YouSaid · the spoken record

John Osher

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72
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2026-02-16
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2026-02-16
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1
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  1. “There were many cases when I'd run into problems that were beyond my experience and intelligence, both, and don't know what to do. And as an entrepreneur, you're really on your own. You might find people who work for you who are very good. You can get their input, but you're really on your own. I learned to basically sit. I always had a couch in my office and I sit on the couch and I would just ask the universe. And it's not about asking God, asking self and Buddhism, asking higher part of my brain. I had no idea. I would just say, what do I do? And then I'd be quiet. And 100% of the time, I always got the answer. 100% I got the answer and was right. To the point that I started calling it the magic. And when we'd have a serious problem, people work for me and tell me to go in my office and ask the magic. And what's wonderful about it is that anybody can do the same.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “First of all, luck enters into everybody's success. And I don't think I had a business that didn't have a crossroad point, could have gone either way. And they all went my way. I live in a really much more of a state of gratitude than pride because so many things could have gone the other way. On the other hand, Gary Players says the reason he put so well and that he's so lucky when he puts is that he practices six hours a day. And he says somehow he gets luckier that way. And I do think that, you know, the more businesses, the fact that I had a lot of businesses, a lot of experience, failures within the successes, that you do get luckier.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “In a way, I retired after each venture. Because Adventure was the project was over. If I never, and I lived in a mode of looking for ideas, that was my mode. I'm not so much anymore as I'm older and retired. I still get ideas. But when I was in that mode, I would attract ideas, whether they came in my own head or people walked in the door with them or I get calls or the universities that I would speak at, people had ideas. After I sell a company or a project, I was open to do something else. Financially, I didn't need to, but I love the creative challenge. To this day, I do. I don't want to do it at this age, but I get just as excited over a new idea.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Right. So once they got rid of the spin, they closed the deal $55 billion deal. And they transitioned for three years with Church and Dwight to use the crest name. And then it had to be just a spin spin brush. But Church and Dwight has done and did and has still done a terrible job. They didn't really do anything with it. Everyone else is in it. So when you go to the store, there's 15 different variations of spin brush on the shelves now.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “You know, everything else was they were always waiting six months, you know, and then there would be due diligence. I said, I'll close next week. But they went back to church in Dwight, who they had been negotiating with, and they said, Oshard's made a big offer. And you guys, and they forced them into closing the deal, you know, for about 75 million plus inventory.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Church and What happened was three years into it, they were trying to buy Gillette and Gillette owned Oral B and Braun. And the deal was being held up because the two Oral B and the Spinbrush were a monopoly. It was well over 50% of all the toothbrushes. And so they decided they have to sell the spin brush off. So they called me and asked if I was interested in buying it back. And I said, I would, but I'm not willing to pay much money. I'll give you $10 million for it, the whole thing. But I'll close next week.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “It was the biggest selling in the world for a period of time. A window was a wonderful grand slam experience that everything went right only once in a lifetime. But you know they ended up having to sell it three years later.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Crest toothpaste became number one again. Their stock went up. So I said, you know, somewhere between zero and infinite, there's a number that we can both live with. And we went back and forth really on the phone for a period, a week or two, I don't remember, and came up with a settlement number.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “So I said, you know, you're right. I said, you guys didn't expect it to be this big. I did, but you didn't because I said, for you guys to stop this is insane. Because when they also came out with our product, they came out almost simultaneously with the white strips. So, the addition of the spin brush and the white strips.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Million with the product. But what they didn't pay attention to was when they made the earnout arrangement, they did it based on it being a maximum of $120 million. They had no concept of it going to $300 or $400 million or $500. And the head of the department, I forget who he was, maybe it was the vice president of the company. I remember, he called me and says, we're going to have to stop advertising. We're going to have to pull the product for a while and give it, let it cool off. And I said, why? He says, the urnhouse going to kill us. We just can't.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Got it into something like 40 countries. I flew around, I did presentations in Japan. I mean, they were all good stories. But after a year, so they had told their board that they thought they could do as much to 110 or $120 million with this product. And I think after a year, they were doing over 300.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “And I said, why? And he says, Because we have a rule in our company that you have to have enough goods and all our warehouses before you can sell the product. And you're selling as fast as you can make it. And we need to build the warehouses up. Stop what you're doing. I went back to the president and I told him, he says, no, you got the right to override it. You keep doing what you're doing. And they were hoping to open it up to three different countries that same year and expand the production. And we ran it and we got our production up from 88,000 to 400 something thousand a day manufacturing. We were buying close to a million batteries from Everready a day. We were second only to Walmart and battery purchases at the time.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “But more likely, what they would do would have done was screw it up. That's more often than not what happens. But the president of the company, he met with me and he says, you know, we have bought three companies like yours in the last four years, and we've ruined them all. And we want you guys, you have a three year deal, we want you to run it, and we'll give you the people, we'll give all this stuff, and we'll even let you override some of our rules. And so we did that, and we got on the phone, we started doing it. The first thing the lawyers wanted to do was have us stop selling.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “What an idea that's something we'd think about. And then it went from there. And, you know, usually things don't work that well as this. This was one of these things where Murphy did not come into the business. Everything worked to clockwork. But I needed them to want to buy the company. And I say this because, as I say, when I do speak at different schools on entrepreneurship, it's such a difference when you're trying to sell something and when somebody wants to buy it. And anytime you can get in a situation where they want to buy it, you'll get way more money.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “And I got to bring it to my board, and then I call him back and said, I hate to say this, but I said the board was so enamored with this that you all made this offer. But they said if we do this licensing, the board, investors all did this to eventually sell, and they said that they would never be able to sell it to anybody, but Procter& Amel and Krest, and you would have all the leverage because we couldn't do anything else. Despite that, this is such an opportunity we're going to have to pass. And he says, well, why don't we buy the company? And I said.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “I said, we have to keep this has to stay at this price point at retail, and we can't do that. And so he says, well, let me check. He calls me back a couple days and says, yeah, that's okay. 3%'s okay. And then I said, well, I'm so honored. I don't know what to say. This is such a great thing. I have to bring this to my board. And back in those days, you always claimed to have a board.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “And the next year we probably would have done 80 to 100 with a great profit. So I finally called the guy and I said, Well, I never heard from you guys. He says, heard from us. I thought you guys were going to call us back. And it turned out, and we didn't know this till later, that it was the highest testing product they ever did in the history of Procter& Gamble with consumers. But I didn't know that until actually a few years later. But so they came back and they said, you know, we decided we'll license you the name. I don't want their name. He said, we'll license you the crest name. And I said, that's so exciting. But I just want you to know that we can't pay more than 3%. You know, most companies like that with that brand want 12 or 15%.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “It's a ruse. Yeah. We wanted to sell the company to them, but I had to find a door and I wanted them to want to buy it instead of the other way. So they brought the brand people in from Crest and everybody. They agreed to test it. So we sent them a bunch of pieces and they tested it. A month goes by. Two months goes by. Three months. Not a word. So, you know, that's usually not a good sign. So I got to finally got to Hawaii and said, well, I might as well call them because I got nothing to lose at this time.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Yeah, we wanted to license their thing, which I think didn't want to do. I didn't want to do, but I just wanted to show them who we were. And I wanted to use that as a door.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Way lower. In fact, they may not have been interested. What I did instead, and this was all part of the plan, I went to their licensing department With this crazy idea, which I didn't think in a million years they'd agreed to license the crest name for our product. Well, even when I went there, they never heard of us.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “didn't but I've known that there are chemical companies They were not particularly a strong company in China, and they were not particularly strong in mechanical. You know, they had Swiffer, but for the most part they were food and chemical company. They were the company that needed this product. They didn't have an electric toothbrush. Their toothbrush business was way down. And their stock was down. Their whole company was in a down mode. So they were our target when we started the company.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “It wasn't even a full year, it was probably closer to eight months. And instead, we made a $21 million profit. But we did that on purpose. We really wanted to make the profit that was so important because I wanted from day one we wanted to sell the company to Procter& Gamble.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “The water was all handled different became waterproof. But the decision to throw those out was a hard decision, especially for a new company. And if I didn't do it, it would have failed.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “So, what happened was the first hundred thousand pieces, we had the water when you brush your teeth, the water would run right through the toothbrush and out the bottom, which we thought would be fine. But what happened was over a month, using it for about a month, electrolysis or whatever would cause it build up at the connections and it would stop working. It would break in a month. And we had 400,000 of them in our warehouse. And I had to make a decision, this is a consumable product, and this is potentially so big. And if I continue to sell this, it will die. And I went back to my partners in it, my investors, and I said, I'm going to scrap these $400,000. We're all going to put in another half a million dollars or something. And we're going to redesign it, which we did working day and night with the factory online on the phone. And in a week or two, we redesigned it.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “We were selling seven per day. And the buyers, everyone involved, knew right away what this was. But we did have, though, our first hundred thousand pieces were defective that we shipped.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Oral B was selling the best selling toothbrush in the world at the time was their cross section, which was $3.95 expensive toothbrush manual, and they were selling 12 a week per store.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Back then, we counted them. Each of us went there and we go to the stores and we count them. Then we became friends with each of the store managers and he'd look it up on his computer to make sure that they were actually sold and not stolen. And once we knew that, that's when I called my factory and quadrupled the tooling, even though we still had trouble getting appointments anywhere.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “With Myers, I happened to be from my other business's friends with one of the owners of one of the Myers. And so he agreed, because we were so new and nobody knew we were, and it was hard to get appointments and didn't know this. But he agreed to do a test, 24-pack test for us in a bunch of stores. And we were five of us at the time working for the company. And we all, and they didn't have any Meyer stores in Cleveland. So we all left, went wonder, I went to Detroit, somebody went to Toledo, Columbus, setting them up, putting them out as the test was supposed to be, and then going back each day. And that's when we found out that we'd put them out and we were selling seven a day per store, which was just in a different realm of any other toothbrush in the world.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “But the Trimi was a very important thing that we learned that was never in the Health and Beauty department. It was a new thing for that department. But we learned it from the toy industry, how useful it is. And people love the press buttons.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “To the retailer, yes. But what was so important is that when you're selling a toothbrush, electric toothbrush for $495 or $489, whatever Walmart price was, it's almost not credible. So if a consumer looks at it, is it a toy? I don't believe this. So having the try me where you could press the button and it does feel like you're running a Volkswagen motor. I mean, it really looked great when you press the button on the shelf. So we took that from our toy experience and we made them in 12 packs that everything we did to start this business was to get them on end caps at a retailer. That means that the end of the aisle, if I had just stuck two of these on the long wall that had 80 manual brushes, we would have sold some, but it would have been much more difficult. But our product sold so well so quickly we were able to get on the end of the aisle at Walmart where they put in 140 of them rather than”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “That was critical to what we were doing for a few reasons. One, we'd sold them just like we did spin pops in a 12-pack, them sticking in a case and that had a button that you could press.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “And get the oscillation at the same time. And that not only gave us a major advantage, but it opened the door for a great patent because we say, okay, we're going to make a toothbrush that moves, part of it moves and part of it's fixed. Well, nobody ever thought of doing that because there's no reason to think that. In the few years that followed, we made even much better ones than that. But at the time, that's what we need to needed to get to a point that we were offering a product that was much better than they could get manually.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “When you brush your teeth, it's really working and it's working great. So it had to satisfy that. And it took us a year before we got a product that I thought was well beyond the threshold of a far better product than any manual brush. And at first, we actually came up with a rounded head, and it worked very well. The problem was after two weeks it was splayed and real ugly. And I said, you can't do that. It's ugly. You know, nobody wants this after two weeks. It's too ugly. And so we decided to make it oscillate rather than rotate. So the name Spinbrush actually came when it was still spinning. We never changed the name because it was a good name. But then I realized that I like to brush my teeth in the morning. I don't like to do what OB does where you walk around your mouth differently and have to learn a new method. So I said, well, why don't we take the oscillating round part and put bristles below it and make”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “Well, it had to include batteries. I didn't want anyone to buy this and have to go buy batteries. Well, I had to give them good batteries because if I gave them cheap non-alcoholine batteries, they would die in a month. And if they're going to have to buy batteries every month, it's not ultimately a good deal. So I had defined that the batteries had to last three months. So we had to design a product and it had to actually work using two minutes brushing, I think twice a day, and we ran all kinds of tests, not quite like PNG would, but we ran all kinds of tests to make sure that we got the battery life we needed. Then even more important is we needed the torque.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “Didn't know. I knew that we were going to, that it was, if we could, it would be so big. I did not know if we could achieve it. And after six months, I almost quit because we just couldn't. Get it the way I wanted it.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “First of all, they copy and work off themselves. So the most expensive electric tooth thrust was $110 owned by Phillips. And they practically use a Volkswagen mother thing. And we had been used to motors that are much smaller. If they would work, we didn't need to have what they had. They were also had to have a quality for the price they were selling at. You couldn't have it just break because everyone would take them back. We didn't need that. We actually went out and said, this lasts the last six months”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “But the best thing about it was everything I've ever been involved with up to that point from energy products. It was still limited to a certain size. The toys, even toys you're dealing with boys that are three to eight, that's really a small market. But I love the idea that toothbrushes was everybody. Everybody in the world, man, woman, kid, age, it made no difference. There was never a bigger market to go after.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Well, we really never considered or worried about or compete with the high end, which was some of them were 50 bucks. We basically saw the manual market. That's where the numbers were”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “No, it wasn't. I'm not that altruistic. But the reality is that we ended up buying such large quantities of little motors at batteries and gears where we're buying in the millions of batteries from Eveready alkaline batteries where we're paying 12 cents a battery rather than 78 cents or 39 cents for high volume. And same with the motors that cost 90 cents and we're paying an 8 cents or something because I was buying a million at a time. And because of that, I thought that it's possible that we could take what we've learned and we have factories that have been making these lollipops that they would be great resources to make a battery operated toothbrushes if we could actually achieve it. We wanted to sell it for $5 or less at Walmart.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “First of all, I always went to stores and looked them aisles all the time, it's just part of a product idea process. But the joke is that everyone says you sold all these lollipops and ruined all these kids' teeth, and then you felt guilty and invented a toothbrush.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “Very few people get good at golf. But after being so-called retired for a year, maybe two, I don't remember, I had an idea. So I got together with guys that had done design work for me in Cleveland. And who had done a lot of great designs for products. And I had a list of 100 ideas. The first one being the spin battery operated toothbrush. I knew we had made millions of these spinning lollipuffs and that we became experts in small batteries, motors, and gears in China. And I said, well, I wonder if it's possible that I can make an electric toothbrush that would sell at Walmart for $5.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “It didn't suit. I took up golf and I did that for a year or two. And once I got bad at golf, I had to go do something else.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “Yeah, so I negotiated a good deal and I retired. I was about 50 and I retired and moved to Florida for a year or something or so.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “No, it's just sometimes you get an item like a popular song that's an incident. Everyone recognizes an instant hit. You know, when you have something on the shelf in a store where you have many products that'll sell one piece a week per store and you sell eight a day or something, it becomes a hit so quickly that everybody wants to buy it. And the spin pop became one of the largest, we sold millions of them all over the world. I sold millions in Japan and we were probably in the interactive candy back then. We're probably doing $40,000, $50 million of the candy.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “Yes, I knew we could make this very inexpensively, and I knew a lollipop. You know, we went to all the lollipop factories, dum-dums, and all that, and that we could buy lollipops very inexpensively.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “Well, they basically had a light at lollipop. It was a spear. And my guy calls me and tells me about it. And I said, that's great. I'm looking for a category. And so I said, I want to fly them in. I want them here tomorrow. I flew them in from Pittsburgh. And I bought the rights to it. And to one person of the four was the inventor. And he started inventing a whole lot of other candy items. And one, I was interested in was this one that spun, which was maybe six months later. And I bought this thing thinking that if I'm ever going to sell this company, I'm going to need a category that Hasbro or Mattel are one of these companies need because they by categories. That's what they don't need a product unless it's a lifelong product. They need a category. So I decided to get into this category of interactive candy.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “I got into somebody went to an inventor show in Pittsburgh and found a lollipop that lit up. You press a button. It was like a sword that would lit up. And I ended up bringing the inventors in. There were four male men, two couples. And shortly after this light, they had come up with another idea, which was it looked like a right angle drill where you press a button, a lollipop would spin. And I looked at that and I said, now that's an idea, because I always spun a lollipop with my fingers in my mouth. I said, but this right angle thing's crazy. I just wanted to come straight up.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “Because he took the deal. But I was also able to, because as a result of that order, my investors agreed to stay in the business. And as a result of that, we were able to get a new bank.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “Yes, yes, that was made in China So our budget next year, we got this chance, and everyone bought RK basketball. We did $6 million and made a million and a half dollar profit. And we were on our way.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “And then I went back to my investors and I said I got Toys R Us to take these. I had already developed a product for the next year too. And the new toy I had was called Arcade Basketball. And it was when Papa Shot was real popular where you pay 50 cents at carnivals and bars and everywhere and see how many baskets. And I made a home version of it that hung on a door with a net.”

    2026-02-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Spinbrush: John Osher. The Electric Toothbrush That Sold for $475M · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT