Love's labors flossed

Inventor Sean Dix wanted to revolutionize the way we get rid of plaque. Now he's in jail for threatening Ted Turner's life.

By Rebecca Segall

Aug 31, 2000 | No one ever expected Sean Dix -- the gently gruff, hardworking New York kid turned quirky inventor -- to wind up in jail this summer, especially not for sending a death threat to one of the world's most powerful men.

Since 1995, the ambitious 32-year-old has put his life's savings of $65,000 into manufacturing and selling something he calls floss rings. Floss rings, for the uninitiated, are plastic rings that one ties to the ends of a length of dental floss. Dix anticipated that the invention would return his investment and then some, $1.99 at a time.

A psoriasis sufferer, he developed the idea after years of painful flossing sessions; although it takes a little effort to tie the floss onto the rings, the small, plastic dental aids sit much more comfortably around sensitive fingers than raw floss. Arthritis sufferers can also find solace in floss rings.

Dix watched as his affordable product won favorable reviews from the press, including Bloomberg Radio, and got picked up, gradually, by more and more major department stores and pharmacies. He grew even more hopeful when a 1996 Beutel study found that using the rings while flossing can lead to the removal of as much as 23.8 percent more plaque, and when the Museum of Dentistry in Baltimore added the rings to its "Dentistry in Transformation" section.

So Dix was flying high when CNN called to say it was running a news piece on his floss rings. He spent nearly two months providing the network with information to illuminate the virtues of his product. The CNN crew came into his home and his company's office in New York multiple times. Dix told everyone he knew in media and venture capital about the airing of the show.

He even called and thanked the CNN segment's producer, Linda Djerejian. And in her response, Dix saw his world -- and possibly his mental health -- begin to crumble.

"She said to me, 'Well you might not want to thank me yet. You may not like the piece,'" Dix remembers. "I didn't quite understand what she was getting at. I couldn't let myself face [it] because the product was getting such wonderful reviews. But I filed away her statement in my mind." (Djerejian was out of town and unreachable for comment at the time this article was written.)

At 9 p.m. on June 12, 1996, Dix enthusiastically turned on CNN's "The World Today." He sat in disbelief as he watched an eight-minute humor segment, featuring two dismissive assessments from dentists, Johnson & Johnson's decision to not back his rings and, worst of all, fluff TV's reliable minimum of 18 sorry puns: "Sean Dix really put his money where his mouth is," etc.

With his first patented invention the butt of a televised bad joke, Dix's characteristic grin turned into something of a cringe.

The national sales team of 12 at Dix Preventive Products and Dix's most generous investors didn't find the segment too funny, either. Dix says they all bailed within weeks of the first airing of the show.

"Before the airing of the piece, I was about to invest $100,000 in the rings, and was on my way to raising another million," says Peter Lusk, a venture capitalist. "But due to the embarrassingly negative and trivializing tone of the CNN article, I found it very difficult to go back to my contacts -- whom I had alerted to the show -- for potential investment."

Dix is unusually determined and resilient, according to those who know him. "Sean always had a smile on his face," says Tony Chirinian, who worked with Dix in the jewelry business for 10 years. "He is a fair, honest, determined guy that couldn't hurt a soul."

From the look of the sparse one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment Dix and his brother grew up in, he came from an average -- but struggling -- American family, and was committed to creating a better life for himself. "Sean was willing to work for it to no end," says Chirinian. "Even as he watched his life fall apart, Sean kept trying to stay upbeat," he says.

At least at first.

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