, so there’s no limitation to what our customer is. We’re in the higher-end stores like Sephora but also the everyday supermarkets like Woolworths and Coles.”
Next is further expansion in markets such as the US, where the firm currently makes 40 to 50 per cent of its sales but its market penetration is the lowest. Mirkovic has a photo of the tiny shelf space Hismile has carved out in Walmart compared with giants such as Colgate.
As for the longer term? The not-inconsiderable goal of becoming the biggest oral hygiene company in the world.
“What is ahead of us is so much bigger and greater than our past and it’s because we’ve got so many exciting ideas that we’re working on,” Mirkovic says. “We’ve got so many things in the pipeline that we can’t wait for the world to see.”
More Coverage
