We Need to Talk about the Bristle Toothbrush Company

Bad Kids, a Ruthless Mom, and the $5,000 Toothbrush

The Bristles had been manufacturing America’s most trusted line of toothbrushes since 1964. According to family lore, when company founder Mike “Moose” Bristle was just 22, a splinter from the handle of his wooden drug store toothbrush sheared off mid-brushing and became lodged in his gum, leading to a 104-degree fever and the realization that, in the world of dental hygiene, there had to be a better way.

The result was the Bristle Classic, the first plastic-handled toothbrush on the market. And every few years since, Moose unveiled an innovation that blew the toothbrush industry away. In 1975 Bristle became the first toothbrush to offer a diamond-shaped brushing plane rather than the standard rectangle. In 1994, he gave the world the first built-in tongue scrubber. In the sixty years since Moose’s initial basic design, the New Jersey-based company had sold over 100 million toothbrushes worldwide.

All that success made Moose and his wife—along with their three children Moose Jr., Maureen, and Mitch—incredibly wealthy. Investment bankers had tried multiple times to convince Moose to go public, but despite all their efforts, he was adamant that Bristle would forever and always be a happy, family-owned business.

But that dream was put to the test the second Moose died from a stroke during 2011’s Great Ergonomic Handle Scandal.¹ With their humble father finally out of the way, his three heirs, now in their 30s, waited breathlessly to learn which of them would be handed the reins of the fourth largest dental device manufacturer in North America.

To their shock, Moose Sr. left the company in the hands of their mother Ophelia. The kids did not take the news well.

“Mom doesn’t know the first thing about shank design!” Mitch yelled to his older sister across the board room table.

“If it were up to her, we’d go back to making our tufts out of horse hair!” Maureen sniped.

“Everyone take a breath,” Moose Jr. said. “Mom doesn’t even floss, so it’s only a matter of time before a below-the-gum-line infection does her in and then we can run this place exactly the way we want.”

What they wanted was an IPO that would land the company on CNBC and multiply their wealth by 100x, allowing them to never have to think about toothbrushes for the rest of their lives.

But that was almost fifteen years ago. And Ophelia was still alive. At 84 years old, she remained gentle and spry, her white curly hair resembling a puffy cloud that had come to rest on top of her head. But to her children there was nothing sweet about her. Every breath she took added one more second of misery to their life. Yes, they were each bringing home eight million dollars a year, but there was only so much a person could buy with eight million dollars.

Moose Jr. had a yacht and spent a few weeks every winter bouncing around the British Virgin Islands. But as he pulled into ports, he couldn’t help but notice bigger yachts with a dozen full time staff instead of his ho-hum five. One of the yachts even had a helicopter on top. A helicopter! That would make it so much easier to avoid all that depressing Puerto Rican poverty between the harbor and the airport.

Maureen had a summer house in the Hamptons but it was a good five-minute walk to the beach, and sometimes on those walks it would be hot and by the time she arrived at the beach she was sweaty and her kids were cranky and she and her two nannies sometimes wondered why they even made the journey in the first place.

Mitch didn’t have a wife or kids but was a sports nut and spent most of his income on tickets to NFL games. As fun as it was to bounce from stadium to stadium, what he really wanted was to own his own team. But every time he crunched the numbers, it was always a few billion dollars out of reach. And the reality of that was making it increasingly hard to even enjoy going to a game. Instead of watching the action on the field, he often found himself looking up to the owner’s box where beautiful young women dangled on the arms of rich ugly men as they all cheered and laughed. He couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed about anything.

When the quarterly reports came in and showed Bristle was losing market share for the first time in two decades, the children could no longer play nice. Every passing day was diminishing the value of the company, and with it their chances of getting a bigger yacht and a shorter walk to the beach and an NFL team.

Mitch called an emergency family meeting. “We’re in a death spiral, Mother, and it’s all your fault.”

Ophelia knew she wasn’t adept at business. The only thing she managed well at her age was her Christmas nutcracker collection. But there was a reason Moose Sr. had put her in charge and not any of his progeny. He knew what Ophelia had come to learn over the last few decades: Moose Jr. and Maureen and Mitch would never be satisfied in life, no matter how rich they were.

She wished she could go back to when they were little. When their every request was met with a “yes.” When their every want was treated as a need. Ophelia didn’t realize the damage she was doing until it was too late. In dental hygiene terms, her children were covered in plaque and regular brushing would never fix the problem. Indeed, if there was any hope of restoring her children, it would require… a deeper cleaning.

Ophelia stared at the oil painting of her late husband on the wall. A Bristle Classic peeked out from the breast pocket of his blazer. She closed her eyes, trying to channel his wisdom in this critical moment. She spoke almost as quickly as the idea reached her frontal cortex.

“Let’s make the most expensive toothbrush ever sold,” she said.

The kids gave her a long blank stare. “What?” Maureen asked, not aware that her mother was capable of a creative thought.

Ophelia continued. “Well, I just remember Moose Jr. saying he paid $700 for a new cooler for his yacht. If someone would pay that much to keep their beer cold, how much more would they pay to keep their teeth clean?”

It was a fair question. Maureen had recently given a college admissions specialist $60,000 to help her moronic son Dylan squeak into Arizona State University. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe… five hundred dollars?”

“Hmm… I was thinking more like five thousand,” Ophelia answered.

Mitch nearly spun right out of his board room chair. “FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS?!”

The children were in agreement that this was incredibly stupid and told their mother so many times over. Once word got out, Bristle would be the laughingstock of the toothbrush industry. Development and production would drain the company’s resources in a matter of months and, when the fancy toothbrush failed, bankrupt them all.

This was exactly Ophelia’s plan.

The next morning she took a hand drawn sketch and sat down with Bristle’s team of toothbrush engineers to rattle off the specifications.

It would be called the Bristle Sapphire Elite. At its core would be a turbo-charged motor creating 20,000 oscillations per minute, double the spins of its closest competitor. In the handle would be built-in sensors to track a user’s heart rate, blood oxygen level, and run a nightly EKG. The brushing plane would feature two separate microscopic water lines. One would hydrate the gums with Fiji branded bottled water. The other would deliver a dollop of teeth whitening gel. The underside of the brush, the forgotten side of a toothbrush, would feature a scrolling LCD screen, projected in reverse, so a user could read their incoming text messages in the mirror while they brush. Lastly, the bristles would be made from a NASA-grade self-rejuvenating polymer that would clean itself between brushings.

“It will be the biggest thing to happen in dental hygiene since the tooth flosser,” she declared.

Hoping to derail the idea, Mitch leaked the news to the blabbermouths at the GFDC (the Greater Florida Dental Conference). As expected, word of a $5,000 toothbrush rocked the industry and created a social media pile on. Months before the Sapphire Elite was even available for purchase, the American Dental Association was forced to render an opinion on the matter and called the price tag “obscene.”

But what no one factored was how the early buzz would work in Bristle’s favor. Soon, online influencers were pre-ordering the Sapphire Elite, hoping to be the first ones to review it. And because Moose Bristle Sr. had instilled such high quality values in his engineers, the world’s first luxury toothbrush completely delivered on all of its ridiculous claims.

“My teeth have never been whiter!” raved an aesthetician on TikTok.

“My kids will never have to go to the dentist again,” said a Momfluencer on Instagram.

A fitness guru filmed her review from her cardiologist’s office. “My toothbrush just diagnosed a heart murmur!”

The Sapphire Elite was a bona fide hit. In its first two months on the market, the company moved 7,000 units, bringing in $35 million in revenue. On Black Friday they dropped the price a thousand bucks and moved 10,000 units in one day. Just like that, investment bankers were calling. To Ophelia’s dismay and her children’s delight, Bristle had become the world’s elite toothbrush brand and everyone on Wall Street wanted a piece.

In preparation for their windfall, Moose Jr. started taking helicopter lessons. Ideally he would be able to hire a full-time pilot, but this would give him the flexibility to fly the chopper himself if he just needed to bop on down to his yacht with his mistress while his wife was at one of her dumb horse jumping tournaments.

Maureen put an offer on a beachfront estate two doors down from Gwyneth Paltrow. The walk from the back door to the water timed out at 41 seconds. This was eleven seconds longer than she hoped but she decided not to be a martyr about the whole thing.

Mitch flew to Germany to get some hair plugs then flew to Italy to get some suits then flew to the Czech Republic to get some girlfriends.

With bankers promising the Bristles were all about to be billionaires, Ophelia knew she couldn’t hold out much longer. She had tried her hardest to fail, and had succeeded nonetheless. After waking up every night for a week with chest pains, the choice was simple: give in or die.

The next morning, she shuffled extra slowly from the parking lot, resigned to the fact her children would always be unsatisfied monsters. As she approached the lobby, Maureen burst through the toothbrush-handled double doors. “We just got a call from the Oscars,” she said with excitement.

Maureen explained how every year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gives out gift bags to the twenty-five Oscar nominees in the major acting and directing categories. Valued at close to $500,000, the bag includes jewelry and gadgets and free vacations and complimentary plastic surgery from the top surgeons in Beverly Hills. Being selected for the annual gift bag puts your product directly into the hands of the most influential people on the planet. “And this year they’re begging for a Bristle,” Maureen squealed.

Ophelia didn’t care about the Oscars or famous people, but hearing this, she realized that she’d been given one final chance to destroy the company and save her family. “Give me three days,” she said.

She returned home and pulled out all of Moose Sr.’s old files. Discarded designs, dumb ideas, book after book about teeth… Seventy-two hours later, Ophelia marched into the board room. Her children and Bristle’s engineers were waiting.

“What do you all think about a solid gold toothbrush?” she asked. Given the success of the Sapphire Elite, they were not about to question their matriarch now.

“It’s genius,” said Mitch.

Ophelia was just getting started. “But it can’t just be a boring gold cylinder. I want it to be in the shape of an Oscar statue.”

“Zendaya will love that,” Maureen interjected, pretending that she knew Zendaya.

“And it needs a bigger motor than the Sapphire. I want to hit 40,000 oscillations per minute.”

The lead engineer gulped. “No one has ever attempted to put that much power in a toothbrush before…” he protested.

Ophelia didn’t back down. She just glared.

“...But we can get there,” he affirmed.

“Of course the brush needs to do more than just spin.”

“It does?”

“I want it to bounce up and down. To get to all the mouth’s nooks and crannies.”

“We can put a small crankshaft in the head,” an engineer volunteered.

“Good. Lastly, I want it to have a Bluetooth speaker and come pre-loaded with every Best Original Song winner from the Oscars since my husband founded the company in 1964.”

“That’s easy,” a designer promised.

“Fantastic,” she said. “Now go make twenty-five of them as fast as you can. And make three extra for the kids.”

The engineers marched off in a line while Ophelia told Moose Jr., Maureen, and Mitch to hang back. She had one special thing to say to them. “Don’t tell anyone, but once this limited edition model hits the red carpet, we’re selling.” Her kids bubbled with excitement. “If I were you, between now and then I would buy out every employee here of their company stock. Offer them 5x what it’s worth right now and it will be the smartest thing you’ve ever done.”

So they did. Overnight everyone at the company became millionaires, even the assistants and the custodial staff. To the future heirs of the Bristle fortune, it was a drop in the bucket for the record-setting payday that was coming their way.

Or so they believed.

On Ophelia’s orders, Moose Jr., Maureen, and Mitch were not to receive their toothbrushes until Oscar night. While their mom tucked herself in for the evening, the siblings gathered at Maureen’s beach house to watch the red carpet and keep a lookout for happy nominees waving their fancy gold Bristles.

Just after 8pm, FedEx rang the doorbell. “They’re here!” Mitch yelled. They paused the show and hustled to the door. Maureen signed for them and they tore into the three custom packages.

The toothbrushes glowed from inside their black leather box. From each of them came music. Mitch’s rang out with Steve Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” Maureen’s played Elton John’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” Moose Jr.’s was playing Barbara Streisand’s “The Way We Were.”

The three were not prone to tears, but one by one they started to cry. “They’re beautiful,” Moose Jr. said. “And heavy,” added Mitch. “Well,” said Maureen. “Should we give them a try?”

Without hesitation, they put the gold statues in their mouths and pushed the button. On contact, 40,000 oscillations per minute paired with 40,000 vertical up and down strikes. One by one their teeth went flying like bowling pins. First the incisors, then the canines, and finally the molars.

The Bristle children screamed, more in shock than in pain, for the ejections were so swift and thorough that the nerves in their gums had no time to react. Like a fire hose in the hands of a child, there was no controlling the device. It went where it wanted to go and there was nothing Moose Jr. or Maureen or Mitch could do but hold on until it ran out of teeth to expel.

In twenty seconds it was all over.

“WHA DA HE JA HAPPPEN?!” was the best Mitch’s traumatized tongue could do under the circumstances.

“I DON NO!” Moose Jr. screamed back.

Maureen was a step ahead of them and looked at the paused TV. “DA OSCAS!!”

Stepping over teeth, Maureen ran to the remote and pushed play. To her horror, she watched Billy Bob Thorton show off his new toothbrush to the cameras and shove it in his mouth like a cigar.

“DON DO IT! DON DO IT!!”

He did it.

Reporters screamed and something small and white hit the camera lens. The broadcast cut to commercial.

Even though Billy Bob was the only person injured beyond the three Bristle children, the red carpet clip had gone viral and not in a good way.

The fallout was swift and thorough. Bristle’s toothbrush sales cratered. Pending orders of the Sapphire Elite were canceled. Walgreens stopped carrying the company’s base models out of “extreme caution.” Within a few days, all of Bristle’s employees had quit. But they did so with seven figures in their bank account and gratefulness that they unloaded their stock when they did.

All that was left behind was Ophelia and Moose Jr. and Maureen and Mitch.

“Tho…” said Moose Jr. with a lisp. He and his siblings were still getting used to the feel of their new teeth. “That wuth weally bad.”

Ophelia nodded and took the blame. Under the circumstances, it only made sense that she step aside. She just hoped that they might find the willpower to carry on.

“But whale do we stawt?” said Mitch.

Ophelia glanced up at Moose’s portrait and smiled. “The same place your father did,” she said. “With nothing.”

The kids nodded. It sounded hard. Maybe even impossible. For the first time in their lives, they were attracted to the challenge.

1. In 2011, the World Health Organization published a paper claiming that regular toothbrush use was causing childhood arthritis, causing Moose to fly back from a golf trip and fast track an oversized “arthritis-safe” toothbrush, only to have the Director-General of WHO realize that the paper in question was fabricated by his nine-year-old son who was simply sick of brushing his teeth.