Featured by The Macomb Daily

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For The Macomb Daily

Armando Doku of Avaneer Dental Studio in Utica has a dream to see people smiling with his work firmly in place.

“Our mission is to bring the smile of your dreams to reality using the latest dental technological advances,” Doku said Wednesday. “Our promise to patients is ‘you will have the smile of your dreams.’”

Doku said his new facility located at 44840 Utica Road in Utica will provide dentists with a complete line of cosmetic ceramic restorations including crowns, bridges and veneers.

“We will feature high-tech ceramic materials characterized by stability and biocompatibility, as well as strength levels that are significantly higher than other all-ceramic materials,” Doku said. “We opened to bring this dental lab into the 21st century.

“Our goal is to simplify everything,” he said. “We specialize in all ceramic restorations – a new wave of restorations that started a while back and became more popular seven years ago.”

Doku, 29, who attended Walsh College in Troy and has a certificate from Wayne County Community College, has been working in the dental field for 10 years. He said he used Blackstone LaunchPad while at Walsh College to catapult his career and open his own business.

“Blackstone LaunchPad helped me create my business plan,” he said Wednesday, noting the program helps aspiring entrepreneurs launch their bujsiness. “It has to be a solid plan. By realizing that my dream was feasible to start, by conducting the due diligence, they helped me with marketing, advertising and public relations.

“Since our ribbon-cutting ceremony on September 26 we have amassed a few accounts and are meeting with doctors, dentists, and offering them to try us out,” he continued. “I know the business idea was a good one and received the help I needed with Blackstone LaunchPad.”

Doku said Avaneer Dental Studio has amassed a workforce of over 100 years of combined experience.

“Avaneer believes that a quality team produces quality products,” he said. “That is why we have handpicked a group of highly experienced dental engineers to ensure efficient processing time without compromising quality and attention to detail.”

Doku said the key ingredient for his dental lab is ‘ceramics,’ which have been used in dentistry and medicine for many years.

“Our vast array of products can accommodate restorations from implants to cosmetics to bruxism,” he recited. “One of the most popular ceramics is zirconia. Its outstanding medical properties make it suitable for many indications formerly reserved for metals. Zirconia-based ceramics have demonstrated ideal suitability as the core for single crowned and long-span fixed prosthesis.”

Doku said he has partnered with other labs that conduct work with dentures and partials.

“At Avaneer we thrive on customer service and using our own network to educate people into realizing what goes on in their mouth,” he said. “We are bringing it to the store front. There’s a new wave of consciousness where people want to know what is occurring in their life.”

Doku said a general dentist sends out for crowns, but at Avaneer they will keep the work “in house and not send out overseas.”

“It gives us control over those properties and we can give a better warranty overall for the product,” Doku said. “Any patient that likes to see their restorations being made we have an open door policy. We are partnering with other Michigan labs; we partner with them and go through our quality control.

“The benefits are just to control work a lot of better and keep the work in Michigan,” he noted. “We hire local people, dental engineers, so everyone hired meet our requirements.”

Doku said the “future of density is taking a technological leap.”

“We want to position ourselves in the forefront,” he said. “Everything in our Utica facility is brand new. A lot of labs have operated a long time, but we have an advantage with new equipment.

“The difference between us and others labs is we take pride in our work,” he concluded. “We are taking the essence of dental labs, the origins, and only hiring people that care about dental lab technology and have pride in what they do.

“By hiring those people you will only end up with the best. We will only produce the best dental restorations in Michigan while still staying competitive with other labs price-wise.”