SURI: Disrupting Oral Care with Design and Sustainability

The electric toothbrush is one of the most familiar objects in our homes, yet also one of the most wasteful. Billions are discarded every year, most destined for landfill. According to a recent report in Waste-Management World, the UK alone disposes of around 212 million toothbrush heads and manual brushes annually. It’s a category that has seen little meaningful innovation. Until SURI.

Founded by former P&G colleagues turned brand entrepreneurs Gyve Safavi and Mark Rushmore, SURI (short for Sustainable Rituals) launched in 2022 as a direct-to-consumer disruptor. Built on eco-first materials – plant-based cornstarch heads, castor-oil bristles and a durable aluminium body – and designed for repair, recycling and long life, the brand quickly tapped into a growing demand for stylish, low-waste oral care. Today it’s stocked nationally in Boots and Planet Organic, and reaches a global audience through Amazon and its own e-commerce platform.

An early adopter myself – drawn to the brand’s sleek design, understated colour palette and ecological narrative – I spoke with Safavi about SURI’s origin story, the challenges of embedding sustainability at every level, and how design and brand strategy are helping to redefine an everyday ritual.

Can you talk me through your early career path, and how those experiences shaped your drive to eventually start your own company?

My dad is an architect, and even as a kid I wanted to make things. I’d take toys apart to see how they worked, repair them, and I was into computers from an early age. 

As an adult, I started at P&G in finance, then moved into marketing on the Gillette brand. Later I had the chance to work with Martin Sorrell at WPP, which was like an MBA in real time: intense. But I learnt a huge amount about strategy and how businesses are run. After that I spent two years at AKQA, learning about user-centric digital design. But I was still frustrated. I wanted to start my own company, and I always kept a book of ideas. If they were killable, I’d kill them, but the good ones wouldn’t die.

How did the SURI concept come up?

I decided to take some time out which happened to coincide with the start of Covid and the national lockdown. I pulled out some ideas from my ideas book, and the toothbrush concept popped up. My wife had just bought an Oral-B electric toothbrush for just under £200. It was ugly and heavy and when she turned it on it was so loud. I couldn’t understand why no one was making thinner, lighter and less noisy brushes. 

So I ordered a bunch of slimmer models from various outlets in the US, but the cleaning experience and performance were, on the whole, terrible. The industry line seemed to be that you need a big motor for power, but when I tore dozens of brushes apart, I found the motors were actually tiny, with a lot of empty space around them. It didn’t have to be that way. For the bigger companies that have the monopoly, though, it made no sense to change, as it would compete with their existing line-up.

So I got to work. After a lot of research, I found a young Californian industrial designer, Dylan Feltman, who happened to be in the UK. He had some great ideas – not all of them came off – and during lockdown we spent hours on Zoom working through concepts.

I began rethinking material choice: could we use aluminium, make it smooth and comfortable in the hand? Then I looked at how you recycle a toothbrush. If I was going to launch something new, it had to have a sustainable angle. Back then, sustainable products usually compromised the experience. I figured the next generation would be sustainability 2.0, where you don’t compromise on design or performance. And finally, the price: I was determined not to go above the £100 barrier.

Is this when Mark Rushmore got involved with SURI?

Yes Mark joined around the time I had the first prototype. We’d met in Cannes eight years earlier, and only later realised we’d both worked around the same time at P&G! I wanted a co-founder, we got along well, so I pitched him the idea. The next day he said he was in. He had great experience across different companies and had just sold his agency.

From there, we went straight into a seed round, contacting VCs. Most said no – no traction, no money, the space already dominated – but we kept going. We did countless Zoom calls during Covid and quickly developed a tag-team rhythm. Eventually one VC, Salica Investments, came on board, raising our initial £500,000 request to £800,000. JamJar Ventures joined on the second round.

It must have felt daunting. You’d just started a family and I assume it took time before the company showed a profit?

The early stage is always risky, but once you make it through, the picture changes. In our first financial year, May 2022 to January 2023, we did £2 million in sales. The next year we hit £9.8 million, mostly DTC. Then Boots began selling in-store, followed by Planet Organic and other outlets. Last year we reached £23.4 million with £1 million profit. And this year, we’re still growing fast.

SURI feels very different from the way toothbrushes are usually marketed — more aligned with wellness and lifestyle brands than with clinical oral care. How did that brand positioning come about?

My background in Gillette marketing taught me that in this category you need to win people’s hearts. At first we thought about every wellness ritual, but decided to focus on oral care. We studied the space and looked at brands like Aesop, who make the rituals of buying so thoughtful – the shop design, the reusable bag, the aromatic spray they apply to the bag – and learnt from that. But beauty and wellness is overcrowded, while oral health is still too often portrayed in a very clinical way. I thought, why can’t we elevate brushing your teeth into a wellbeing ritual, where you’re taking care of yourself? Yes, there’s a medical side, but there’s also a wellness aspect. And so the name SURI, which is short for sustainable rituals.

Then came sustainability. We asked why electric toothbrushes weren’t sustainable and how we could provide free recycling with plant-based alternatives. How do we champion the materials and the story around the product? That’s why we spent so much time on the copy at the start of the business – obsessing over getting the message right. For us, it was always about the whole ritual: from the design to the packaging to the words we use.

You’ve just launched your second edition SURI, further refined in terms of design and functionality. Where do you see the next stage of the business?

Yes, we’re at the second stage, which means more products, more people, more investment. Last year we were 15 people; now we’re 37, mainly in the UK and at our factory in Shenzhen, China, and we’ll need to keep growing. We’ve launched the new SURI brush, and are working on expanding the range with a prototype in its final stages. And, we’re exploring packaging materials that are fully recyclable.

Where do you see the opportunities?

In terms of markets, 40 percent of our DTC sales are in the US, where we have two warehouses, with Europe the next focus. We see Japan as a great potential market too as they appreciate good design and packaging. PR is obviously important, and so are influencers to create a buzz around the product. So much is happening online, with most people today buy directly, whether on Amazon or through social platforms like TikTok. So we need to tap into all these areas.

From the start we said we would keep the product price under £100. We’re now working on a cheaper toothbrush aimed at younger customers, because there’s a big opportunity to get 20 to 26-year-olds to switch from manual to electric for the first time. Our core target is 30 to 45-year-olds, though we also see older generations buying for the whole family, and younger, design-driven buyers who simply like the product. Did you know 50 percent of the UK still uses a manual brush, and of that, two brands own 75 percent of the market? There’s a lot of opportunity out there.