Meet Floe, The Eco-Friendly Entrepreneurs Hoping To Save Britons’ Teeth

“We want people to subscribe to a sustainable smile,” says Will Welton, one of the entrepreneurs behind Floe Oral Care, a UK start-up that thinks it can help Britons transform their oral health. Welton and co-founder Javier Navarro have just launched a direct-to-consumer subscription service they say could make a huge difference in nudging people towards better dental habits.

At a cost of £23.97 a quarter, Floe Oral Care will send its subscribers a new box of dental kit every 12 weeks. Each box contains two types of toothpaste – Dawn, a tooth whitening paste to be applied in the morning, and Dusk, to promote stronger enamel and fight decay at night-time – as well as a new brush and dental floss.

It’s not the first dental subscription service in the UK – rivals include Brushbox and Utterbrush – but Floe Oral Care says its unique selling point is what Welton claims it “the UK’s first oral subscription box that is totally circular”.

Every bit of what the company supplies is made from premium materials, but crucially these are all recyclable. The idea is that customers keep each box their kit is sent in, pop the empties in it when they’re done, and return the box (free of charge) when the next one arrives. Welton and Navarro then commit to recycling the materials, which are sourced with sustainability in mind. They’ll also recycle any old toothbrushes you have lying around.

It’s a neat pitch. The subscription box market has become increasingly saturated in recent times, offering consumers regular supplies of everything from lambswool socks to craft ale. But dental products are a necessity rather than a luxury – something people have to buy, rather than a nice-to-have.

Why opt for a subscription service to meet that need? One reason is value. Welton points to research from the Oral Health Foundation suggesting Britons spend an average of £16 or so a month on dental products. This total may have been boosted somewhat by the vogue for cosmetic dentistry, but still suggests the company’s price, the equivalent of £7.99 a month, makes economic sense for many households.

Then there’s the sustainability issue, on which Floe Oral Care wants to major. Discarded toothbrushes, dental floss and packaging exert a considerable environmental toll and are very difficult to recycle in traditional centres. Toothbrushes in particular consist of several different materials that recycling centres find impossible to separate, though most people don’t realise this when they throw their brushes in the recycling.

Above all, there is the question of people’s oral health. Research suggests Britons don’t look after their teeth. More than half fail to replace their toothbrushes every three months, as dentists recommend. Too many people don’t brush their teeth properly or often enough – and large numbers never floss. A service that supplies the right products on a regular basis may just be able to nudge people towards taking greater care of their dental health, Welton argues.

“We’re all about doing the basics properly,” he says. “There’s no point in spending hundreds of pounds on expensive dental products if you don’t brush your teeth twice a day, replace your brush regularly and floss.”

The company is also convinced that the Covid-19 pandemic is making a bad situation worse. Fewer people have been keeping up with dental appointments, while lockdown has brought changes in routine, encouraged poor eating habits and additional alcohol consumption. The result could be an oral health crisis.

Can they persuade people to do better? Well, the pandemic has prompted many people to think more carefully about their health and wellbeing. Better dental health could be an important part of the picture, particularly as the mouth represents a point of entry for infections. Moreover, all that time on video calls has seen many people confronted with regular close-ups of their teeth – often a nasty surprise.

Navarro certainly hopes Floe Oral Care will make a difference. He comes from a family of dentists but spurned the family tradition to go into banking following university. A chance meeting with Welton, whose background is in consumer goods, led to the development and launch of their business. “It was a way of coming home,” Navarro observes.

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