Last Updated on April 9, 2026 by Jason Andrew
12 years ago, two ~20-year-old Aussie guys decided that they were going to have a crack at starting a business.
With $20k in savings, fresh after dropping out of university and leaving hopes of professional soccer behind, Nik Mirkovic and Alex Tomic realised there was a gap in the oral care market.
Many of their friends were whitening their teeth, only to find that at-home teeth whitening kits left their teeth extremely painful and sensitive. Seeking out better alternatives, they scoured the globe, chatting to Professors from Canada, the US, Europe, and Asia in search of a superior whitening product absent of peroxide, the ingredient known for causing the stinging sensation.
Pictured: Nik and Alex pitching HiSmile to Professors
They settled on a whitening agent called PAP+, and with a stroke of genius, landed on the name HiSmile. Some nice packaging and a simple WordPress website later, and they were off to the races.
Today, HiSmile generates north of $150m in revenue, profitably, and is on a death march to $1bn+ in sales volume. Their product has been featured by influencers like Kim Kardashian and Conor McGregor, and has 1.8M Instagram followers.
So how did two young guys from the Gold Coast build an oral empire?
And is it just a marketing gimmick? Or does the product actually work?
Let’s break it down.
Product Selection
“Not everyone uses a skincare product, not everyone uses a haircare product, but every single person I know brushes their teeth” – Nik Mirkovic, Co-Founder of HiSmile
Although they didn’t realise it, Nik and Alex were ticking a lot of the right boxes when entering the oral care ecommerce market.
Teeth whitening products are:
- High gross margin (60%+)
- Repeat purchase
- Small and cheap to ship online
- Consumer product perfect for the Instagram algorithm
- High enough AOV to get margins to work (bundles start at ~$65)
If you look at every successful ecommerce category like supplements, pet products, beauty products, and activewear, they also tick most of these boxes.
Financials
But what do the numbers say? Financially, HiSmile is doing relatively well.
I know what you’re thinking, 50%+ revenue drop last year, what happened?
It’s actually not the worst thing in the world.
The business shifted from a strategy of pursuing growth at all costs towards a more sustainable growth strategy, dropping ad spend to improve unit economics. When DTC brands stop spending on Facebook ads, their revenue drops massively.
Looking at the revenue by segment tells us the whole story here.
Product Efficacy
As is the case with many health and wellness products, like the supplement category, efficacy is questionable in the case of HiSmile. So does the product actually work? Or is it just a marketing gimmick?
HiSmile products contain PAP+, which is an oxidant designed to achieve teeth whitening without the sensitivity problem of traditional hydrogen peroxide products.
Well, it does something to your teeth. But the extent of the whitening is debatable.
There is some clinical data backing up the efficacy of the product, so it’s not a total sham, the issue is with what the marketing team was claiming.
HiSmile has run into trouble with a class action lawsuit in California, with consumers citing that the product does not live up to its claims of “instant” teeth whitening, and “immediate brightening”.
The product claims to improve teeth whitening by 3.5 shades in a single session based on a study conducted on 24 people aged 19–55 using the product.
“A change of 3.5 shades is not especially impressive, given that some toothpastes with improved polishing particles achieve 2 or more shades improvement or more just by removing some external stain or by repelling stains.” (Choice.com.au)
As a comparison, professional teeth whitening, by contrast, can help teeth become 6–8 shades whiter or more. Trustpilot tells a similar story, with an average rating of 2.5 stars from over 21,000 reviews, and many customers unsatisfied with their results.
Growth Engine: Influencers
Every successful business needs at least one core growth engine in order to be successful. For Facebook, it was the social graph. For Oracle, it was an army of B2B sales reps. And for HiSmile, it was influencers.
In many ways, HiSmile was the OG ‘influencer marketing’ company. When Alex and Nik started the company, the idea of an ‘influencer’ was nascent, so they were able to send their product to people with followings, and ask them to review the product without paying. Over time, they were able to move up the chain, working with people like Kim Kardashian and Conor McGregor. They were able to compound this social proof into building a respected brand, with 1.8M Instagram followers.
But it’s not clear that you could replicate this growth engine of HiSmile today.
Influencer marketing is not without its challenges. Ad rates for influencers have gone up steadily over time, where today, they are now a relatively saturated marketing channel, and brands will pay 5 figures for a single post working with big creators.
Another issue with influencers is that attribution is incredibly hard. Unlike running Facebook or Google ads, it is difficult to assess what ROI you are getting on influencer spend if customers aren’t purchasing the product directly using an influencer’s affiliate code.
Aaron Zagha broke down how Ecommerce CMOs think about deploying ad dollars towards influencers in 2026:
Key Principles of Influencer Marketing
- Measure everything possible with respect to paid content (Views, Comments)
- Provide every creator with a unique affiliate code
- Post purchase: Allow customers to write an individual creator name when asked “How did you hear about our product”
- Customise email, SMS signups for a creator, so they can track new email followers who came from creators
- Portfolio approach: never bet the farm on one influencer or creator (never more than 20% of ad budget on an influencer in any given month)
- Creator performance often is consistent across brands, so if you can find out from influencers how they are converting for other brands, this may help to inform your decisions as to whether or not you should work with them
- Influencer frequency should follow the cadence of the customer journey (if it takes on average 1–2 months to get through your funnel, you should be cycling new content with the influencers on this same basis)
- Credibility is key: persuasiveness can be a much higher driver of category revenue than the relevance of the influencer, so focus on people with stronger brands
SKU Diversification
The other thing that HiSmile has done exceptionally well is diversification across SKUs over time. What started as an online retailer of teeth whitening formulas has expanded into toothpaste, lip balm, toothbrushes and more.
Reframing the business from a teeth whitening brand to ‘owning share of the bathroom cabinet’ will help offer a more predictable, stable revenue stream over time. This is critical in ecommerce because copycats will often mimic your brand’s hero product quickly,
Similar to Yeti’s push from coolers into merchandise and water bottles, for HiSmile, going after the broader oral care market provides the opportunity to scale revenue and build HiSmile into a much more defensible business. The global oral care market is worth ~ US$35bn, $40bn a year, so if they can start to capture more of this value over time they have a shot at building a massive company.
What Next for HiSmile
The HiSmile founders have already gone on the record saying they would never sell the business. It’s great to hear that Nik and Alex are playing the infinite game, but I still think HiSmile could be ripe for partnering with private equity or sale to a strategic player in the consumer market like Colgate-Palmolive. In Australia, there are relatively few businesses with strong growth potential like HiSmile, so I think the business would be very attractive to the right buyer.
From a risk perspective, Alex and Nik have only just started paying themselves dividends (paying out a ~$4m dividend last year), but the enterprise value of HiSmile could be much closer to $300m, $380m (at 11x, 14x EBIT) so it would take them years to get the cash out from the business through dividends that they could otherwise achieve through an acquisition.
Scaling B2B distribution for HiSmile will be the key to unlock growth going forward. Whilst people might pay for teeth whitening products online, the reality is that most people will purchase their daily use toothpaste and toothbrushes in stores, so physical distribution will be a barrier to growth. Although margins may be lower in this segment, this revenue stream should also be much stickier for HiSmile over time.
This is the same journey that Harry’s followed, starting as a DTC brand, but eventually growing a large retail segment, selling products into Target, Walmart and supermarkets.
If you’re building, scaling, or investing in a consumer brand and want to understand what great really looks like:
👉 Book a call with SBO to analyse your margins, growth levers, and long-term value creation.
