This could be you. Forever. (PHOTO: Melody Broyles/Flickr)
Thanks to Hello Products, you’ll soon be able to brush your teeth 500 times per day!
Representatives from the New Jersey-based company will be in Manhattan on Friday, giving away 100,000 tubes of flavored toothpaste to passersby, according to The Wall Street Journal. The variations will include mojito mint, pink grapefruit mint and sweet cinnamint, but you can mix them together to create your own fun puns on the word “mint.” Hello Products, whose slogan is “let’s be friends,” just wants you to smile, be happy and like, feel the love man.
The sudden generosity is the result of an ongoing legal battle with Proctor & Gamble Co., which owns America’s favorite toothpaste, Crest. P&G was unhappy with Hello’s product labeling, which said that the toothpaste was “99% natural,” when the product contains chemically processed materials like sodium lauryl sulfate and sorbitol. Even though P&G is a $200 billion company and Hello’s entire staff consists of six people, P&G decided to file a lawsuit and in January the two sides agreed to an injunction which requires Hello Products to stop selling products with the label by March 25.
The deal left Hello Products with a whole lot of toothpaste and very little time to get rid of it. So they decided to make it rain oral hygiene products in densely populated places, including South by Southwest and Sundance Film Festival. Now, the minty fresh mayhem is coming to various sidewalks in Manhattan.
Hello Products is taking the whole debacle in stride (pun intended). “Thanks P&G,” Craig Dubitsky, Hello’s founder, told The Wall Street Journal. “They’re accelerating and amplifying our marketing efforts.”
Toothpaste makes up about $2.3 billion of the $7 billion US oral care market, so perhaps it’s understandable that everyone’s emotions are running high. But Dubitsky and Co. really just want to spread the good vibes.
Which is why the new toothpaste tubes will say “naturally friendly.”
