What does it look like to build a hardware brand to eight figures with two employees, no VC, and a rule that every product must be first order profitable from day one?

Sam Coxe, Founder and CEO of Flaus, joins In The Money to tell one of the most disciplined founder stories in the DTC space; a Skadden M&A attorney who put her entire life savings into a consumer electronics company, got told no by every professional investor, and built her way to $10M+ in revenue on a foundation of margins, focus, and relentless customer research.

Flaus is the world's first electric flosser. Sam didn't just build the product, she built the category. And she did it one deliberate step at a time.

We cover:

• Why Sam left one of the world's most prestigious law firms to build a consumer hardware company
• The $120K life savings bet: how she funded the first million dollars of product development
• Why she got told no by every professional investor
• The 10x bill of materials rule: how she engineered hardware margins before she had a factory
• First order profitable from day one, what that actually means and how she's maintained it for seven years
• The SurveyMonkey moment: 600 strangers, 15 questions, and the data that flipped her entire customer hypothesis on its head

• Agency first, employees second: how she structured the team to stay lean as the business scaled
• The dental conference circuit: 13 shows this year, all booked on credit card points, all ROI positive by end of show

• One SKU. One color. One channel. The focus framework she's used since day one
• The tariff crisis: 145% tariffs, a bonded warehouse strategy she pioneered before it went mainstream, and why strong margins were the only real hedge
• Why she moved from air freight to ocean freight and how it offset the tariff impact entirely
• 65% subscription attachment rate: how she thinks about refill cadence, churn, and personalizing the subscription model

If you're building a hardware brand, a subscription business, or anything in a category that doesn't exist yet, this episode is the clearest blueprint I've seen for how to do it without burning through capital you don't have.