How SURI outshone Oral-B on Trustpilot in just 2 years 🦷

If you’ve walked down the dental care aisle, you’ll know it’s dominated by giants like Oral-B and Philips. 

And yet, SURI, founded in 2021, is now the highest-rated toothbrush brand on TrustPilot, surpassing the category giants in less than two years.

In one of our Marketing Hustle podcast episodes, Lottie sat down with Mark Rushmore, Co-Founder of SURI. 

Lottie and Mark spoke about everything from the power of product, to consumer painpoints, to the business basics that drive growth. 

Whether you’re battling Goliaths in your own category or scaling a young brand from zero, there’ll be something to take away from the brilliant conversation they had.

These were our top 5 takeaways:

1. Business growth comes from solving real pain, not adding features

“Every year, 4 billion brushes end up in landfill. And by the way, most customers hate their electric toothbrushes – poor battery, clunky design, hygiene issues.” Mark Rushmore

The electric toothbrushes that were dominating the aisles were built with buttons no one used. Mark and his co-founder spoke to hundreds of customers and found 99.8% never touched the Bluetooth functions.

Instead, they complained about:

• Batteries dying in a week.

• Ugly plastic bodies that got gunked up.

• Brushes too bulky to take on holiday.

  
  

So SURI binned the gimmicks and obsessed over three things to tackle those issues:

• Performance: 40-day battery life.

• Design: slim aluminium body that looks like something you’d actually want on your bathroom shelf.

• Sustainability: plant-based heads, castor bean bristles and modular construction that makes every part recyclable.

If in doubt about your product or service, pressure test it with:

1. How big is the category? What are your competitors getting right that you don’t really need to compete with? 

2. And what are they getting really wrong? What are the customer pain points that are getting ignored?

3. And finally, are your solutions making their life noticeably easier or better, or are your new shiny features just a gimmick?

2. Product-market fit is the best marketing budget you’ll ever have

SURI sold out their first 5,000 units before stock arrived. The magic wasn’t clever ads, but clear comms to go alongside a great product.

• Early ads simply listed pain points customers already felt (“does your brush battery die after a week?”).

• Delivering on the promise generated 6,500+ 5-star TrustPilot reviews, which drove organic word of mouth.

If you feel really confident about your product but feel like it isn’t landing, audit your messaging. Is it mirroring back problems your customers already complain about? Using your customers’ own words is often the best way to get your comms to land.

3. Hire strategic executors

When SURI got to a certain stage of growth and enough budget to outsource marketing, they brought on an agency. 

The agency helped them achieve some growth… but not enough to justify how much they were spending.

Then when SURI made their first growth hire – someone who had a great combination of strategy and initiative – and they realised that they didn’t need to be spending so much on an agency.

The new hire outperformed the agency by creating 10 high-performing ads in his first week, just by cutting SURI’s existing assets differently.

Execution was cheaper, faster and most importantly, it helped SURI scale.

Before you brief an agency, ask: 

Could one resourceful hire create and test this tomorrow?

In many cases, speed and scrappiness beat polish.

4. Customer service builds brand equity fast

When a shipping error to the US left 1,000 customers waiting, SURI leaned into over-communication. 

It turned out that customers were understanding about the delay, and instead of refunds or churn, they built trust by owning up to their humanness.

This was a steep learning curve in customer service for SURI, and Mark’s advice was to make sure you’ve got a comms plan for crises. Can you over-communicate, with empathy, across every touchpoint? This often matters more for long-term brand growth than the crisis itself.

5. Keep it simple to scale

When SURI started out they were constrained by budget and team capacity. The big creative initiatives? They had to park those ideas in the corner.

Instead, they doubled down on their core activities. Mark says this turned out to be the foundation of their success:

“We kind of went fast just by trying to do the basics well. We constantly try to do less things.”

By resisting shiny distractions, they achieved B Corp certification in just 14 months of launching – something that further differentiated SURI as the go-to brand for sustainable dental care.

So ask yourself what actually matters. Then go all guns blazing.