‘I’d rather take shares than a big salary’

Gyve Safavi’s eureka moment came after spending weeks bored at home during Covid, inadvertently photobombing his wife’s work calls in his pyjamas.

The co-founder of the sustainable electric toothbrush company Suri was on a pandemic-induced career hiatus when he decided to dig into the oral care industry and its waste problem. After dismantling dozens of electric toothbrushes, the former brand executive spotted an opportunity to challenge the duopoly that controlled 75 per cent of the market, by marrying sustainability with design. Social media users may recognise Suri’s slim, aluminium-bodied brushes from its Instagram advertising onslaught.

Five years on, Suri has sold more than 1mn toothbrushes and last year reported revenue of £23.4mn. The company has raised nearly £9mn from investors including JamJar Investments, V3 Ventures and DMG Ventures.

Where does your entrepreneurial spirit come from?
I was born in New York City to immigrant parents. My mother worked for the UN and my father was an architect, and they were incredibly driven. That must have rubbed off on me; there was this sense that to do anything right, you really have to focus. Also, from a young age, they took us to design museums, and had us building cardboard models and planes. That instilled an early appetite for invention. I initially wanted to be a scientist.

Education was also hugely valued in our home. I started at the United Nations International School and later went to boarding school in New England. That period of private schooling probably focused me even more.

After university, my first proper job was with Procter & Gamble, at their Geneva headquarters. I started in finance and spent three years building spreadsheets until midnight, which was crazy in Switzerland because nothing there is open past 9pm.

It wasn’t glamorous and I didn’t love it, but it laid the foundations for how I think today about business.

Why toothbrushes?
It was a few years in at P&G that I started thinking about electric toothbrushes. By then, I’d moved into marketing, leading the female razor division at Gillette — Venus, and we happened to sit on the same office floor as the toothbrush team [P&G owns the Oral-B brand]. I was curious about their product development and I remember thinking: “Can’t this be done better?” But I wasn’t allowed to input. That frustration stuck with me.

Before starting Suri, you spent time working for Sir Martin Sorrell, the British advertising tycoon. How did that come about?
After leaving P&G, I worked closely with Sir Martin at WPP as his aide-de-camp and business development lead in London for three years.

I first met him at an industry event and we stayed in touch. I was later considering doing an MBA, and reached out for advice, and he suggested I go to work with him. He was right — that job was an MBA. It was sink or swim. I’d often travel with him, sit in on meetings with major business leaders like Sheryl Sandberg, former chief operating officer at Meta, and see what it takes to scale a company globally. I learned a lot from brand building at P&G, but I’d never before seen how to run a company from the top with 300,000 employees and 300 agencies around the world.

I left WPP because I really wanted to work for a start-up; a few years later, I’d be starting one myself.

How did you fund the early days of Suri?
I put in around £30,000 to build the first rather ugly prototype, and to run research surveys. Some of that money came from my mother. She helped me survive that first year — 2020 to 2021. I later offered to repay her, but she refused; she just wanted to support me.

Mark [Rushmore, Suri’s other co-founder] came on board soon after the first prototype was ready. I knew I wanted a co-founder, though I played it cool. I offered him nothing at first — he just wanted to get involved and we spent hours on Zoom for about a month before we formalised it. We didn’t go 50/50 on the share split; I’m the largest shareholder and chief executive officer but between us we own a majority of over 50 per cent.

We began making a presentation to investors and talking to some angels — Sorrell couldn’t invest due to a conflict of interest, but we’re still friendly. We secured an £800,000 pre-seed in 2021, which helped us fund our designer and the first batch of 5,000 toothbrushes, which went live in May 2022.

Neither of us took salaries for a while. We survived thanks to our partners — Mark and I both say we couldn’t have done this if our wives hadn’t supported the home front.

We’ve also always run things lean. We saw the “grow now, fix later” approach play out, but we said from day one: “If this isn’t structurally right economically, we’ll never get to profit.” So we focused early on that and last year, we reached £1mn Ebitda. 

How have your finances changed since sales took off?
We did a small secondary sale during our Series A to take some money off the table. It wasn’t much, but I just needed to stabilise. I have a mortgage and it wasn’t easy taking a very low salary for years. I also wanted to pay my wife back too. She floated our home expenses for a year and a half.

I wanted to keep most of my equity in the firm. I’d also rather take shares than a big salary, so I’m not the highest paid person on the team.

About 40% of your sales are in the US. Are you concerned about the new tariff regime?
Yes, it’s definitely something we’re keeping a close eye on and is a risk. But so far it’s been manageable. Luckily, we’ve been proactive: we held a healthy amount of inventory stateside, which means we haven’t had to raise prices immediately [there’s currently a 30 per cent tariff on products shipped from China, where the toothbrushes are made, to the US]. In parallel, we’ve been running a pretty thorough cost-cutting exercise and looking at alternate sourcing routes to avoid passing the full brunt on to customers. 

We’re also thinking about other markets. Germany is really interesting. Electric toothbrush penetration is very high there — 65 per cent of the population, vs UK/US, which is around 50 per cent.

Currently, in the UK, we account for low single digits [electric toothbrush] market. It really is David and Goliath trying to get dentists to recommend us because we don’t have the money to give them out for free like the big players. Telling dentists “you need to buy it first” is terrible, right?

Are you a saver or a spender?
My approach to money has definitely evolved over time, especially through the experience of starting a company. In the early days, when I wasn’t taking a salary, I was extremely conservative with spending. I even sold a number of smaller possessions I didn’t use — an exercise that really opened my eyes to how much we accumulate without purpose, and how those things could be more valuable to someone else.

These days, I’m back to enjoying a healthy dose of consumerism — something I’m always trying to keep in check — but I’ve become more intentional. I’m increasingly drawn to the idea of buying fewer, better things. That applies especially to our kids: we try to focus on toys and products that can grow with them, such as Lego or open-ended creative sets, rather than things that are short-lived.

Do you invest?
I don’t invest directly in the stock market myself, but [my wife and I] work with a financial adviser who manages our savings through a portfolio that includes funds in both the UK and US.

As an early-stage founder, I’ve had to be very focused with my time, prioritising work and family above all else. Perhaps as the business matures I’ll have the bandwidth to explore more direct involvement in investing, including angel investing.

If you started your business again, would you do anything differently?
I didn’t focus enough on health initially, especially mental health. And I didn’t celebrate wins early enough. I remember Mark and I sat in an airport on our way to China, totally exhausted, and I was like, “Don’t tell me the good news.” He said: “You want to do this for 10 years and not celebrate anything?” He was right. Now we make time to mark the milestones. If we hit a revenue goal, we go out for a meal with the team or do an off-site. You have to enjoy the wins.