It's time for a long-term relationship with your toothbrush
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Goby's toothbrush subscriptions are successfully making room for themselves in the world of dental care giants such as Oral and Philips.
You can choose between a car, a personal computer, a mobile phone, a microwave oven, or a toothbrush. Which one would you miss the most? Admittedly, the 2003 research is not the freshest, but the answer is still worth noting: Americans went heavily for the toothbrush. This useful dental hygiene product dates from the 15th century, but had no trouble overtaking other, more or less advanced, items.
Subscribing to the technologically advanced Goby toothbrush will initially set you back 50 dollars, followed by yearly payments of 24 to 72 dollars, depending on how often you want to change brush heads.
The answer would most likely remain the same in 2019, especially since the product, which has not changed much in the last 500 years, recently got some high-tech upgrades. Toothbrushes are no longer just bristled plastic sticks, but advanced electric or even sonic and ultrasonic devices that can rotate up to 192 million times per minute.
The new devices can move in all possible directions while cleaning teeth, reaching into the previously unexplored corners of our mouths. The toothbrushes can also record how much time we spent using it, are controlled by a special mobile application, have an inbuilt Bluetooth module ... and the spare parts, at your command, can be delivered to your door every month.
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Oral and Philips dominate the market of these accessories made to provide beautiful smiles, but in the past two years (for now only in the USA), Goby has been attempting to chip away a share for itself, even though its toothbrushes are not even sold in stores, but exclusively online.
Goby toothbrushes are electric. In that, they are not much different from the rest, and neither is their appearance, even though according to many users the black version is a decent design feat. »If James Bond had a toothbrush, he would have a Goby, and a licence to kill plaque«, wrote one witty commenter.
Goby first entered the market with a product with a lower price tag than those of the industry giants, while offering its customers a subscription that provides pristine quality maintenance.
The objective is clear: the teeth must be clean, keeping your mum and the dentist happy. In product development, company founders Claire Burke and Ben Goldberg also paid special attention to its affordability and to perfecting the subscription model.
The Goby brush costs 65 dollars, which is significantly less than, for example, the 250 dollars you would pay for the Oral-B Genius Pro 8000, which is a spaceship of a toothbrush in this dental hygiene category. Goby offered a simplified version, which came with an extra replacement brush head.
Photo: Goby
If you opt for the subscription, it will only cost 50 dollars. Following the principles of life per month, payments of 6 dollars will bring you an additional replacement head every three months, every two months or even each month, depending on how often you want to replace them. In the first year, you will therefore spend between 74 and 122 dollars for your tooth brushing needs, but in the years after that you will only need to replace the brush heads.
It is true that toothpaste also costs money, and so does the electricity used, but the Goby brush doesn’t have to be charged each time you want to use it. Even if you brush your teeth several times a day, it should last you half a month.
The Ancient Filling
Even if you decide to take a two-week off-the-grid holiday, with no car and no microwave, you will at least not have to worry about finding a socket in the wild, and will be able to completely focus on picking berries or hunting for your next snack. It really doesn’t matter what you eat; fresh breath and clean teeth are a given, and the tooth worms are long gone.