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January 05, 2016 01:00 AM

Taking a bite out of the mouthguard business

Tom Henderson
Crain's Detroit Business
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    Tom Henderson
    Sassa Akervall has led Akervall Technologies from a start-up to a rapidly-growing supplier of thermoplastic mouthguards.

    If you build a better mouthguard, the world will beat a path to your door.

    Or, at least send you an email and ask you to become a supplier.

    Akervall Technologies Inc. of Saline, Mich., has built a lighter, thinner, stronger mouthguard, both for athletes and for those who grind their teeth while sleeping. So far, the innovation is paying off.

    The company was officially founded in 2008 but started getting traction in 2010 after taking part in an entrepreneurial boot camp hosted by economic group Ann Arbor Spark.

    It had sales of $1.4 million in 2014 and $2.6 million in 2015 and projects sales of $4.2 million in 2016 that will grow to $12.6 million in 2018.

    CCM, the iconic Canadian brand that has been making skates for decades for everyone from peewees to National Hockey League players, has been selling Akervall's mouthguards since March as a result of the retail equivalent of a man-bites-dog story — an executive in Montreal heard about the Akervall mouthguard and sent the company an email introducing himself and saying he might want to be a customer.

    Later this month, 2,100 of the 8,000 Walgreens drugstores in the U.S. will start carrying the mouthpieces, with a national rollout to follow. Details of a rollout in another national drug chain are expected to be finalized soon.

    And, in August, Akervall was named the official mouthguard of the National Lacrosse League.

    Akervall Technologies was named the top company in the advanced materials category at the last two recent Accelerate Michigan Innovation events at Orchestra Hall in Detroit, winning $25,000 each time.

    Making connections

    Unlike most of her fellow finalists at the competition, President and co-founder Sassa Akervall wasn't looking for investments from angel investors or venture capitalists. Akervall is cash-flow positive and capable of funding growth from revenue.

    Dan Asma, president of Warren, Mich.-based McKeon Products Inc. — a seller of ear protection equipment at drugstores — heard about Akervall's mouthpieces through a friend of his company's CEO, Devin Benner, and met with Akervall co-founder and CEO Jan Akervall, Sassa's husband, last year.

    "We had been talking about diversifying into other product categories, and Jan and I thought we could leverage each other's strengths. Theirs is innovation, and ours is working with retailers," said Asma.

    McKeon is selling Akervall's LunaGuard Nighttime Dental Protector brand at drugstores in Ohio, New York and the East Coast.

    Asma said final details on a deal with another national drug chain are being worked out, and he expects the mouthguards to be in those stores soon.

    "Akervall's mouthguards are so much better than traditional mouthguards," said Asma. "Because they're so thin, they're very comfortable. Because they are made of thermoplastic that is re-moldable. If you don't get the fit quite right the first time, you drop it in warm water and remold it. And you can't bite through it the way you can with other mouthguards."

    Mathieu Filiatrault-Giroux is a North American product manager for CCM in Montreal. CCM is part of the Canton, Mass.-based Reebok International Ltd.

    He said the traditional mouthguards CCM had sold for decades were long criticized for their bulkiness and ineffectiveness. Players had difficulty speaking with them in their mouths, didn't like the way they felt, and suffered loss of teeth even when wearing them.

    He said he spends a lot of time visiting retailers and early in 2014 was told about a new mouthguard someone in Michigan was making.

    "I went on their website and got a generic e-mail address and sent a note introducing myself," he said. "It's really rare for us to reach out to a company. Usually, they reach out to us.

    "These are extremely thin. They have breathability, and they have a fit that is on the level of a dentist-made custom mouthguard," he said.

    He said CCM validated Akervall's claims about strength and better protection through energy dispersion.

    CCM began selling the mouthpiece in March, using the CCM brand with the tag line "powered by Sisu." They are made by Akervall's outside contractors.

    Filiatrault-Giroux declined to provide sales numbers but said "our market share has increased significantly since then."

    "Sisu" is the brand name Akervall uses for its sports mouthguards. According to Sassa Akervall, "sisu" is a popular word in her and Jan's native country of Sweden. It has no direct English translation but embodies "determination, strength and resilience."

    Akervall directly sells online or though Amazon.com three mouthguards under that brand — a standard mouthguard at $24.99, a higher-impact guard at $34.99 and a kids guard at $19.99. It also sells a guard case at $8.99 and the Sova Night Guard for teeth grinders for $44.99.

    It competes with makers of traditional ethylene-vinyl acetate guards, such as Minnetonka, Minn.-based Shock Doctor Inc., the largest U.S. manufacturer of mouthguards

    A surgeon's tool

    Lacrosse Allstars

    Lacrosse player Drew Snider with a Sisu mouthguard.

    Akervall Technologies was founded in 2008 after Jan Akervall, an ear, nose and throat surgeon at William Beaumont Hospital, devised a mouthguard to keep patients' teeth from being chipped by the heavy medical instruments used during endoscopic surgeries.

    "One day, Jan came home with this mouthguard and said, 'I think you should do this as a business.' I had run my own production company in Finland and had developed my own entrepreneurial spirit, figuring out how to get things done," said Sassa, who had been a TV producer, TV host and author in Finland.

    The company, which has filed for four patents, was co-founded by Jan, Sassa and Johannes Schwank, the James and Judith Street professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan and director of the school's Electron Microbeam Analysis Laboratory.

    The company used an existing thermoplastic polymer, although it has kept details of that material quiet. Schwank, the company's chief scientific officer, set up tests to determine what shape and thickness provided the best strength and shock absorption.

    One claimed result was a guard that transmits nearly all the energy of a hit throughout the mouthpiece. One real-world guide for the company as they worked on prototypes was Sassa's daughter, Miriam, a field hockey player who, like many athletes, hated her traditional mouthguard, taking it out often to catch her breath.

    In 2010, Sassa went to the Spark boot camp, where she met Bill Mayer, Spark's vice president of entrepreneurial services.

    He gave her advice on growing a startup, hooked her up with a consultant and mentor, Wayne Brannon, the former head of General Motors Co.'s European operations who later joined Akervall's board, and helped her get a microloan of $15,000 from Spark.

    "Fifteen thousand was huge at the time," said Sassa. "It allowed us to buy material to start making mouthguards and build our first inventory. We had two years to pay Spark back and paid it back in 10 months."

    Spark also helped find an affordable contractor to mold the mouthguards and helped Akervall build a good website.

    "Sassa was great to work with," said Mayer. "She wanted to learn. She was eager for advice. She's been the kind of entrepreneur who just keeps at it, keeps doing what needs to be done."

    Sports customer growth

    In 2011, Akervall landed its first customer, Cliff Keen Athletic, an Ann Arbor maker of athletic gear for high school and college wrestlers. Wrestlers often wrestle without mouthguards so they can breathe unimpeded.

    "They bought our first inventory of a couple of thousand guards, which was huge," said Sassa.

    Up till then, Sassa had been the sole employee, working at the kitchen table. The Cliff Keen deal allowed her to hire her first employee, Terry Rishoi, who is now office manager, and move from the kitchen to bigger digs in the basement.

    Another set of early customers was the booming roller-derby community. Also in 2011, Sassa and Lynne Schwank, Johannes' wife and Akervall's fulfillment manager today, drove to a derby convention in Chicago and set up shop.

    By 2013, there were six employees in the Akervall basement setup, "and we were trying not to drive each other crazy."

    In December 2013, Akervall bought a vacant 15,000-square-foot factory in an industrial park in Saline and in July 2014 moved in to the building, where it does sales and marketing, order fulfillment and engineering research on the next generation of even thinner mouthguards.

    The company now employs 17.

    On the way toward profitability, Akervall kept the bills paid and funded research with a series of three federal grants totaling $970,000 — a Phase 1 small business innovation grant from the Department of Defense, a Phase 1 SBIR grant of $150,000 from the National Science Foundation and a Phase 2 SBIR grant of $750,000 from the NSF.

    Sassa said the Phase 2 grant is helping Akervall develop a new material for the mouthguards that will have other applications, too.

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