Here We Go

February 09, 2015

It’s been a hell of a ride, and it’s just getting started.

I vividly remember that night about a year ago when my brother Scott called, venting about the dismal state of the dental supply market. He was fresh out of Penn Dental, and I was sitting in my college dining hall, working on a problem set. Scott wanted to do something about the supply market; he wanted to fix it.

So I did what any good brother would do; I went back to work on my problem set. But he was insistent. Maybe it’s the Penn in him, but Scott kept digging and digging and before long convinced me to jump in with both feet.

The market is broken. In fact, the market is so broken that it’s not much of a market, and more like a supply chain run through a small handful of distributors. Others seem to be getting squeezed out, and previous attempts to remedy the situation are rife with flaws and poor execution.

So we’ve been building our own. It’s Supply Clinic, and our goal is to become the comprehensive marketplace for dental supplies. We don’t sell supplies ourselves, but aggregate distributors on a single platform so clinicians have a place to go to in order to see what products and prices the market has to offer. Fair is fair.

After months of legwork, we’ve entered a closed beta. At the moment, only a small handful of individuals have access, but over the course of the next two months we’ll begin accepting beta requests from dentists across the country. In the meantime, we’re actively signing vendors and expanding our inventory. To date, we have 16 vendors signed, with more in the pipeline.

Our inventory is limited at the moment. We’ve got Osung instrument cassettes and 3M syringes, but not a single toothbrush or tube of toothpaste. We’re expanding rapidly, though, and with the help of our vendors and customers will continue to grow.

So thank you for your interest, if you’ve read this far. Thank you for your support. And please, be patient. Because it’s been a hell of a ride, and it’s just getting started.

--Jacob