How John Osher built and sold Spin Brush to P&G for $475M

Executive overview

Mass-market electric toothbrushes cost $50–$80 in the late 1990s, leaving most consumers stuck with manual brushes. John Osher used manufacturing expertise from his battery-powered lollipop business to build a $5 electric toothbrush — and sold it to Procter & Gamble for $475 million within two years of launch.

The core move was engineering the acquisition rather than the product alone. Osher targeted P&G from day one and used a fake licensing pitch to get them to ask to buy the company instead.

Pricing to the market ceiling — not the cost — is the entrepreneur's most powerful lever.

From lollipops to toothbrushes

• Spin Pop (battery-powered spinning lollipop) sold 100M+ units in three years, making Osher's team experts in small motors, gears, and batteries at high volume
• Bulk buying drove unit costs to fractions of retail: 12 cents per alkaline battery vs. 78 cents; 8 cents per motor vs. 90 cents
• After selling Cap Toys to Hasbro for $160M in 1997, Osher targeted a category with universal appeal — toothbrushes are used by everyone, regardless of age or gender
• Competing electric brushes (Oral-B, Sonicare) cost $50–$110; the real target was the manual brush market, not the premium segment

Engineering the product

• Key design challenge: motor torque sufficient for brushing, battery life of three months minimum, retail price of $5 or less
• Early rotating-head design caused bristle splaying within two weeks — switched to oscillating head
• Final design: fixed bristles below an oscillating round head, allowing normal brushing technique while adding oscillation
• Dual patents secured — one covering the part-moving, part-fixed brush design, a combination no one had previously attempted
• Waterproofing flaw discovered after 100,000 units shipped: electrolysis at internal connections caused failure within a month; Osher scrapped 400,000 units and rebuilt the design rather than risk the brand

Going to market

• Packaged in retail-ready 12-packs with a try-me button — borrowed from toy industry experience, novel in health and beauty aisles
• First test: Meijer stores in Michigan/Ohio; Spin Brush sold 7 units per day per store vs. 12 per week for Oral-B's best-selling manual brush
• Positioned on end-caps (140 units) rather than the main toothbrush wall — critical for early velocity
• Year-one revenue: $44M on roughly eight months of sales; $21M profit

The P&G acquisition strategy

• Osher identified P&G as the target buyer before the product launched — their toothbrush business was declining and they lacked electric or mechanical product expertise
• Approached P&G's licensing team proposing to license the Crest name — a pitch he never intended to accept, designed purely to get in the door
• When P&G offered the license at 3%, Osher declined citing board constraints, then implied the company could never be sold to anyone but P&G under such a license — engineering P&G to suggest the acquisition themselves
• Initial offer: $165M upfront plus earn-out; P&G projected $110–120M annual revenue
• Actual performance exceeded $300M in year one under P&G; earn-out would have required five to six times the anticipated payout
• Settlement reached 21 months early: total paid $475M ($165M upfront + $310M settlement)
• Spin Brush became the best-selling toothbrush in the world for a period; combined with Crest Whitestrips, it helped reverse P&G's stock decline and restored Crest to the category lead
• P&G later sold Spin Brush to Church & Dwight for ~$75M to clear an antitrust hurdle when acquiring Gillette (and its Oral-B brand)