THE RACE TO REINVENT EVERYTHING
James McKean wants to revolutionize the manual toothbrush. It’s January 2018. The 31-year-old MBA candidate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School whirls his laptop around to show me the prototype designs. Bristle, as the product might be called, has a detachable head and a colorful pattern on the handle—like faux wood grain, flowers, or plaid. Customers would pay somewhere around $15 for their first purchase, and then get replacement heads, at $3 or $4 a pop, through a subscription service.
There are a few reasons McKean likes this plan. A Bristle subscription would be more convenient than going to CVS when you need a new toothbrush—you’d order online, set your replacement-head frequency, and forget about it. Also, Bristle brushes are friendlier looking than, say, Oral-B’s spaceship-like aesthetic. “To me, brushing your teeth is such an intimate act. You engage with these products by putting them in your mouth,” he says. A toothbrush, he adds, is “almost an extension of your individuality.”
A former McKinsey consultant and private equity investor from Utah, McKean caught the entrepreneurial bug from watching his clients. We’re sitting in a small study room at Wharton’s Huntsman Hall, named after a fellow Utahn, the late industrialist Jon M. Huntsman. When it was established in 1881, Wharton became the world’s first business college. Its alumni, in addition to Huntsman, include Elon Musk, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, hedge fund billionaire Steven Cohen, and Donald Trump.
For most of its history, Wharton’s reputation has been built on turning out the world’s finest spreadsheet jockeys. But, a few years ago, four students met at Wharton and started a company that would help ignite a startup revolution: Warby Parker. The concept: selling eyeglasses directly to consumers (DTC) online. Few thought the idea would work, but today Warby is valued at $1.75 billion, and its founding story has become a fairy tale at Wharton. Co-founders and co-CEOs Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa give guest lectures at the business school—as does Jeff Raider, the third Warby co-founder, who went on to help hatch Harry’s, a DTC razor brand.
Wharton, in turn, has become a sort of incubator of DTC companies in product categories as diverse as lingerie, sofas, and, if McKean gets his way, manual toothbrushes. Wharton is by no means the only place such companies originate, but it is the most fertile ground—a fact that’s not lost on venture capitalists. “I’ve basically pitched a tent outside of Wharton,” says Andrew Mitchell, who founded the venture capital firm Brand Foundry to invest in digital-first consumer businesses.
The appeal of the DTC movement goes like this: By selling directly to consumers online, you can avoid exorbitant retail markups and therefore afford to offer some combination of better design,
