Today we’re looking at a product that sounds ridiculous: flavoured toothpicks from Pick’em. Yet this idea from a group of German university students turned into a breakout D2C brand, selling over 250 million sticks, passing €4 million in revenue, and growing 1400% last year. It’s fascinating to see how they turned the most ordinary thing in the world into something people queued up to try, selling out for nearly 18 months.
- Product: Flavoured toothpicks
- AOV: Around €20
- Initial capital: A few thousand euros
- First batch: About 2000 packs
- Target audience: 15 – 28 yrs
- Total sold: 250 million sticks (1.25 million packs)
- Sales Revenue: Over €4 + million
Now, let’s look at the story from the first-person perspective of Niklas Terrahe, one of Pick’em’s co-founders, to explore who buys flavoured toothpicks, where the idea began, and how it scaled to €10 million a year.
Finding the Idea in the Most Boring Product
Toothpick is simple, universal, and almost invisible in daily life. But back in the 1970s, it actually had its moment: often seen in Hollywood movies and pop culture as a casual accessory that signaled attitude and rebellion. It was cool to have one between your teeth.
So what if we gave it a flavour? Something like mint to make people want to keep it in their mouths. If we could re-package and re-imagine the most ordinary product, and make people talk about it again just like toothpicks in the 1970s? Considering how common the material is, it’s almost crazy to see how far it’s come.
Why Supply Chain Became Our Biggest Advantage?
Back then, we were still at university, so we treated Pick’em like a side project. We pooled a few thousand euros, found a supplier, and produced our first 2 000 packs, stacked inside a 20 square-meter room. Then came our fifth TikTok video, the one that went viral. Orders skyrocketed overnight and our lead time with the supplier was eight weeks. Even though we reinvested every money we earned back into production, for almost a year and a half we simply couldn’t keep up with demand. We were constantly sold out.
Once we raised our first angel round, we made a bold decision: go in-house. So we now have an 800 m² production facility, fully certified for food safety and quality control. I know it goes against what most startups do today, too much upfront investment and risk. But if we wanted to become the Coca-Cola of toothpicks, the brand that defines the flavoured-toothpick category, this was the only way forward.
It was a painful process: new equipment, new compliance, new learning curves. But it did give us a decisive edge. Now we can develop and launch a new flavour in under a week, test spices sourced from around the world, and send fresh samples to creators within 24 hours.
How We Market Beyond Paid Ads?
We don’t like paid ads
Let’s be honest, toothpicks sound like the most ordinary product in the world. And hardly anyone has heard of flavoured toothpicks. So if we wanted to bring a “dead” category back to life, we couldn’t just explain what it is. The goal isn’t to sell a toothpick, but to grab people’s attention first. The creative chain is simple: Content → Entertainment → Trust → Conversion. To make that happen, the focus stays on 4 things:
- Authenticity beats perfection.
We deliberately make our videos look like they were shot by the community itself which is filmed on phones, edited with CapCut, and always conversational. The goal is to make viewers feel like they’re talking to a friend, not being sold to. - Play in the grey zone.
Our best videos often live in that slightly chaotic guerrilla-marketing space, like holding up a sign at a Macklemore concert until he reacts, or sneaking a “toothpick Mona Lisa” into the National Gallery. It’s not technically illegal, but just thrilling enough to keep people watching. - The story is everything.
Every video is written in “five-year-old language” — short, direct, impossible to miss. Every few seconds, the viewer needs a new reason to stay: a question, a surprise, or a payoff.
For example:
- Wanting a celebrity to try the product — episode 1.
- Getting noticed — episode 2.
- The reaction — episode 3.
One idea can fuel several short videos, each with its own hook and resolution.
- Influencer marketing?
It doesn’t work the way it used to. You can’t just pay someone to say, “I got this product and it changed my life.” It’s about building a story around the collaboration. When we worked with UFC Heavyweight Champion Tom Aspinall, we didn’t just hand him a box of toothpicks. We filmed how we met him at the gym, his first reaction, and how we co-created a new flavour — B.I.G Berry.
Where real conversions happen
Viral TikToks don’t automatically turn into sales. Even our most viral vedios convert at around 0.01%, because audiences hate feeling like they’re being sold to. That’s why our top-of-funnel content is never about pushing the product. It’s about building awareness, making people laugh, and earning a place in their memory.
Once that attention is there, we go deeper. Our ads are built around specific use cases that come from what we see every day: biting nails, chewing pencils, or needing something to focus. Many people use our toothpicks to quit smoking, others to fight late-night snack cravings. A zero-calorie, sugar-free toothpick turned out to be a much bigger market than we expected. Everything we do now is about slowly changing that habit: instead of chewing gum, people start chewing flavoured toothpicks.
Viral first. Retail next.
I believe 90% of gum purchases are impulse buys. It happens at the checkout counter. That’s why getting into retail brings the real pull. It turns all the momentum we built online into something people can actually grab on the shelf. Actually, retailers came to us. In the UK, a new regulation banned sugary products from checkout displays. Retailers started looking for sugar-free, small-format products that could still attract attention, and our name kept coming up. Every retailer we spoke to wanted to reach younger customers. And our strongest audience is Gen Z and Alpha, the generations that live on TikTok.
In our ideal setup, retail sales will one day surpass online. A strong retail revenue stream lets us push our top-of-funnel marketing even further to make cooler, bolder, more entertaining videos that don’t have to convert directly, but drive impressions and brand recall at scale.
Where We First Sold & How We Priced to Profit?
Our primary market is the UK. Even though we’re a German company, we deliberately avoided launching in Germany first. Anything pop-culture relevant rarely becomes mainstream there, so we decided to scale in countries where trends move faster and then come back home later. Appearing on Germany’s Shark Tank (Die Höhle der Löwen) gave us both exposure and investment, which helped accelerate our rollout across eight European markets. Retail has been a major growth driver since then, with large orders coming in from multiple regions.
On pricing, a single pack at €3 can’t cover customer acquisition and fulfillment costs. A one-pack order is effectively unprofitable. The psychological ceiling for a single purchase sits around €10, but our real margin comes from bundle sales around €20. That’s how we lift the average order value (AOV) to a profitable level.
How to Choose Right Investors for a Crazy Idea?
Besides the investors from Die Höhle der Löwen (Judith Williams), we also brought in some amazing angel investors like Tom Aspinall, the UFC heavyweight champion. In total, we raised less than €400,000, which went directly into production. It wasn’t much, but the expertise, network, and trust our angels brought were worth far more than the capital itself.
We chose angels over venture capital for a reason. Choosing VC money can be both a curse and a blessing. It comes with funding, but also layers of approval, endless meetings, and expectations that slow everything down. As a D2C brand, we need to reach profitability early and keep momentum alive. Negotiating with suppliers and managing daily operations is already complex enough.
Especially when you’re pitching something as absurd as flavoured toothpicks, you don’t need a 40-page market analysis. The category didn’t even exist. Our angels understood that. They saw the potential. As Judith’s team said when they invested: “We’ve never done toothpicks before. Let’s try it.”
How We Expanding Products?
We’re definitely not stopping at toothpicks. Our next product line takes the concept one step further: nutrient-infused toothpicks. We’ve successfully added essential vitamins like D, B1, and B6, and we’re also considering melatonin for better sleep. This will be our premium line, designed to make a daily habit even more beneficial.
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