About Oral Essentials
Oral Essentials is the creation of Kourosh Maddahi, a cosmetic dentist with 34 years of experience out of Beverly Hills, California. He was noticing that after putting veneers in his patients, the aftercare products he was recommending, namely mouthwash, were having terrible effects on their oral health.
This led him to develop his own mouthwash, with all natural ingredients which help protect the good bacteria in the mouth, while eliminating toxins. Kourosh’s formula had fantastic results, leading him to expand his product line and build Oral Essentials as it is now.
Today, Oral Essentials is run by him and his son, Justin, who leads the online sales and marketing effort at the company. They have 14 staff total across all departments.
Inventory was limiting growth
Justin identified quite early that the growth trajectory that they were on was fairly capital intensive, for inventory purposes.
“We 5x our online revenue with new ad campaigns and creatives and that created quite the cash crunch. We aim to always have 3 months inventory on hand, which can be hard at that pace, so that’s why we decided to take on growth capital. Having that side of the business taken care of, we can go back to growing it.”
Justin and Kourosh had used other methods of growth funding in the past, but mentioned those were a lot more conservative in the amount of cash they would qualify Oral Essentials for, which didn’t work for the business.
“On top of that, they didn’t spend nearly as much time understanding the business. Jack, the CFO at Wayflyer, spent a long time with my dad going over the numbers and really seeing the balance sheet and the quality of the business, so with Wayflyer we definitely have much more of a partnership” Justin admitted. “They also didn’t want us to spend any money on inventory”.
We are focused on growing our marketing, doing better cost analysis in the business. Another thing I can now spend a lot of time on is improving our shipping, which is huge for our customers.
Back to growth
With the inventory crunch out of the way, Justin and Kourosh can go back to spending time in the areas of the business that matter most to their customers.