by Tom Molony
Evelyn M. Perreault, RDH

While the idea of opening a store that would specifically offer oral health care items might not be unique among oral health care professionals, few, such as Evelyn M. Perreault, RDH, of Pelham, Massachusetts, have ventured forth with such a plan. In November 2002, she opened Tooth Pix·A Dental Specialty Store (TM).

Dental hygiene wasn't Perreault's first career choice. In high school, she had been considering a degree in education, a career her father advised her against because he felt that the field was already over saturated. Working with guidance counselors, Perreault discovered that dental hygienists were also educators, except with patients, and decided to pursue her career in dental hygiene. After graduating with an associate's degree in 1978 from Springfield Technical Community College in Springfield, Massachusetts, Perreault worked for a short time as a full-time clinician. But, she says, "I was looking for something different; I was looking for the unexpected." This led her to state institutions, where she instructed staff on how to treat clients with special needs.

"At that time, they were placing people who lived at the institution into residential programs," Perreault says. "I was going into the residential programs to educate staff on how to maintain oral health [for] their residents." Today, Perreault hasn't forgotten that working with clients with special needs inspired Tooth Pix in the first place. The need for such a store became apparent to her while searching pharmacies, department stores, and the Internet for oral health care products to help her clients.

Perreault still works a few hours each week at the Monson Developmental Center in Palmer, Massachusetts, overseeing its oral health services, but the majority of her time is spent running her business.

Perreault says that the inability to find appropriate products in stores can put patients with special needs off the pursuit of good oral health. "It shouldn't be a specialized thing," she says, adding that if certain products are necessary in the professional oral health care setting, it is often because patients need them at home. Tooth Pix offers a wide variety of oral health care products common in oral health clinics around the United States, however many of them are uncommon to people who browse the unique store located in the Thornes Market in Northampton, Massachusetts.

"We found that people would pass by the store once in disbelief, but later when they needed [a specific dental product], they'd say, 'that's the store I need to go to,'" says Perreault. Word-of-mouth also has helped bolster the store's reputation÷not only throughout the local area, but out of state, as well. "We have customers who are now bringing in friends and family, saying, 'you have to see this store.''

While Perreault advertises in local newspapers and receives plenty of word-of-mouth referrals from friends and family, much of her business comes from oral health practices that hear about the store from their clients who were impressed with the store, she adds. Sometimes they even show an improvement in their oral health as a result of products and/or oral information that they got from Tooth Pix, Perreault says.

Likewise, already more than 60 area dental offices refer their patients to Tooth Pix to buy many of the products they recommend, Perreault says.

Perreault and staff recently launched www.toothpixstore.com and published a catalog for dental offices to attract customers nationwide. "I have great hopes," she says.

Evelyn Perreault , RDH (author of "Betwixt & Between," a rundown of novelty flossers), describes herself as a born educator. Intending to become a schoolteacher, the Massachusetts native got sidetracked into a career as a dental hygienist÷only to discover that much of her job consisted of teaching patients how to take care of their teeth and gums.

At ToothPix, the dental specialty boutique she founded in 2002, Perreault focuses on matching appropriate products with patientsâ needs. As for tending to her own mouth: with the added stresses of owning a boutique, she now finds she needs a bruxing nightguard. "I'm not alone," says Perreault, whose store sells many such devices. (info@toothpixstore.com)