For the 168th feature of our "Together Talks" campaign, we collaborated with Diso and Steve Hyde, CEO and Head of Sales. As the new face in health and wellness, here at Diso, they like to do things differently. Their range of high-absorption dissolvable strips ensures that you truly feel the benefits of your daily supplements, ensuring all of those valuable minerals and nutrients get to exactly where they need to be. No more ‘bitter pills to swallow,’ just deliciously convenient supplements that go down nice and easy.
"Together Talks" feature # 168: Diso presented by KLS - Your Trusted Shipping Solutions In The USA
What separates you from your competition? What have been the biggest challenges? Goals for upcoming year + Next phase of the company?
Story of how it was created?
It was 2011, I was on a phone call with my mother, talking about my brother, who's a fantastic boat builder. But he is a little slow in getting things done. He was talking about making a bamboo frame bicycle for many years. My mother and I were talking about that, and she asked why doesn't he just make something simple like a bamboo toothbrush? I literally got off the phone, googled bamboo toothbrush, found an enormous hole in the market, and went after it. In 2013, we launched Woobamboo. We went to New York for Earth Day and walked around New York, giving toothbrushes away. We saw the excitement that people had, and just grew from there. We got into retail, going to these big expos, and by 2017, we were in 71 countries and over 40,000 stores, including every big brand in the U.S., except for Walgreens and Walmart.
What separates you from your competition?
We were the originators. Not only, did competitors steal our design of our brush, they plagiarized our website, they just flat out copied us. There was one brand out there for a while called GoWoo. Then Colgate did it in 2019. That's when it really put the nail into the coffin because Colgate weren't trying to be eco-friendly. They were trying to destroy the bamboo toothbrush market because they knew that they couldn't come and buy me and buy the other companies. They knew would have to wipe out the bamboo toothbrush market. So they came in, pushed their way into all the stores beside me and any other bamboo toothbrush manufacturer and promoted like crazy. Whenever you promo in a big store it costs you an enormous amount of money. We were trapped to do it only four times a year. They were doing it every two weeks.
My conversations with people like Kroger that we've been the only bamboo toothbrush in four years turned into them bringing in Colgate and then they started their own private label. They saw the natural products category growing by 30%, but our sales have dropped by 30%. They told us to increase our sales or we would be out of their stores. They didn't mention how my sales were diluted by 66%. There was no way for us to grow. They removed us from rotation. Then Colgate stopped their promos and put the price at $9 and no one bought it. It got restocked with plastic toothbrushes and bamboo were out.
What have been the biggest challenges?
That has been an enormous challenge. Also, just cash flow more than anything, because we were growing at such an enormous rate. TJ Maxx ordered 80,000 toothbrushes packs every three months, we had to figure out how to afford that. We stumbled through, but somehow we got that done. We still haven't taken money from any VC or any sort of institution. Everything's either backed by me or family and friends, or the SBA loans I've taken out.
Goals for upcoming year + Next phase of the company?
We have stuck by our guns, but everybody else is racing to the bottom. A lot of buyers have gone to that. Our loyal retail customers in the US, Canada and the UK are still good. But, as I had mentioned, we have picked up a new brand that had a great impact at Expo West. And we'll be moving on that. Woobamboo will just be there as a constant and steady business. We see the growth in Diso, our new venture.
Our potential for the year and with that growth will come a joint venture with the brand owners out of England. After that we'll start to look for investment money to really put some big money behind this and I expect this year's growth will be 100 or 200 percent. Next year's growth could be just massive.
What problems are Diso trying to solve?
Diso is a full line of vitamins and supplements that dissolve on your tongue. You get a full daily dose of whatever you've taken within two to ten seconds. It's absorbed into your mouth instead of going into your gut. The absorption rate in your mouth is 70 to 80%, where when you take a tablet or a capsule, you're only capturing 20% of the potential of that dose. It's a much more efficient way to get a dosage and it's much more convenient.
All of our products are vegan, sugar-free, and calorie-free. They also taste like a fruit roll-up. The convenience factor of it just being a tiny strip that you don't need water for, that you can travel with very easily, is a great selling point. We have seen a lot of attraction at the show because of that. People were basically saying, this is the next thing, we're disrupting the category. Numerous people wanted private label from us at the show.
10% of the population suffer from gagging while taking tablets. Children, older people, cancer patients, stomach issue patients, autistic kids, they all have trouble and this immediately solves that. We've got an enormous amount of people that we cater to. As we saw at the show too, people coming and wanting different products made by us. It's pretty exciting and we'll become even more exciting once the joint venture and the angel investment money comes in. Then we'll be turning the volume up.
What were your concerns about making this transition to Diso?
The concerns are that we don't know the vitamin supplement market. We're not well versed in it. When you go into a new market, as we learned with when we started Woobamboo toothbrushes, there is a language. Just like you have with logistics, you have a language that no one else speaks outside of that circle. When we started doing bamboo toothbrushes, we had to learn that language. When you go into vitamins and supplements, there's not only the knowledge base you need, but there's that language that you need that the people in that industry use. That was a bit of a concern. I really don't feel nervous about doing any of it because I believe that the product really is a category disruptor. The attention we're going to get is going to make that difference. That's already been shown to us by Sprouts picking us up and putting us in all of their stores within three months of us launching.
What have you learned since becoming an entrepreneur?
Everything. Before Woobamboo, I was a restaurateur. I owned a couple of restaurants. I was opening one in 2008, when the market crashed. Then I sat on my pool deck, drinking beer for six months, working up what to do. I started up as a wine salesperson and was doing that until I started this venture. It's with my partner, who did all the graphic artwork for me, and neither of us have done any distribution in retail, wholesaling, importing, exporting.
The first big distributor I got into, my first phone call with them was, how does this work? Because I had no idea. There's a lot of complexities that go into distributing. I just had no idea. She had to basically talk me through how their distribution model worked, and to this day I still don't really know. But, now I've got bright people around me that helped me with that. They are very smart.
What aspect of entrepreneurship do you appreciate the most?
I love building a team around myself and watching them grow and helping them grow. That's exciting for me. Watching your people succeed around you, that's awesome. I love the not answering to anybody. I owned restaurants before and as a restaurateur, you answer to everybody. Also, you are the lowest person on the totem pole because if the dishwasher doesn't show up, you're dishwasher today.
What is your why?
A lot of it is security in my, I'm 63. Security in my older age. I want to make sure that my wife and I are going to be able to do whatever we want to do. That is one of the beauties of owning your own business. I take all of the trips. If there's trips to be taken, that's my responsibility. We have done a lot of travel through that. But when I start thinking about retiring, which I'm not really at the moment, I want to be able to travel and do whatever I want.
Do you have a moment that brings you the most joy?
Getting into the enormous accounts like Kroger, CVS, Target, nobody really understands what it takes to do that. When people see a brand in the store, more often than not, people that are not in this business go that must be a huge brand. We're in CVS. Yes, we're in 4,000 CVS's. We had a staff of seven. People with a staff of seven don't get into CVS or Costco. But we did it.
When you see a product in Costco, you think of a multi-million dollar international company. You don't think of a staff of seven people in a little office in Cape Coral, Florida. But we did that and nobody's ever going to be able to take that away. We not only did it once, we did it over and over again into almost every retailer in the country. It's just unheard of. When you think about us importing or exporting to 71 countries, it is amazing.
Piece of Advice
I think one of the great things about us not knowing what we were doing at the very start, we didn't know if we were doing things wrong or right. And a lot of the things that we did were outside the box or not the norm, where people at say a trade show would look at us go, what are you doing? They would tell us that is not how you do it. But we did it. Funny enough, then everybody would start doing that same thing. We would we would change the rules.
I know when I was thinking outside of the box, and we always thought outside the box, I still try to do that today. I know most of the rules now, but I don't want to abide by them all. Take risks and remember you can always pivot. If you find that whatever you were doing is not correct, you can pivot quickly.
In Closing
KLS wants to thank Diso and Steve Hyde, CEO and Head of Sales, for today's "Together Talks" feature. Follow along for their journey with their social handles below!
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