How I Built the 'Anti-Dental Lab' Dental Lab

I spent much of my career working in dental office labs—alongside Olivier Tric, MDT, at the beginning of my career, then Dr. Ed McLaren at UCLA and finally setting up my own lab in my father’s Cherry Hill, NJ, dental office. As we grew, space got tight so I moved the lab into a 1,000-square-foot unit in a medical complex; within a few years, we had outgrown that space too.

As luck would have it, the unit next door was about to go up for sale; knocking down the wall between the two units would more than double our square footage. I saw the opportunity to finally have the space to build the lab I envisioned: one without any kind of clinical or production vibe, where people would walk in and say, “What exactly do you do here?” In essence, I wanted the “anti-dental lab” dental lab.

In 2020, we were about to make that dream a reality but, just a few weeks before we closed on the new unit, dentistry went into COVID lockdown....