
I mean, we drove to Pennsylvania, we drove to Chicago, we drove down to Naples, Florida. Then me and my dad, more often than not, would load up a 26-foot Penske rental truck and drive (the fountain) cross-country and do the install. I designed it and I started building them. I’m like, wow, that’s a lot of money for a small water fountain! I pictured I could make one myself. They were selling them - a small one - for $15,000. For comparison’s sake, the overall toothpaste market is expected to grow 3.8% by 2027 to $28 billion annually.Ī: I was online shopping for a water fountain, and I found this company in LA that made these custom water fountains. Helping that trend is a booming online marketplace that got a big push from pandemic lockdowns. Industry watchers expect the “herbal” segment to increase 5% in the next two to five years to $1.16 billion annually. Demand is growing, too, as more shoppers look for oral products without fluoride.
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(URBN is the parent company of Urban Outfitters, Free People and Anthropologie.)ĭavids, which marks its seventh birthday this year, is one of many “natural” toothpaste competitors including Tom’s and Hello. Ten years after first googling “toothpaste ingredients,” 51-year-old Buss and his team of 14 employees can barely keep up, packing thousands of tubes of Davids weekly for an all-star lineup of retailers including URBN, Target, Wegman’s, Amazon and Whole Foods. Such was the trajectory of Davids Natural Toothpaste, a plain, pale-mint-green tube of $10 paste sourced with American products because that galling moment at the end with Ingram Micro left a bad taste in Buss’ mouth.

A random conversation with himself about the incomprehensible contents of toothpaste leads to a three-year odyssey to create a product people will buy “over and over and over again.” The jobless man turned small business owner leases a 2,000-square-foot workshop and makes fountains for 11 years until the welding fumes and cross-country installations are just too much.

Then Cheesecake Factory’s designers call and ask, ‘Hey, can you build us fountains for our restaurants, only make them 15-feet wide instead of 2?’ In his downtime, an Internet search for a backyard fountain turns into a DIY adventure, and suddenly the jobless man is making and selling water fountains built in his garage. His story goes something like this: Thirty-something gets fired from Ingram Micro’s sales department, his job of eight years outsourced to the Philippines. The story of the La Mirada kid who grew up to be a Temecula manufacturer selling minty paste to the masses is a head-spinning tale of ingenuity and good old-fashioned serendipity. Small California business owner takes on the titans of toothpaste Close MenuĪ layoff and a knack for making things pushed Eric Buss into the sticky, opaque world of toothpaste.
