Craig Dubitsky is a self-described lifelong entrepreneur.

Craig founded Hello Products, a friendly, all-natural personal care brand, and he now works as the Chief Innovation Strategist at Colgate (after Colgate acquired his brand!).

You'd be hard-pressed to find someone more obsessed with packaging and design than Craig, who believes there's no such thing as a boring category — only boring execution. As a testament to this belief, his first product at Hello was toothpaste.

While browsing through the typical chain drugstore one day, Craig was struck by the sudden horror of how doom and gloom toothpaste packaging was. For instance, he noticed that most of them included ingredients banned by the FDA in other products that didn't even go inside your body. (Plus, why do they always show graphics of teeth falling out? Don't we want our teeth to stay in?)

"If it's going in your mouth, it's going in your body," Craig says. This pushed him to create something that was natural and highly effective.

The first thing Craig did was trademark "Hello" in a ton of different product categories to ensure he could truly promote the friendliest brand possible. Then he got to work with a formulator with "more degrees than a thermometer."

Craig's brand journey is the exact opposite of your typical direct-to-consumer brand: he started out in Target, Walmart, CVS, Walgreens and other major retailers because he knew his brand held certain credibility just by being inside those brick and mortars.

Craig is all about humanizing brands and making the world a friendlier place. "I never use the word ‘consumer.’ I don't use the word ‘customer.’ I'll use the word ‘people’ — we're all people, we happen to consume things. I think a lot of companies — a lot of larger brands — spoke to people as if they were just consumers and that, to me, was the opportunity," he says on this episode of The Empowered Challenger.

Featured Challenger👨 Name: Craig Dubitsky

⚙️ How he challenges: As the Chief Innovation Strategist at Colgate, Craig is working to make everyday retail products (like toothpaste) beautiful, friendlier and healthier.

👋 Company: Hello Products

💎 Noteworthy: Since his brand's website first launched, Craig insisted on having a Skype line that went directly to him so he could answer and talk with customers — and yes, it still exists!

🔍 Where to find Craig: Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn

Challenger Wisdom💡 Humanizing your brand and talking to consumers people"It was sort of like we can't have a brand voice — that's for advertising! The product can't do that! … And that to me, some might argue that provides a lot of flexibility — I think it's an antiquated way in a lot of cases of thinking about your brand. I like to think Hello is a brand people join, not one they consume or one they buy on a promotion or deal — it's kind of like it's talking to them."

💡 Overcoming long-standing cues of product effectiveness"There are definitely cues [on a product's effectiveness] that we're used to, and a lot of those cues come from decades of storytelling and advertising that we're exposed to. Like mouthwash — the more it hurts, the more it works, but things don't have to hurt to work. So, anyway, there've been a lot of tropey storytelling messages we've been bludgeoned with but it takes a little time to get people over that. I think a lot of bigger purchases have gotten us used to the idea that something a little more natural doesn't mean it's not going to work."

💡 Don't disrupt a market — change the world"If it's all about ‘we're going to raise a bunch of money and then look to bother someone so that they have to come buy us,’ that's not really building a brand. That's not really building a business; that's like you want to be a pain in someone's backside. That's a business model I guess, but that's not what gets me fired up. Tell me how you're really going to be changing the world, not disrupting someone."

💡 Making personal care personal again"Talking about humanizing the brand, I wanted to make personal care personal again. Ever since we launched — literally day one with the first website we had — there was a Skype button on the website. Now, Skype is going to sound a little antiquated now since we're all Zooming our way into the future but at the time, Skype was pretty cool. There's still a Skype button on the website and it comes directly to me and I always — unless I was on a plane or with a retail partner or family — I pick up. People were always shocked that it was real."

💡 Profitability comes down to how you can make people feel"Getting the profitability, getting people to believe — a lot of that comes from how you make other people feel. That's what marketing is, that's what branding is. How do you elicit an authentic set of emotions — hopefully not just one emotion — with people at scale? And do it in a way that doesn't put their bullshit meter in the red, because I think people can tell. They're smart, and if you can feel something and you get a sense that it's real … That's what it's about."

💡 Making everything just a little more friendly"It was always ‘Hello Products’ — it was never ‘Hello Oral Care, Inc.’ because I had this idea that basically anything and everything could be made a little more friendly. Full stop. And part of being friendly is, to me, a combination of ethics and aesthetics, and how can we bring that to a lot of other categories?"

💡 An entrepreneur is anybody with an idea who makes it real"To me, an entrepreneur is anybody with an idea who makes it real. If you have an idea and you can make it real, why does it matter if it's on your own and you're a disruptor or you're inside of a big company and you're a challenger inside your company? I just make fun of challenger and disruptor a lot, sorry. But if you have an idea and you make it real, in my mind, you're an entrepreneur. If you can take that idea and make it real and make it profitable, then you're a good entrepreneur."

Top quotes from the episodeCraig Dubitsky

Quote #1

"I never use the word ‘consumer.’ I don't use the word ‘customer.’ I'll use the word ‘people’ — we're all people, we happen to consume things. I think a lot of companies, a lot of larger brands spoke to people as if they were just consumers and that, to me, was the opportunity."

Quote #2

"What I have really always loved is design and art and people — I love people. I think people write their narratives through their things and their experiences and, quite frankly, they're not given a lot of really great things. What gets me excited, truly, is to try and make things pretty ... but make them affordable."

Quote #3

"If you have an idea and you make it real, in my mind, you're an entrepreneur. If you can take that idea and make it real and make it profitable, then you're a good entrepreneur."