A Brush With Destiny?

Entrepreneur David Giuliani, Who Hit It Big With The Sonicare Toothbrush, Tries For The Same With Skin Care

By Ben Raker

"Launching a business is like launching a rocket,” says David Giuliani, CEO of Pacific Bioscience Laboratories, a Bellevue, Wash., biomedical company. "What really counts is what's in the payload. If you have a really good payload, a product that's really worthwhile, then that can be a strong benefit to everybody concerned. If the payload's a dud, then what was the point? Just a lot of fire and smoke.”

Giuliani, a locally touted innovator and nationally recognized entrepreneur, has definite ideas about which technologies are worth pushing forward. And he has high hopes for his new product, a motorized skin care brush system called Clarisonic for which Pacific Bioscience Labs just began taking limited orders.

Because of the track record of Giuliani's previous ventures–most notably the Optiva company that created the Sonicare toothbrush–others in the investment community view prospects as good for this new device.

"Clarisonic is an innovative product that taps a huge market–skin care,” says Dan Rosen, managing partner at Seattle's Frazier Technology Ventures, a venture capitalist firm. "There is no other device like it in the marketplace today. I look for it to be hugely successful.”

Rosen, who is also chairman of the Alliance of Angels, a Seattle organization that brings entrepreneurs and investors together, sees Giuliani as a leader in the region's technology community. "David Giuliani is a beacon for entrepreneurs in the Puget Sound area. He has great passion for bringing great new ideas to life. He recruits great people, and spends investors' money on the right things, making products that delight customers.”

Pacific Bioscience Labs revealed the Clarisonic Skin Care Brush on Oct. 11, 2004, to a conference of plastic surgeons and dermatologists in Philadelphia. The product is designed to open pores and clean skin through a proprietary sonic-frequency oscillation of its bristles. Though it is still being tested for applications beyond everyday hygiene, the company suggests that Clarisonic might eventually be used for treatment of skin conditions like acne, seborrhea, and psoriasis. It is now available to professionals, but not yet to consumers–the product is too new. As Giuliani notes, the 13-person company is "just ramping up.”

The place Giuliani describes as the world headquarters of Pacific Bioscience Labs is an unassuming, one-floor tan and blue building at the back of a cracked-pavement parking lot in Bellevue, Wash. This building serves as the center for research, development, clinical testing, management, and manufacture of Clarisonic. For now, the product is hand-assembled on a set of tables in a back room.

The most decorated room inside the low-profile headquarters is the clinical room, where testing of the product on patients takes place. This room, with its padded table, red wall hangings, and rice-paper standing lamp, looks part exam room, part Zen meditation room. It stands out from the rest of the no-frills office space, which is decorated here and there with art volunteered by employees. Giuliani's cubicle in a windowless room is no exception to the near-spartan feel; and though his is perhaps larger than some of the other desks, it gives little indication of his rank.

"We're not so big on spending money that's not productive,” he says.

He almost apologetically points out chairs that cost $50 each, but says much of the other furniture was free except for the cost of pickup. For a company developing devices that could be considered luxury items, its very practical office makes it look like it could be run on a shoestring.

Still, appearances can be misleading. This is, after all, a team with proven success. About $2 million has been invested in the company so far–a good portion funded by Giuliani and other past employees of Optiva. Meanwhile, Giuliani's frugal, no-nonsense approach to business is paired with an air of informality, which lends the place the feel of efficiency, good humor, and confidence in its creative abilities.

When I meet with him he is wearing blue jeans and a fleece jacket that looks softened by use. Giuliani is slightly above average height, gray-haired, and mustached. The most noticeable skin creases of this dermatology-device pioneer are the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes. During our discussion, Giuliani leans back in his chair comfortably, considering the answer to each question carefully before speaking. The conference room door stays open to the inner offices while we talk–Giuliani later confirms there are no closed meetings here.

Tilting back in his chair, he explains how Pacific Bioscience Labs acquired its focus.

"We were motivated by skin care because it appeared to be an area that had been neglected by appliance manufacturers,” he says.

Company members, including several other Optiva veterans besides Giuliani, had experience developing devices, and they were curious if they could make any instruments beneficial to the skin.

Financial incentive was there as well: according to a company fact sheet, there is a $25-billion skin care market in the U.S., with few products that live up to their promises. "Most conventional cleansers are strictly abrasive and pull something abrasive across the skin in order to remove material from it,” says Giuliani. "Ours works on a different principle.”

Researchers consulted with dermatologists and discovered that they could take advantage of elastic properties of skin that would be stimulated by oscillatory motion to open pores and keep them clean.

Somewhat surprisingly, Giuliani says that they did not start by looking for an application of sonic cleansing that would be similar to Optiva's toothbrush. "It wasn't like we were looking for the next Sonicare,” he says. "We started with the skin and worked backwards and found that sonic technology seemed like it would be pretty useful.”

To demonstrate the oscillatory motion to customers, Giuliani uses a strobe light so the vibration of the inner brush becomes visible. The outer ring of bristles stays stationary during this time, which sets up the tension designed to gently stretch the skin and open pores. The brushing does feel gentle–like a massage. One can't press too hard; there's a pressure-sensitive shutoff. The handheld device is wireless, waterproof, and comes with a recharging station and two brush attachments for a suggested retail price of $195. The company is developing a cleansing solution to be sold with the kit.

Giuliani acknowledges the risk of Clarisonic being perceived as a mere gadget. "I think that there is a tendency to consider products in skin care as likely to be not very effective because so many of them aren't,” he says. "The best way to assure that people see Clarisonic differently is to make sure it really functions and gives visible benefits.”

Another way, he points out, is to establish science that shows results and familiarize the medical community with its credibility.

Claiming that they can demonstrate results within two weeks in some cases, Giuliani says that their internal studies show the effects are ten times more effective than manual cleansing–and more consistent from one cleansing to the next. He says that many people claim to feel the effects of use within a few days.

Giuliani also cites a more informal gauge of Clarisonic's market potential: what he calls the "retention force.” The company has been lending out trial prototypes to interested clinicians, he says. "The force with which they hold on to it is the retention force, and so far the retention force has been really high; people don't want to give it back.”

Though their products won't be commercially available for some time yet, they have made about 100 prototypes to fill orders from the professional community. Meanwhile, continued tests and tweaking are expected–but these plans for further fine-tuning are somehow not surprising coming from Giuliani, who apparently thrives on innovation and constant reinvention.

The fact that he considers his office a "learning laboratory” as well as a business speaks to the importance he places on innovation in business. And why not? This innovative tendency has already taken him far.

Giuliani recalls building his first motor in the seventh grade, and has long had an interest in technology–a trait he noticed in himself even before high school.

"I had a pretty typical, nerdy approach to life,” he says. "But also I had an entrepreneurial one, which is somewhat separate.”

Giuliani remembers his first entrepreneurial venture was building and selling industrial-strength color music organs in the 1960s. The organs, which lit up colored bulbs when attached to stereos, were popular in homes at the time, and he and a friend recognized the chance to build and distribute larger ones to bars up and along the San Francisco peninsula.

Giuliani studied electrical engineering in college, and graduated summa cum laude from the University of California, Santa Barbara before going on to study graduate-level engineering and business at Stanford.

After school, he worked in the semiconductor industry. He attributes some of his entrepreneurial leanings and a good part of his managerial learning to time spent at Hewlett Packard, where he spent 12 years developing new products.

He moved to Washington state to become director of R&D for Advanced Technology Labs–and gradually became more and more interested in entrepreneurial pursuits and especially in developing niche medical products.

His first company, Precision Medical Technologies, worked on medical ultrasound products. Another company, International Biomedics, met success developing an optic sensor to monitor arterial blood gases in the critically ill.

Then came the toothbrush pioneer Optiva, which was listed by Inc. magazine as the fastest-growing private company in the U.S. in 1997.

That same year, Giuliani was named "Entrepreneur of the Year for the USA” by the Small Business Administration, in the category of manufacturing. This was for his work with Optiva, which had annual sales of $175 million before being sold to Philips Oral Healthcare for an undisclosed amount. Giuliani remembers being happy representing Washington at the banquet of state awardees. The national award took him by surprise. "All of a sudden–spotlights. I heard my name and–spotlights. And I was way in the back and had to walk through all these tables.”

Giuliani has also spoken at the White House at a conference on corporate responsibility held by then president Bill Clinton, an experience he called fascinating. "I think there's a wide range of performances with respect to corporate responsibility,” he says. "Unfortunately, the Enrons, the Tycos, et cetera of the world get a lot of play in the news. There's not nearly as much information about corporations doing good things.”

In 2002, Giuliani, by then well recognized for his innovative business approach, became chairman of the Washington Technology Center (WTC), a state organization that facilitates technology transfer for Washington's industries. He also sat on the WTC board for eight years.

From this experience, Giuliani gained a greater appreciation for technology entrepreneurship in the area. "I think we're uniquely enriched in Washington state to have as many people who are bitten by the bug and succeed in it so well,” he says. He lists Boeing, PACCAR, Starbucks, Microsoft, and companies emerging in the fields of medicine, energy, and communications as evidence of the impact of local entrepreneurs.

To would-be technology entrepreneurs, he suggests effective management technique as one of the most important skills to learn. "If you are interested in developing a career as an entrepreneur, it's very likely the case it's going to involve other people,” he says. To gain understanding of how to manage, he suggests working for a well-managed company, and gaining diversity of experience by working at a variety of branches of a company early in one's career.

"In order to be a successful manager you have to have a clear focus on where you're going as an individual as well as an organization.” He also lists integrity, charisma, judgment, and experience as useful traits for the successful manager.

Giuliani feels that CEOs and company managers have a responsibility to teach, but in the end, also to learn.

His favorite part about being an entrepreneur, he says, is bringing together a team of talented people and helping that team pool its collective expertise in an efficient way.

He expects big things from his new company, and anticipates that it will grow rapidly and eventually develop new technologies beyond Clarisonic. But for now he's busy enough rolling out this handy new gizmo–convinced this "rocket” is not just fire and smoke.

Images:

Top: David Giuliani, CEO of Pacific Bioscience Laboratories, examines a prototype of his Clarisonic Skin Care Brush. Photo: Ben Raker

Middle: The Clarisonic Skin Care Brush, with accessories. Photo: Pacific Bioscience Laboratories

Bottom: The Clarisonic brush in use. Photo: Ben Raker