Today we’d like to introduce you to John Fischer.
John, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I am often asked, “what made you think of this?” So, here’s the story. In January of 2000, I was alone with my 2-year-old son, a new lawyer that didn’t know what he was doing, wasn’t making much money, and owed the world in student loans. My son’s mother had moved on and would never be back. Worst of all was that my son was speech delayed and no doctor knew why, but he needed help. It was a very difficult time. Everyone has challenging times, and this was one of mine.
In December of that year, I took my son to North Park Mall to see the Christmas train display. He loved the sounds and action of the little trains running around the tiny lighted cities. Staring at the ground and worrying about my circumstance, I spotted a scenery item that had fallen from the display. It was a tiny little man with his hand on his even smaller son’s shoulder. After looking at it for a few seconds, I picked it up and put it in my pocket. When I got home, I placed it on my desk in front of my keyboard. Somehow, occasionally looking at that little man and his son helped me focus more on my tasks and worry less about what I thought my problems were. It was like a tiny life compass. There’s less need to worry about the journey if you know you’re on the right road.
On a Saturday morning several years later, I was sitting with my feet up on my desk, relaxing. By then, my son was just fine, doing well in school and playing sports. I had an excellent job, knew exactly what I was doing, and my bills were all paid. Life was immeasurably better. I was holding a plastic box with my son’s baby teeth in it and was wondering what I would ever do with them. At the same time, I looked over at the little man and his son, still on my desk, and that’s when it I began to wonder if I could make something from the baby teeth that could provide me with the same simple reminder of my duty, devotion, and love for my son.
I decided to try to make a cube-shaped “tooth-stone” to replace the polished rock in my favorite pendant. I broke two of the baby teeth into pieces, created a mold from a large eraser, and borrowed chemicals and a UV light from my girlfriend who was, most fortuitously, a dentist. Working from underneath a glass table top, I cast the ugliest piece of jewelry I would ever make. The first people to see my pendant’s new “tooth-stone” raved over it anyway, but it was my attachment to it that convinced me to immediately file a patent application. What made it special was what it was, and that it wasn’t immediately recognizable as a baby tooth. Only I knew what it was. It looked like a little square pearl. I’m wearing it right now. My son is a young man away in the army now and I can’t always see him or even call him, but I get to keep him right next to my heart.
One thing you might not know about attorneys; regardless of our success, after a while, most of us wish we were doing something else. I decided to make a run at a small business based on the little pendant that I loved so much. I would pay for my naivety in thinking this would be a part-time thing. The truth was that I now had two full-time jobs.
I had recently handled a difficult patent infringement lawsuit in the jewelry industry and scored a terrific settlement for my client, who had become a friend through the ordeal. In gratitude for my work, he agreed to have his factory supply me with jewelry for my new venture. Entrepreneurship is a gauntlet of a thousand obstacles. One down, 999 to go.
I wanted to make each “tooth-stone” from a single tooth, to preserve the enamel and to display the same bright white surface the parent saw when their child smiled in those wonderful early years of life. A few years of R&D followed. It’s a surprisingly complex task, given the fragility of the teeth, their small size, individuality, irregular topography, and a thin layer of enamel. I convinced a good friend and co-worker from my former life as an engineer to help me with the project. No man has been more fortunate than me to have a friend like this.
He corrals the mad scientist in me, gently shoves the immobile perfectionist in me, provides practical solutions, and most importantly, keeps me calm.
Despite a marketing effort that included nothing more than a non-promoted website, we managed to sell a few articles. One of our favorite customers insisted that we display our products at a “craft show.” Neither of us had ever been to a craft show, but we agreed to do it, only if she would help. She wholeheartedly agreed and one folding table later we were attending our first craft show ever – as a vendor. You’ve got to do it to learn it. We have been to GrapeFest in Grapevine, Texas twice now, and we love it. The response people have when they see our product inspires us more than anything else. We learned that people who see the product, love it. We also learned that the emotional draw of customers to our product is proportional to how involved they were as parents, or how much they struggled. Rich women with nannies changing their baby’s diapers don’t take much interest in our products. They generally want more diamonds.
In the larger view, people begin decorating themselves with polished rocks and metal in about middle school, primarily to attract the opposite sex, and to achieve status among their peers. That’s appropriate then, but by the time you are a fully-grown man, or woman, that should not be enough. Adulthood brings the confidence and independence that allows wearing jewelry that has a greater meaning, such as gifts from loved ones, and expressions of faith and devotion. We believe this is the reason parents of young adults and new grandparents are among our best customers.
Has it been a smooth road?
When you tell people that you have started a new business, you get all kinds of reactions, depending on their life experiences.
Inexperienced people visualize a rocket launch. A more appropriate visual for us would be the maiden flight of the Spruce Goose.
Early on, I decided to go to the Basal Switzerland Jewelry show to learn more about the industry. On one of the amazing Swiss trains headed for Bazal, I was fortunate to visit with the President of a Swiss jewelry company. I told him about our product line and he said, in a beautiful Swiss accent “the problem is that you have created an entirely new category of jewelry.” I thought his English was slightly off and that he was paying me a compliment. His English was perfect. So was his insight. He was warning me that having a completely new product was a problem. It wasn’t that we didn’t know what we were doing, the problem was that no one else knew what we were doing.
Our product didn’t exist anywhere on the planet. We were telling people they should buy something they never heard of, rather than what they were shopping for. Most people will stop you right there.
“I’ve never heard of this” is the single phrase we hear most often. That’s good, right? Not really. Consumers need to have confidence to make a purchase decision. That begins with product awareness. They are unaware of our product category, let alone our brand and our products. Multiple exposures to a brand in a known category are normally required to provide the awareness, acceptance, and approval needed to make a purchase. We see this at craft shows, where people will often visit our booth more than once before buying the product.
There have been other problems, like when the really cute little brunette girl with the same-dressed little sister pulled hard on her mom’s hand and said “But Mom, the Tooth Fairy has all my teeth!” Showstopper! The mom started backing her kids away from the booth like we were lepers. – “Wait! No one knows exactly what the Tooth Fairy does with them, but we do know that she doesn’t need them for very long.
In most cases, if you write her a nice note and put this little bottle under your pillow, the Tooth Fairy will bring them back. Then you can make a great gift for your mom for Mother’s Day!” They all smiled and started walking back to the booth. That’s the story we’re sticking with. Our craft show booth was R-rated until we came up with that one.
The Home Shopping Network has considered having us on, but they can’t wrap their heads around the idea that we don’t show up with the baby teeth from 3rd world country children already machined and mounted and ready to sell, like the super mops and magic wrinkle remover they sell all day. We sell an envelope with a safe shipping bottle in it, and a return envelope. The buyer puts their child’s baby teeth in the bottle, the bottle in the envelope, and drops it in the mail. We get it, process it, and send back the final product in 2 weeks or less. Apparently, that’s crazy far outside the standard way of doing things at HSN.
There were other problems. A verbal description of our product has no chance of providing a visual image. People image what they know – which is a shark’s tooth on the end of a string. There is no point in even describing our product if you don’t have a picture or finished product to show them. Again, the concept is novel.
But we also have our advantages. My Swiss friend on the train said something else I remember. He said, “The most important thing in jewelry is for the customer to have an emotional attachment to the product.” On that “most important thing” we beat them all. Every wedding band has a 50% chance of ending up in a pawn shop. Nobody sells our product for the price of the metal. When our products are created, they enter the family estate forever, to be passed down for generations.
The reviews and thanks from our customers have been overwhelming. They cry, they hug us, email us thank you notes, and openly express their happiness with the product. This, more than anything else, is the fuel that runs our engine. It makes what we are doing so much fun, and besides, no product can get that much love and not have a future.
And there is this number: 92 million. That’s how many times a child loses a baby tooth each year in the United States alone. That number is small compared to the 1 billion baby teeth we estimate to be already stored in this country. We have started to have a few sales overseas too.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Tooth Fairy Designs story. Tell us more about the business.
We have created a new category of products, of scientifically preserved, and shaped baby teeth mounted in precious metal jewelry and keepsakes items. We have no direct competitor. Our intellectual property rights are extensive and aggressively enforced.
While we have created a unique jewelry product, we are primarily a technology company. The design and manufacturing challenges associated with our product are immense, and are the subject of at least 16 domestic and international patents and applications, as well as domestic and international trademarks, copyrights, domain properties, and trade secrets that are carefully protected. We are extremely proud of the quality of our manufacturing process. Tooth Fairy Designs has invested, and continues to invest, in high precision capital equipment that permits the expedient manufacture of our product with the tolerances required to meet our high-quality standards. Every baby tooth is unique, just as every child is. We transform every baby tooth into the most beautiful product that it can possibly be.
Processing the baby teeth is very labor intensive, taking up to 3 hours to prepare, preserve, machine, and mount a single baby tooth.
Articles with two baby teeth take twice as long to make. All processing is performed in Irving, Texas.
We hope to make Tooth Fairy Fundraisers the class ring of elementary schools. The difference is that the parent buyer gets to keep the prize.
We believe that in the future, it will be sine qua non to create an heirloom from a baby tooth of each family member. Why bronze random tennis shoes from Walmart when you can do this? Besides, if you saved some baby teeth, what else are you going to do with them? If you’re not going to let us make a beautiful heirloom for you, you might as well throw them away right now.
In addition to fundraising, we are broadening our online store in 2018 to carry all Tooth Fairy related products. We are considering a presence in the pediatric dentist market. We further plan to provide Craft Show Kits for new entrepreneurs that enjoy craft show participation across the country. Finally, we are looking to add the right marketing staff in 2018 to create and manage a professional presence in the big virtual stores, like Pinterest.
Pricing:
- Single baby tooth articles in Sterling Silver: $179 to $209.
- Double mountings (two children’s baby teeth): $259 – $269
Contact Info:
- Address: 820 S. MacArthur Blvd., STE 105-350
Coppell, Texas 75019 - Website: toothfairydesigns.com
- Phone: 214-444-4575
- Email: cs@toothfairydesigns.com
- Facebook: facebook.com/ToothFairyDesigns
Image Credits:
www.dallasjewelryphotographer.
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