Voodoo Manufacturing has announced a move into the clear aligners market with the launch of a B2B additive manufacturing service powered by Formlabs technology.
The company has also named Smilelove as the first public direct-to-consumer partner of Voodoo Clear Aligners, while 3Shape, FullContour and ZenduraDental have been revealed as premier technical, digital design and material partners, respectively. It represents a significant expansion of offerings from the New York-based manufacturer, who, over four years, has built up a factory with more than 200 fused deposition modelling (FDM) machines to cater for low-volume requests.
Voodoo believes that to have been a solid footing from which to launch its clear aligner business.
“We realised we had built the perfect foundation for a clear aligner factory that produces thousands of unique and precision parts every day,” commented Max Friefeld, Voodoo Manufacturing CEO, in a press release. “While the market is growing rapidly, it is being throttled by a lack of modern, scalable manufacturers that are capable of delivering such a personal product at scale. We address this pain point for our partners bringing aligner treatment to the masses and look forward to passing along any time and cost-savings we can to their patients.”
Vodoo Manufacturing
Voodoo Clear Aligners
Currently, Voodoo has 21 Form 2 machines in operation in a 2,000-square-foot facility down the street from its headquarters, though it is hoping soon to take up an additional 10,000 square feet and get the entire business back under one roof. As things stand, the company says it can manufacture 20,000 aligner moulds a month with its current set-up, which would see around 700 patients receive treatment, but is planning to scale by four times before the end of year, producing 80,000 moulds a month for 2,800 patients. Voodoo’s growth ambitions have been enabled by Formlabs’ ability to manufacture and ship machines within weeks, per Friefeld, and will see the company transition from Formlabs’ Form 2 model to the Form 3 to take advantage of its ‘Low Force Stereolithography’ capabilities going forward.
“The advantages of the Form 3 for us are really about maintainability,” Friefeld told TCT. “We’ve found the occasional failure on the Form 2s where a mould will become unstuck from the build plate if there’s enough surface area holding it down and the Form 3 has much gentler forces during printing because of this new membrane they have on the resin tank. So far, we’ve seen lower failure rates on the plates which were already pretty low but now they’re even better.”
According to Friefeld, Voodoo was first approached by a dental company around 12 months ago and opened up a dialogue with Smilelove in the new year. By the beginning of summer, the company had FDA clearance and was turning around 3D printed aligner moulds for Smilelove to sample within five days, instead of the several weeks it’s used to.
Voodoo’s manufacturing process kicks into gear once scans of mouths have been conducted and treatment plans worked out. When Voodoo receives the data, moulds are printed on the Form 2 platforms – they can print between 12-16 moulds per build depending on size – and then washed in the Form Wash unit and cured in a Voodoo-built oven which has been standardised against the Form Cure. The company will then thermoform a sheet of plastic, developed and supplied by ZenduraDental, over each printed part with a six-axis robotic arm trimming away the excess materials to remove the aligner, a task believed to have been automated by just four companies in the world. The aligner will then be polished, sorted and shipped, with an integrated API allowing Smilelove to keep track of order status and receive shipping notifications. Plans are in place to automate the entire process from when the prints finish to aligners shipped, but Voodoo has placed its initial focus on the more arduous tasks.
Voodoo's thermoforming station.
Voodoo's thermoforming station.
“We’ve focused on these labour-intensive parts of the process to automate first, and then we are building backwards from there,” Friefeld explained. “We’ve automated trimming, we’ve automated polishing, which took minutes of human time per aligner - like four minutes between the two steps - and now we’re moving to thermoforming. Then after thermoforming, we’ll probably move to sorting, and then we’ll probably do washing and curing and turn those into a more converyorised or robotic arm-driven process.”
At the other end of the process, Voodoo Clear Aligners relies on service provider FullContour to work with trained dental technicians to design the patient treatment plans using 3Shape’s Clear Aligner Studio software. Gathering information through direct 3D scans or reverse moulding impressions, the data is uploaded into Clear Aligner Studio, where a technician will move the patient’s teeth digitally into the positions they ought to be in by the end of the plan and the software will generate a number of steps in between to get there. That treatment plan will be approved by a dentist or orthodontist, as well as by the patient, and then it will be forwarded to Voodoo to manufacture a set of aligners for the patient to use. The average plan comprises of around 15 steps – and therefore 15 different aligners – and takes about 30 weeks to complete.
Recognising patients generally want to get through to the other end of this plan as quickly as possible, Voodoo understands the significance of starting the process quickly. By getting aligners produced, polished and posted within five days it has been able to entice a company in Smilelove who already had a service provider leveraging 3D printing in place. The difference between the two: one is a dental lab and the other an automated manufacturer.
Voodoo Manufacturing
Voodoo Clear Aligner
“The reason we’re working together comes down to speed and automation,” Friefeld said. “[Smilelove was] very interested in our ability to turn around cases faster than their current partner and our ability to scale up as needed, typically when you have a more human hand-driven process which is how their current manufacturer works. You have to hire and train people, there’s typically issues, they’ve had patients in the past receiving the wrong product or a bad product and obviously [Smilelove is] striving for perfection. We’ve been able to prove to them that we’re going to be the best partner to do that.”
Voodoo being a manufacturer at heart is also why its Clear Aligner brand isn’t a direct-to-consumer venture. On top of that, the company has done its research and knows the state of play. Align Technology has had its Invisalign brand on the market for 20+ years, former Align partner SmileDirectClub has hundreds of millions of venture capital dollars behind it and last week went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange, and many other firms have entered the market in recent years too. Voodoo doesn’t want to compete with them, rather it wants to help them differentiate from the market leaders, whether it be in the types of treatment they offer, the price at which they offer it, or Voodoo’s specialty, the speed in which they can get aligners into mouths.
“Our mission as a company is to democratise access to manufacturing for everybody and we see [Voodoo Clear Aligners] as part of that,” Friefeld said. “We aren’t launching our own aligner brand for a reason, because it’s an incredibly competitive market. There are dozens of direct to consumer aligner companies that have launched over the last few years and our goal is to work with all of them.”
