Hi, I'm Sean. I invent things that make good choices easier.
Sow Flow started in Lake Charles, Louisiana, with a toothpaste tablet and one question: what if the healthy thing were also the easy thing?
How I got here
I went to film school to tell stories. I studied film in New Orleans because I love being surrounded by talented artists working toward a common vision, but after graduating, I realized I wanted my work to leave something measurable behind, and I soon discovered that entertainment alone wasn’t satisfying me.
It’s always been a challenge for me to “color inside the lines.” I’ve adopted the mindset of a polymath, exploring self-expression across a variety of mediums. But I try to bring innovation to any art I take part in. One day I came to believe that innovation is the highest form of creativity, and I made a personal resolution to channel my creative efforts toward creating art no one else has ever created.
After film school, teaching became another creative outlet for me. I realized that sharing what I’ve learned has always been one of my deepest joys. I soon set out to build a more modern kind of learning for kids: a character-driven curriculum built on Howard Gardner’s idea that people aren’t simply smart or not smart, they’re smart in different ways. I pictured digital puppets, a little like Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street, made for kids who want to choose what they learn.
While student teaching, I became fascinated by behaviorism. I got a dog and a cat and dove into conditioning and applied behavior analysis. I taught the cat to use the toilet and kept pushing to see what my dog could learn. The lessons stuck: lasting behavior doesn’t come from demanding more effort. It comes from making the right action easier and reinforcing it.
I ended up relocating to Fayetteville, AR where I got a job teaching English online to students overseas from a green-screen studio I built myself. I also stumbled into the rare privilege of serving as a part-time campground host on a lake in the Ozarks.
Leave no trace stuck with me. As a camp host I spent a great deal of time picking up other people’s trash. As I learned more about the culture around it, I fell in love with the “leave no trace” mindset: take out what you bring in, and leave a place better than you found it.
It changed how I shop. Fayetteville is a community that really cares about recycling and its environmental footprint, and it rubbed off. I got more conscious about what I consumed and started choosing products with more eco-friendly packaging.
I couldn’t stop inventing. With a lot of quiet time and a friend who loved fixing things, I started building small gadgets to make life easier, including gear for a Pacific Crest Trail hike I was planning with my dog. I tried the toothpaste tablets on the market too. They were okay, but I really didn’t like fishing them out of a jar. It struck me that a dispenser would make the whole experience way more satisfying.
Then everything broke. COVID closed the park. Weeks after I moved home to Lake Charles, Hurricane Laura flattened the trailer I was staying in and took everything I owned. So I turned my car into a rolling studio, buckled my dog into a harness I’d rigged for him, and hit the road to see the country and write.
On the drive home, in the Utah desert, a car in the oncoming lane lost control on an 80 mph highway and hit me head-on. There was no phone signal. An off-duty paramedic found me, and a helicopter took me to a trauma center. Both harness straps I’d rigged for my dog broke off in the crash, but he survived. It took me months to walk again.
What it changed. Recovery gave me time to think, and I decided life was too short to spend it on working for someone else’s mission. I’d iterated on plenty of inventions I wasn’t qualified to build, since I have no mechanical engineering background. But when I zoomed out and asked the question, “If I want to create all these things in one lifetime, what is the most appropriate order of operations?” That’s when I got tunnel vision for the toothpaste tablet dispenser. So I teamed up with an investor who believed in me and a couple of engineers, and we started bringing it to life.
The idea: remove the resistance
We set out to build this brand around eco-friendly packaging. I noticed the tube first: billions of them will sit in landfills long after we’re gone. But when I talked with potential customers, I found far more interest in something else. The product took the friction out of a parent’s day: daily resistance from kids, messy squeezing, and worries about how much to use. The packaging still matters to me, but that conversation shaped what we became.
From training animals, I knew how to work with friction. You make the right action easy and you reinforce it. Sow Flow is that idea in everyday products: turning good intentions into lasting action by empowering behavior rather than changing it.
Our toothpaste tablets are our first product. They’re pre-portioned, cleaner to use, and refined with feedback from families who want brushing to feel easier.
IMAGE PLACEHOLDER 7
A family brushing at the sink with the tablets and dispenser (hands-only if kids are in frame; get a release)
Why Sow Flow?
We’re not building a toothpaste company. We’re building a company around one idea: making the healthy thing the easy thing. Toothpaste is where we start. People use it twice a day, it’s small enough to rethink from scratch, and it’s durable enough to build on.
The name is the idea. We plant small seeds of momentum in your daily environment until the friction that was stopping you is gone. Toothpaste is the first place we’re proving it.
Thank you
I never imagined how hard this would be to build. To everyone who has supported me and encouraged me along the way: thank you. I don’t know how I would have made it this far without you.
Sean Hager, Founder, Sow Flow Solutions, Lake Charles, Louisiana