hello puts the ‘personal’ in personal care

When 26-year-old Tracy Dalton forgot her toothpaste when visiting a friend’s house, she fell in love with her friend’s brand, hello. “I had never seen the brand before, but it just looked so friendly and called out to me,” she said.

(To view the full Special Report, click here.)



“Friendly” is a word Craig Dubitsky, founder and CEO of hello products, likes to hear from New General Market consumers. “What does your brand stand for,” Dubitsky asked. “If you don’t stand for something, someone’s going to tell you what you stand for — and for us, it’s all about being friendly.”



With hello products, Dubitsky wants to fill white space and, in his words, “make personal care personal again.” And with its cheery packaging and healthy positioning, hello offers a new twist on an established category that is used daily. Great attention was paid to the packaging and the ingredients, which don’t include microbeads, triclosan, dyes or artificial sweeteners. “I want people to fall in love with the tube when they see it and touch it,” Dubitsky said.



Being reachable was important to him as he nurtured the brand. “One of the things we did to build community fast is that I literally write back or call every single person who contacts us. And I know that that does not scale very easily, and I spend between 5:00 and 7:00 in the morning responding to folks, [and] between 11:30 and 1 to 1:30 at night answering people if I don’t get to them during the day,” he said. He also Skypes with customers who can ping directly from hello’s website.



Dubitsky believes that by taking the anonymity out of the company, trust and authenticity is built, especially because millennials can sniff out fakes in a second. “You can’t outsource soul,” he noted.



Rather than being seen as a challenger, he called hello a “questioner” brand. He hopes the unique formula and compelling look makes people ponder why something like hello hasn’t been created before — especially since the product goes into the mouth and “should be delicious and as natural as we can possibly make it.”



While some cast oral care aside as a mundane category, Dubitsky said, “there’s no such thing as a boring category; there are just boring executions.” He also believes in product transparency and that consumers shouldn’t have to pay a fortune for natural ingredients.



Cool and fun is in hello’s DNA, and that’s helped build a strong social media following. Its Instagram account has the largest following in all of oral care. “We didn’t set out to create that; we just started putting things out there that we thought were cool, interesting and fun. And it just starts to build on its own. That’s the thing — you can’t really fake it. Everybody can tell the difference,” Dubitsky said.



While hello obviously appeals to millennials, Dubitsky is quick to point out that the New General Market consumer is a psychographic, not a demographic. “I think if 40 is a new 20, and 20 is a new 30, and 15 is a new 25, the idea of segmenting ... is a little antiquated. Consumers today want to feel part of something, and that’s ignited the move to products having a story. “Cavemen wrote on the walls; we tell our own story through our things. And I think as stewards of brands and business leaders, our job, our responsibility, is to create things that are better and more beautiful that let people tell their story. But again, do it in a way that’s responsible; try to make things that are better for their personal environment, better for the overall environment and I think allow people to express themselves.”



Hello is witnessing growth in sales and distribution numbers, and has been approached by retailers and distributors in 67 countries around the world. That’s been accomplished with a tiny marketing budget that’s most likely a fraction of multinational competitors. But an even better measure of success for Dubitsky is when he hears people ask, “What took so long? Where have you been my whole life?”