Kia ora, I’m Laura 😊
I’m an oral health therapist and the founder of Solid.
I’ve always loved teeth. In fact, I still have my extracted premolars from when I got braces.
Before I started making toothpaste, I worked with both children and adults as a dental therapist and a dental hygienist. I really enjoyed making a difference to people’s oral health outcomes. Then, the waste started to get to me.
Why is the dental industry so plastic-fantastic?
Every dental appointment I would watch horrified as all the single use plastic wrap, instruments, and packaging we’d just used was pushed into the general waste bin.
Each year, more and more reusable or sterilisable items were replaced by single use. All the toothpaste, floss, and mouthwash I would recommend to my patients was plastic-wrapped-in-more-plastic.
I started thinking about what kind of world I wanted to live in.
And, what kind of ancestor did I want to be to my kids? I started reducing waste in my personal life and becoming more conscious of my carbon footprint. I did all the easy stuff first, then looked at my toothpaste tube. What was I going to replace this with?
Becoming a toothpaste formulator.
I love to solve problems and invent things. In fact, I already had a mouthwash formula I’d invented during my time as a hygienist.
How hard could it be to make toothpaste tablets? Kind of difficult, it turned out. Luckily, I do love a challenge. Fast forward a couple of years, and we now have a range of flavours and formats to suit (almost) everyone.
As a hygienist, I learnt that you need to get people excited about looking after their teeth.
It’s not enough just to make sustainable toothpaste. It needs to work, be safe, taste good, and people need to love using it.
All Solid toothpaste, toothpaste tablets, toothpaste powder and mouthwash are made by us in Elsdon, Porirua.
