Sometimes you can go home again: Why bringing Dental Lab Products back matters to me

Relaunching Dental Lab Products is a proud moment, and I hope we can live up to this title’s legacy as we return to covering an exciting and evolving industry.

It’s often a good idea to keep your personal life and feelings out of your professional life and business decisions. But for me, the relaunch of Dental Lab Products is extremely personal, and something in which I feel a strong sense of pride and accomplishment.

Unlike the many people in the dental industry who follow a career path that is simultaneously a family legacy, I came to the dental world with no experience beyond that of a patient who has never had a cavity and never needed orthodontics. The only dental care I’d ever received beyond my six-month prophy appointments were sealants applied in my youth.

I came to dentistry as a journalist in need of a job and got a crash course in the technologies, material science, and quite simply amazing things dentists can and were doing for their patients. Still, when I first walked into the Dental Products Report newstroomI had no clue what a dental lab was or what they actually did.

My education on the dental industry was a rapid, on-the-job learning spree just like any reporter learning a new beat. I tried to absorb as much information and ask as many questions as I could, but even after working on DPR for more than a year, my only taste of the dental lab industry was copy editing pages for upcoming issues of DLP. It was only after I began directly working on the magazine that my eyes opened to the amazing world of dental labs and the unbelievable work of expert technicians.

The more I worked on DLP content, and the more people from the lab world I got to know, the more I grew to love the priviledge of writing about this side of the dental industry. At my core I’m a geek who loves learning how things work and I appreciate the craft of making something as much as I love the finished thing itself. The dental lab world was a hidden place that combined a chance to cover material science, engineering, and cutting edge technology, right along with covering art, photography, and of course the people who do all this amazing work without receiving much of the credit for the potentially life-changing results.

Then a career-changing opportunity presented itself when I was named Managing Editor for DLP. This was my first time fully at the helm of a publication, and it was far more fun and rewarding than I’d expected. I only ran the brand for a bit more than a year, but during that time my esteem for the work done in dental labs grew immeasurably.

When my career path took me in another direction, I watched DLP from afar and continued to work with some of my lab friends on content at my new dental publication. But watching DLP from afar was not much of a pleasure as I saw the new leadership of the magazine just didn’t seem to connect to the lab industry and content tended to approach the industry from an outsider’s perspective, rather than delving deep into what really mattered at the bench and in the office. To be honest, when the name of the publication was changed to Digital Esthetics, I simply didn’t know who it was not supposed to be for.

Now Digital Esthetics is the brand that has been retired and Dental Lab Products is proudly back atop our masthead, and we’re entering a new phase with all the excitement of starting something new, and the comfort of it also being something familiar. I hope as we regrow our lab-focused content and continue to explore all of the innovations available to labs today, you enjoy coming right along with us.

Working on Dental Lab Products once again is something that feels right. We plan to focus our efforts on covering the products, services, materials, and technologies of the dental lab world and hope to once again be viewed as a valued resource to help your labs thrive so dental patients always have access to restorations that provide the form and function everyone deserves from their dentition.

Thank you for joining us on this journey. We’re glad to be back on this path.