The Hismile guys aren’t selling, so don’t ask.

In just nine years, Nik Mirkovic and Alex Tomic built their smile care brand into a category disruptor on track to earn over a billion in annual revenue by next year. The suitors are knocking, but Mirkovic and Tomic clearly understand their vision.

“The offers are there to inject [capital] straight into Hismile,” Mirkovic says. “But we would [skip] 10 years of learning […], and something’s going to crumble because we’re not ready for that yet, clearly, because we haven’t achieved [it].”

Mirkovic and Tomic don’t want shortcuts, so they’ve remained bootstrapped since they started Hismile at ages 19 and 20.

Hismile’s teeth-whitening kit has become an internet sensation, making the brand a favorite among influencers and celebrities.

But the co-founders aren’t resting on success. They want to make Hismile a category champion and take on businesses with an extra century of experience.

The competition is on.

Coming From the Gold

Nestled in the Eastern point of Australia lies Gold Coast, a suburb of Brisbane home to desirable beaches and surf. The tourist destination is not where you’d expect a billion-dollar oral care startup to emerge.

“Being on the Gold Coast, we do our own thing, run our own race,” Tomic says.

The duo describes the distance from the rest of the world and the epicenter of business in Australia—Melbourne and Sydney—as a physical manifestation of their attitude toward Hismile. Their strategy is to stay isolated.

“We’re not looking at what the other guys are doing, whether you’re big, small, medium, left, or right,” Tomic says.

“We’re doing our own thing, and we’re loving to do it.”

Instead of relaxing on the golden sands of Broadbeach, Mirkovic and Tomic spent their young teens playing soccer together. They met through their moms, who worked at one of Gold Coast’s few recognizable businesses, Sea World.

“We’re probably the only two people born and raised [and] living on the Gold Coast that don’t surf,” Mirkovic says.

Besides sharing a love of soccer over surfing, the two studied brands like Nike, Apple, and Adidas. Tomic remembers diagnosing brands battling with new product launches and marketing campaigns.

“That intuition is the thing that [created] the hunger for business. It was something natural. It’s not necessarily from any one place but just the interest and the intrigue in the world of business and always keeping my eyes open,” Tomic says. “And that’s where me and [Mirkovic] joined forces.”

The pair observed there wasn’t a middle-ground option for teeth whitening besides going to a dental office or doing it at home.

Pricey and scheduled dental visits weren’t an easy option for their generation, leaving the sticky over-the-counter whitening strips as the fallback for brighter smiles. The problem was the mass-market at-home strips contained peroxide, which causes soreness and sensitivity.

“We just knew we could do something better. It wasn’t solved. No one had this great product that everyone wanted to get behind,”

Tomic says. “We found the oral care business and teeth whitening to be the one to really target and solve the problem there and make something great out of it.”

Mirkovic says their naivete allowed them to jump in headfirst without fear of how chemists and pharmacists reacted when they called them in the early days. Their research found a formulation similar to professional whitenings that they could ship directly to a customer.

All Smiles

In 2014, a year after the idea’s inception, Hismile launched its teeth-whitening kit. The kit consisted of a liquid whitening formula placed in a mouthguard activated by LEDs.

Within the first few days, Hismile generated five sales. But Mirkovic and Tomic forgot to connect their payment gateway on the website, so their first sales were not actual sales.

“Honestly, there are about a million stories like that where we took learnings, [but] we paid the price at the time,” Mirkovic says.

“Looking back, we wouldn’t change a single thing. I think the fact that we took those learnings on ourselves and we felt those pain points is why the business we believe in is [in] the place it is today.”

Even with a less-than-profitable first week, the Hismile cleaning kit began to gain traction because of the co-founders’ willingness to give away free products to influencers.

“The only reason people think of Hismile as this influencer brand is because that’s how we started,” Mirkovic says.

“We didn’t have the budget to market this product, but we thought this product was so unique and so different in how it worked.”

The brand’s teeth-whitening kit captured the internet’s gaze with its whitening tool that looked like a bulky, opaque sports mouthguard. Testimonial after testimonial on social media catapulted Hismile as a trendsetter in a dated industry.

Soon celebrities, including Conor McGregor and Kim Kardashian, and everyday influencers were sliding the mouthguard into their jaws and showcasing the before and after results.

“It looked cool enough, looked unique enough, and it delivered results in a different way,” Mirkovic says. “And at that time, people weren’t being paid to post or paid to promote, so people were just sharing it. They felt a value in that product and the value in the brand that we’re trying to create.”

Hismile was doing things differently. The cleaning kit captured a demand, encouraging customers to evangelize the outcomes.

By 2019, Hismile was an ecommerce darling. Mirkovic and Tomic were leading a team of 20 employees, and their whitening kit was on the feeds of influencer marketers worldwide. Then one day, the co-founders met in their office after another profitable week.

They both had a gut feeling that something needed to change.

A Tactical Adjustment

Mirkovic and Tomic look like brothers.

Typically side-by-side in plain white tees, the co-founders share blue eyes, square jaws, dark eyebrows, brown hair, and radiant smiles.

But their youthful glow doesn’t reflect their seasoned speech. A decade leading one of the fastest-growing ecommerce brands on the globe builds battle scars.

“That’s what makes business so special—there are these tough times when you have to become even more clear and even more precise with the actions and the moves you make,” Tomic says.

Three years ago, Hismile shifted from a one-product wonder solving the problem of at-home teeth whitening to an oral care innovator.

Because of Hismile’s dramatic rise, the at-home teeth-whitening market was getting crowded.

“We’d make a move. Someone would copy it. We’d make a move, and something else would happen,” Mirkovic says. “We’ve never waited for a catalyst. We’ve always been that catalyst for change.”

“We’ve never waited for a catalyst. We’ve always been that catalyst for change.”

Instead of trying to outrun the copycats on product iterations or marketing, they invested in bringing research and development in-house.

“We had to completely break ourselves,” Tomic says.

First, they accepted they’d take a loss for more than a year. Second, they needed to develop a new state-of-the-art R&D team, something they had little experience with.

They interviewed the best and brightest oral care researchers across the globe, including people with experience at product conglomerates like Unilever and Colgate. But no candidates fit the Hismile way.

“We never wanted to run a business the way other people would run a business because we’re two very unique, different individuals, and Hismile is a very unique, different business,” Mirkovic says.

Tomic says they were looking for someone with the required scientific knowledge but without a corporation’s institutional weight. They hired the head of science at Gold Coast University because they wanted someone willing to reimagine oral care.

“Character over everything. Everything,” Mirkovic says. “Because every time myself and [Tomic] didn’t know a thing about R&D, didn’t know a thing about business, didn’t know a thing about anything, it came down to what we believe is character and competencies and then just being willing to pick up things and […] work with other people to make things happen.”\

“Character over everything. Everything.”

The willingness to pursue an idea comes from the top down and bottom up at Hismile. Since Hismile shifted its strategy, the business has elevated leaders from all sectors.

• The head of product and procurement came through customer service.
• The head of supply chain played soccer with Mirkovic and started at Hismile in the warehouse.
• The general manager was working casually for Hismile as a copywriting consultant.
• The head of marketing used to be in sales at a software company.

“If you were to look at them when they started at Hismile and when they came in, I don’t think any other company would’ve given them the chance [to grow],” Mirkovic says.

With the Hismile Research Center established, the business cut its product development down from years to months. Through the in-house R&D, they’ve developed new products like a color corrector serum, peroxide-free whitening strips, and toothpaste with a Hismile spin, offering flavors including Mango Sorbet, Peach Iced Tea, Coconut Whip, and Red Velvet.

Even though influencer marketing made Hismile a hit, it’s now less than five percent of their marketing. Instead, they expanded to working with retailers and created a professional dental network that sells Hismile products at their offices.

“It was the best year and a half for us that we could have ever gone through because it’s taught us about so many things in this short little window,” Tomic says. “That key moment is what has transformed the business. […] The toughest part is what makes it shine and makes it what it is.”

Mirkovic advises founders to make it as difficult as possible for another brand to copy what they do, and that doesn’t mean just using legal protection.

“What you do is so much more than what you’re putting out,” Mirkovic. “It’s what’s in those four walls in the office. It’s the people that are there. It’s how you operate, it’s how you move, it’s your strategy and where you want to be in the future. No one can copy that.”

In the past three years, Hismile transformed into a brand that couldn’t be copied. Now, they’re entering the major leagues of the oral care industry. And the competition is ruthless.

The Big Leagues

Mirkovic and Tomic cut their teeth on the soccer pitch, forming the drive they still share as leaders of a brand with 3 million customers worldwide. They idolize the next challenge, not the dollars or achievements.

“If you look at the top level of performance in sport, you have to be on another level. You have to transform yourself,” Tomic says. “If you compare a striker 10 years ago to what a striker is today, it’s two completely different things. You have to transform yourself and become something even better.”

Tomic says their philosophy is the same in business, and it’s why their early brush with fame didn’t affect the co-founders’ consistent drive to achieve.

“We need to accept that over 10 years, there’ll be someone that creates something special in our category,” Tomic says. “How do we obsess so much that we are the ones constantly transitioning [the industry] and everyone’s looking at us [for] what the next move is in the category?”

Hismile is now facing off against brands like Colgate, Crest, and Arm & Hammer—staples in people’s bathrooms for decades. But Mirkovic says they remain obsessed with the oral care industry.

“The challenge of taking on the biggest brands in oral care that have been there for hundreds of years and dominated every single bathroom. […] I can’t possibly see where that stops and what the limit is,” Mirkovic says. “There’s always another level. There’s always somewhere else we can take it.”

“There’s always another level. There’s always somewhere else we can take it.”

Unlike the beauty or skincare industries, Mirkovic and Tomic say the power of the oral care category is that almost everyone brushes their teeth, making the customer base limitless.

“A lot of people go, ‘What’s there to be passionate about teeth? It’s boring. It’s a boring category,’” Mirkovic says. “Being competitive people who have always played sport our whole lives, there’s no bigger stage than that to compete on and to wake up every single day to that massive, never-ending challenge.”

The co-founders realize that not every-stage founder has the same spirit or opportunity as them. That’s why they encourage founders not to get weighed down by what’s already out there and to pursue what makes them unique.

“Don’t get crumbled by there being too many competitors in whatever you want to do,” Tomic says. “First and foremost, find something that you absolutely love, as in a category, an industry, or something, that you could really get behind and support because you figured out a way that you can do it better than what is already being done.”

“Don’t get crumbled by there being too many competitors in whatever you want to do.”

In the corner of Australia’s beach haven, two friends took their competitive spirit and built their first-ever business into an oral care brand that is doing it better than before. Then and now, they want to be in control of their own destiny.

“The strategy you have today is ready for what you are there to do today,” Mirkovic says. “If we were in Silicon Valley, we would’ve taken funding straight away. And I don’t know if Hismile would’ve been the Hismile it is today.”

The Hismile guys aren’t selling. They’re building something better.