Dr. David Carter knows a thing or two about the business, and presentation, of keeping teeth straight.
“Over time, I just realized marketing is everything,” said Carter.
Between his own orthodontics practice and, for a time, speaking on behalf of the Invisalign brand of aligners, Carter has been tending to teeth for over three decades. For years, he and his father, who started the practice, Carter Orthodontics, offered a service called “Brace Bus,” in which staff would drive about in a big yellow Hummer and pick up kids from school to take them to the office for their orthodontic appointments and drive them back.
Over the course of speaking for Invisalign, Carter says, it dawned on him that its business model was based, essentially, on just “expensive pieces of plastic,” and that a piece of plastic would move much like braces would. He also noted that Invisalign, and similar company Smile Direct Club, target people who have had braces before.
“If you’ve had braces before, you don’t want braces again,” Carters said. “You want something sort of like Invisalign.”
When Smile Direct Club came along and offered the aligners to customers directly, bypassing doctors, Carter says, he also noted that you “can’t bypass doctors.”
“When you’re trying to treat somebody, you’ve got to have some kind of supervision to see what’s going with the teeth,” he said. “What’s going on with the bone, the cavities, are they moving correctly, that kind of thing.”
Carter started filing for patent protection for his own design for clear plastic aligners 15 years ago. In June 2016, he launched the Forever Aligned Club, a subscription service focusing on affordable orthodontic aftercare, in which customers pay monthly for clear aligning retainers to maintain their teeth corrections.
“We want to sell our business as a membership business that basically keeps your teeth and jaws aligned forever,” said Carter.
The retainers are made from a 3D print model, over which a sheet of plastic is heated and molded to form a retainer. Carter has the products manufactured in a lab in Grovetown, and also outsources manufacturing to labs in California and Oklahoma.
The Forever Aligned Club is based in Augusta, where Carter keeps his practice alongside offices in Grovetown, North Augusta and Aiken. He recently met with investors in Atlanta, where he aims to relocate Forever Aligned Club headquarters to a space in the Buckhead district to be managed by his son Brian, who is the CEO of Forever Aligned Club.
“He and several of our other employees that work there, they run the operational side,” said Carter. “I’ll let them run the business from Atlanta now because it’s gotten too big for me to run. We want it to be not just a national business we want to make it a global business and online membership platform.”
For more information on the Forever Aligned Club, visit its website at www.foreveralignedclub.com.
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter covering education in Columbia County and business-related topics for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
