How I Got the Idea – A Little Spit and Polish

Imagine walking into a dentist's office and seeing a broken chair in the waiting room with a handwritten sign that reads, "Don't Sit Here." Not once, but twice. That's the gloomy experience that inspired Doug Hudson, 54, to give the dental industry what he saw as a long-overdue cleaning.

- By Nick Hawkins

After getting fitted for a mouth guard at a New York City dentist in 2016, Hudson returned weeks later to find that that chair still hadn't been fixed.

"I had just paid $500 for the device I was picking up," he says. "In that moment I thought, I know we can do better." To do that, he launched Tend, a chain of chic and consumer-obsessed dental clinics, in 2019.