She Watched Patients Struggle With Flossing for Years. Then She Built the Fix.

Speaker 1: Welcome to She Built It. I'm your host, Melanie Bar. Building a business is one of the hardest and most rewarding things that you can do. It takes vision, resilience, and the willingness to solve a problem most people walk right past. Today's guest did exactly that. She sat inside a dental practice, watched the same gap play out every single day, and decided to build a product that closes it. Not because it was easy, but because she could see what was missing, and she knew how to fix it. Bren Mlennon is the co-founder and CEO of Slate Flosser, an oral wellness brand and the creator of the patented 3in-1 electric flosser heading to national retail. Bin started her first business at 13, studied product design at Brigham Y Young University, and brought her experience to Johnson and Johnson before co-managing a dental practice and founding Slate Flosser. What she built from that experience is a product company at the intersection of consumer health, innovation, and smart growth strategy. Bren speaks widely on the connection between oral health and systemic wellness. She's navigating national retail expansion, building a brand in a category ready for disruption, and doing it as a mother of five based in Spokane, Washington. She's one of the most powerful product founders we have had on She Built It. And I cannot wait to get into how she thinks about growth, innovation, and building something that lasts. Bin, thank you for being here. What is the moment, belief, or frustration that sits at the heart of Slate Waser? The thing that made you certain that your product

Speaker 2: had to exist? Well, actually, I we owned a dental office and we noticed that people were not flossing even though we had wealthy, educated patients, and we're like, wait, if these people can't floss, flossing is broken. So, I'm a product designer by trade and I was like, if we can make this easy and effective so your dentist notices will make a huge difference. And we worked with dentists and hygienists. This was invented by a dentist. I know I like it, but would other people like it? And we sent it to 500 hygienists and they said 74% of them said it was better than any tool on the market at stimulating the gums. And I was like, "Okay, we can do this."

Speaker 1: Interesting. Cuz I know how important oral health is. And it's great that you took this product cuz floss has always been kind of awkward.

Speaker 2: It is so awkward. I knew I needed to floss. I flossed for a lot of my life, but when you have kids and you're trying to wrangle them, sometimes it's just like this isn't on my top 10. But once I found out all of the health benefits, I was like, wait, this takes 30 seconds. I can do this.

Speaker 1: And it's interesting that you say when you have kids or a busy lifestyle, that's when things tend to slip.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's hard to know like what do I need to prioritize? I can exercise or I can look good or do my hair or what are the things that matter to me?

Speaker 1: Tell us more about who you are. what Slate Flosser does and the work you're leading right now as you headed to

Speaker 2: national retail in 2026. My name is Brenn McClennon. I am the co-founder of Slate. We are based out of Spokane, Washington. And our mission is to make flossing so easy that you do it. And we've seen fantastic results. It was so fun. We grew exponentially. The very first year we were in business, we did a million dollars. So, I was like, "Okay, we know people want to want this." And then we have done some studies and we found out that 46% of people still go in store to buy oral health. And so we're like, okay, we need to be where people are. So we made that a goal in 2025 to be in retail. And we were able to launch into Target. And we were just so excited. And originally we were like, we just want to be in a few stores, but we actually are in 870 stores. So wow,

Speaker 1: congratulations. A lot of stores. With

Speaker 2: that comes the anxiety of how do I make sure everyone in the nation knows about our product.

Speaker 1: Yes. I love that you say to make sure people do it because everyone thinks about brushing their teeth. Blossing is always the extra. Okay. So, this is what blew my mind. I found out all these things when I was working at the dental office. It's connected to dementia, heart disease, your gut health, erectile dysfunction, pregnancy gingivitis. Flossing is more important at disrupting that bacteria than your brushing your teeth. Someone told me, "If you brush your teeth, you only do 60% of your mouth. And if you were to shower, would you skip your armpits or other cracks and crevices? Like those are the dirty parts." And I was like, "Oh my gosh, your gums are the armpits of your mouth." So interesting. And we don't always talk about that. What part about building Slate Flosser could you talk about all day? What's the part about growing the business that lights you up?

Speaker 2: Well, it's twofold. I love being an entrepreneur. I started being an entrepreneur as a young child. So, I love the business side of Slate. I love growing it. I find it so interesting to talk about DTOC and Amazon and how to grow your business and what's working, what isn't working. What worked last year doesn't work this year. It's constantly changing. But the other side is education. I'm extremely passionate about oral health. I couldn't unlearn what I learned. And it made me be like, if people knew what the bacteria in their mouth is causing in their body, they would do it. I exercise. I go to the gym. All the people at my gym care about their bodies, but they're forgetting about their mouth. So, how do we get people to realize that oral health is self-care, is longevity, is wellness.

Speaker 1: It has to be so fun for you to build the business and do that that you love and also know you're helping so many people. My neighbor is a heart surgeon and he was like, I am so grateful that you're doing this. You are going to impact so many of my patients. It was crazy. He was telling me there's uh some bacteria in your body and if you have tea cells

Speaker 2: in your heart when you have heart surgery, there's a 70% chance you'll die after. It's insane. I don't want to have tea cells. You're inspiring so many to floss right now. Well, hopefully that's the goal.

Speaker 1: How are you using AI in your business today? And where do you see the biggest opportunity AI can support a product company like Slate Flosser as you scale?

Speaker 2: Yes. So, this is really interesting because I'm a creative part as a product designer. So, and we don't actually use it at Slate for a lot of creative. It's very good at systems helping you create SOPs or helping you create guidance. So, we use Claude, we use chat. Also, there's ways to use it in ad buying, ways to use it in monitoring things in operations. But personally, I use it a lot to help with my email inbox and with creating framework for ads. But in the end, we always create things with humans still.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Cuz we are still human.

Speaker 2: Yeah. We love that element. Like if you see a flosser, we want there to be a hand or a smile so that you can connect with it. So it can be a positive experience. Most people think of flossing as I'm going to jam my gums. It's going to hurt. I'm going to bleed. What if we made it like something you wanted to do that it would feel good and you'd feel happier and prettier and your smile would look good?

Speaker 1: You are preparing for national retail launch as we talked about before and building visibility across dental practices and digital platforms. How are you thinking about positioning so the right customers find slate flosser at the right moment?

Speaker 2: Actually an AI tool that we use is called outer signals. It um teaches us about our consumer. We have six typical purchasers. A lot of them are focused on wellness and a lot of them are dental professionals. And so knowing that, we use these personas to really help us hone in on how to maximize our ad spend, how to maximize what we're communicating to people. So people who are using our product right now are early adopters. They're the people who maybe were the first to get a Pelaton or the first to do Hydrox. So most of our people are first to market people and we just have to figure out how do we reach them and we have seen really good success with dental professional influencers but people don't really respond to lifestyle influencers at all for us. So we're trying to learn and grow. But something that's been super exciting is is we've seen really great success with national television national magazines. We invested in a PR firm with our launch and we were able to see fantastic we won men's health, women's health, L, the Today Show, we were able to win awards for all of those things and that just helps you get more eyes on your company.

Speaker 1: That's great. And as life gets busier, we want tools to help us do things easier and quicker. With the electric toothbrush, it's like, why wouldn't you want that? And when you look at a flosser, you think, why wouldn't I want something like that to make it easier? Yeah, it's fantastic because a toothbrush is usually at least 10 times more effective than a manual toothbrush. And so when you think of the technique of flossing is way more technique sensitive than an electric toothbrush. With a toothbrush just going around, you're getting those main surfaces. But that's actually what makes our product so special is ours isn't just floss. It's a threein one. And it has bristles and ribs on the back. And so really communicating to our consumer what makes it more effective. Well, it's not that it's just floss, it's that it's a three in one and it's disrupting the bacteria along your gum lines more. So I totally agree with you on who wouldn't want an electric toothbrush. Now you just need an electric flosser.

Speaker 2: And it's great that you made the charger the way you did, too. That makes it easy.

Speaker 1: Actually just came out with a batterypowered one that's the battery lasts almost 6 months so you can go on your trips and never think about

Speaker 2: charging it. What is your biggest growth challenge right now as you move towards national retail and how are you thinking about solving it?

Speaker 1: Everyone is brand awareness and brand loyalty I guess too. So for us when you get bigger you get knockoffs or competitors. Luckily our floss heads are patented and special so we're able to not have that problem. But that is the hardest question of all. We are always trying to figure out what can we do to get national recognition to get people we see certain states that are more health focused tend to adopt our product a lot more easily. But then that means like okay well California, Washington, Florida, New York, those are high populated, high health focused but Target isn't just in those stores. They have also places in smaller cities. We're just really focusing on our consumer and how to communicate to them. You haven't nailed it. We're always working on how to make it better.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I think with as quickly as things are moving, everyone's in that place. Yeah. The cool thing though is is like most people want they know they need to floss, so they are like, "Oh, if this is going to make it easier, I'll try it." But they have to know it exists first. What has changed the most in your leadership across the various stages of your business growth?

Speaker 1: Learning to let go of things is hard. When you start a company and there's only one of you, you realize what your strengths and weaknesses are. So, I offloaded my weaknesses at first. I'm not good at customer service because I'm just like a problem solver. So, if someone was to say, "Hey, this isn't working." I'd be like, "Okay, here's a new label." But I learned I need to be flowery and kind. I read a book called Multipliers and Who Not How. And I loved both of those books. who not how made me realize if I wanted to have exponential growth, I needed to hire the right people that had more experience than I did and could help me grow more rapidly. And then the multiplier book is about as a leader that you need to be able to have everyone on your team feel like their voice matters. And it's something as women we actually typically do a little bit better job of letting people feel like their ideas are important. But I've been trying to figure out how do I make my team know even if they're not involved in this and they have an idea about it. I still want them to give a viewpoint because that would be a viewpoint that the consumer would probably have as well.

Speaker 2: Yes. And as a founder, the best ideas are the collective ideas and I want to surround myself with people and team members that come to me and say, "Hey, have you thought of this?" or "Why aren't we doing this?" Or, "This just started happening within our business and what we do. We should think about doing that." And I know as a founder, we're not all good at everything. And so that is the hardest part as you're starting and growing. What's hard nowadays is to get top talent. Sometimes they don't want to move to where you are. But we have this awesome headquarters in Spokane. And right now we have almost our whole team is in Spokane. We were able to get some awesome people to be here, but that really helps to have like the interaction of humans. But right now, a big challenge is how do you get your non- inperson people cuz you want to have great talent still be as involved and brainstorm together.

Speaker 1: That is hard. It is hard when you're spread across the country or even the world. What's one honest lesson about leading people or building a product that you wish more founders talked about

Speaker 2: openly? Well, I wish more founders talked openly about failing because we all are failing at something. And it's the people who failed, learned, and then kept going that luckily, I'm part of a female founders group, and I'm pretty good at sharing my failures and not being worried about being exposed. But when other people do, I usually learn a lot from it. I wish founders shared like, "I tried this and it didn't work at all." But it's also interesting to see how quickly we have to adopt change. Even with meta ads, there's a whole new formula to do it now. Before you used to be able to try different hooks on the same picture and now you can't do that. And influencers are completely changing. I just think being more honest about our failures would help people more.

Speaker 1: You're right. You're right. Because a customer too wants to go on a journey with you. And a customer might end up investing more in your product when they know the complete story behind it instead of just seeing, oh, we have this successful business to know everything it took to get to where you are today. People are way more invested. But it's

Speaker 2: hard because when you sometimes share those things, people can take it advantage of you. I used to share my numbers all the time. And then I realized there's a reason people don't share their numbers. But it's hard cuz my natural instinct is to share. But now now I only share with trusted

Speaker 1: individuals. Yes. And and your reach shows the success.

Speaker 2: Yes. Yes.

Speaker 1: How do you make sure to protect and cultivate your joy within work and your life?

Speaker 2: Who you surround yourself with at work can really dictate this too? I have an amazing team where I come to work, I'm excited to hang out with them. So I realize I'm fortunate that way. When you first start a company, everything feels it's important. Everything feels like it's on fire. But as I've grown, I've realized I need to take the night off to spend with my children. The hard part is at the beginning you're being scrappy and gritty and you really have to sacrifice a lot. But I'm like, did I need to do that back then? Maybe that's why I'm successful. I don't know. But now I put in boundaries of I don't work on Saturdays really at all. Now if there's a super pressing thing or we're having a big sale, I'll work on Saturdays. But I never work on Sundays. And I make a point of if my kids need to be somewhere and I need to be with them, they know that I am. And I honor that for all of our team is 90% women. So they know that I know that their family comes before work.

Speaker 1: Yeah, that's so good because we can do it all. And I try to put my phone away, too. And my mom growing up was a kindergarten teacher and I watched her. She would take one day on the weekend and not do anything and then the next day she'd prep all of her plans for the week. But I learned that from her and we really do need that downtime.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: And then we come back so much more refreshed even though sometimes we don't feel like we can take

Speaker 2: it's interesting. I live for exercising every morning. It helps me start my day off so well. But when I had little kids that wouldn't have been an option. I'm a 40-year-old with five kids. My my youngest is seven. My life is way different now than it was 7 years ago. And so founder women need to give themselves more grace when they have little kids. So, if you're a founder, when you have kids, you can't compare yourself to someone who doesn't have kids or someone who's older. It just things are going to be different. But I also could work wait into the night when I had kids and now if I stay up past 10, I'm dying.

Speaker 1: Such good advice because it is hard in those early years. And it does change as they get older. Goes from being more physical to the mental load. Definitely. Thank you so much for joining us today and for all that you are doing to create products to protect our health. Please share with us how and where we can find Slate Flosser.

Speaker 2: slateflosser.com. Also, Amazon.com, Target, and Target.com. If you ever want to follow me, I try to give people tips on being a female founder on my Instagram, which is Breed McClennon.