Dr. Bukk employee Deborah Wilson (left) models the ``gnarly fake teef'' while Mrs. Albert shows off her new Imako 2.0 cosmetic teeth. Mrs. Albert says the Imako teeth give wearers the ``Hollywood look,'' but the ugly teeth are still the most popular. JENNIFER FULLER/STAFF

Million-dollar firm began for laughs

Web posted Sunday, October 29, 2000

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By Frank Witsil
Staff Writer

GROVETOWN - Nancy Albert uses a screwdriver to pry a pale-green, rubbery substance out of a Williams & Sonoma chili bowl. It's her latest creation, based on a photo of an open-mouthed Vince Lombardi.

The football legend is revealing some big choppers, and boy, do they look bad - crooked and uneven.

``Isn't it awful!'' she says.

Mrs. Albert will make hundreds of plastic teeth - Lombardis, she'll probably call them - from the green mold. She already has created more than two dozen styles of novelty teeth, each set with its own name and description.

There's the Eleanor Roosevelt: ``Long liberal teef set amidst recessionary gums.''

There's Bodnia HurtsWhenItGoesInYa: ``One toof with infected gum is dying and shares a cavity with its neighbor.''

And don't forget Incest: ``With an emerging toof and a gumsore, you'll never have to squeal like a pig again.''

The original design, Bukk, is still around, too.

Mrs. Albert, 49, made the first set to replicate a gag that made her laugh so hard she wet her pants, twice. About a decade later, it became a million-dollar-a-year enterprise - Dr. Bukk Inc. The plastic teeth, which sell for $40 a set, are stained, chipped, missing and just plain hideous. They are especially popular at Halloween.

Nancy Albert, creator of the Dr. Bukk false teeth brand, wears one of her favorite styles of the funny mouthpieces. She says she started making the teeth just for fun. JENNIFER FULLER/STAFF

In 1986, Mrs. Albert became one of the first to mass-market novelty teeth, she says. Since then, a number of other companies - Billy-Bob, Bubba, Toothfairy and Dental Distortions - have realized the potential of bad dentures.

Now, the fake-teeth industry is so overrun with companies hawking ugly smiles that it's cutting into Dr. Bukk's sales, and Mrs. Albert is dabbling with another dental product - artificial teeth that look good.

Working at Dr. Bukk's 6,000-square-foot office in Grovetown, John Albert, Mrs. Albert's stepson, is busy staining a gnarled set of teeth with a small brush, similar to one women use to paint fingernails. The phone rings.

He stops to answer. After some casual banter, he asks the caller: ``So do you want the ugly teeth or the pretty teeth?'' The caller, Robert from Batesville, Ark., explains he is missing his three front teeth and wants the pretty teeth.

Mr. Albert takes down Robert's address and sends him information on the company's latest product, the Imako 2.0.

Eureka!

In 18 years, Mrs. Albert's personal quest to make people laugh has turned into big business. An Atlanta native and former debutante, the former Nancy MacDouglad first experienced the power of buckteeth in 1982.

At the time, she had been going through a divorce and was looking for a break from her troubles. She took a trip to New York, where a friend, who was a dentist, showed her some fake teeth that made her laugh so hard she cried. He took her to a posh restaurant and popped the teeth in. The expressions on the other diner's faces made her bladder erupt.

Even now, Mrs. Albert can't retell the story without tears.

``I never laughed so much in my life,'' she recalls, holding a tissue.

After her trip, Mrs. Albert decided to get a set of her own bad teeth. She asked her dentist to make some. He said they would cost hundreds of dollars and probably wouldn't fit. It would be easier, the dentist told her, if he just pulled all her teeth and started over.

That was a lot of effort for a cheap laugh, Mrs. Albert thought, so she took matters into her own hands. She went to a dental supply store and bought various products to mold to her real teeth. Dental cement? Too brittle. Plaster of Paris? Too messy. Plastic? Hmmm. Maybe.

After four years of toiling in her kitchen, she found the right material. What did she do when she got it right?

``I think,'' Mrs. Albert recalls, ``I actually shouted, `Eureka!'''

Success at last

After she invented her first set of teeth, Mrs. Albert made a second set for a friend. They took the teeth to fern bars - hip places to be in the 1980s - in the trendy Buckhead section of Atlanta.

``It was great excitement,'' Mrs. Albert says.

Mrs. Albert made the ``Lombardi'' false teeth based on a photo a friend gave her of legendary football coach Vince Lombardi's crooked grin. Mrs. Albert says she will make hundreds of the Lombardis for customers. JENNIFER FULLER/STAFF

Later that same year, Mrs. Albert sold her first set of teeth.

She was on vacation at St. George Island in Florida, where a stranger made an offer: $25. He thought the teeth were funny. She thought the $25 would make good beer money.

A commercial venture was born.

After she returned to Atlanta, Mrs. Albert bought an ad in an alternative weekly. It produced a handful of customers. But her teeth designs required personal fittings, so she had to sculpt each set individually. It took a lot of time.

She wrote to the company that made the plastic she used and asked for technical assistance. An engineer wrote back, suggesting she make silicon molds.

It was a major breakthrough.

With molds, Mrs. Albert could sell more teeth without sculpting each one individually. Word about the funny teeth spread, and Mrs. Albert rang up sales.

In 1989, she married Frank Albert, then a state legislator, and moved to Augusta.

The next year, local media picked up on her story, and within months Dr. Bukk was getting mentions in USA Today, Rolling Stone and The New York Times.

Overnight, Mrs. Albert says, she became ``semifamous.''

She and her husband built a corporate office in Grovetown, hired five employees and eventually developed a Web site. Dr. Bukk now has thousands of bite marks on file. Even celebrities seek her gnarled buckteeth.

Dan Marino, Jenna Elfman and Jeff Foxworthy have sets.

By 1998, Mrs. Albert's quest for a cheap laugh became a business with about $1 million in sales.

``We were more successful than we thought we would be,'' she says.

But she still wears them for laughs.

Pearly whites

In 1998, Mrs. Albert started experimenting with another dental product - pretty teeth. Instead of ugly teeth that slip over attractive ones, she figured she could use the same technique to make unattractive teeth look pretty.

She called it Imako, a variation of imago - which means image. She replaced the g with a k, like the k in Bukk. What a wig is to hair, she says, her product is to teeth.

But the first version of Imako failed. It never fit very well, and as a result didn't sell well, either. Mrs. Albert spent thousands of dollars to develop it but never sold more than 30 sets.

In addition, the company came under fire from the Georgia Board of Dentistry, which claimed Mrs. Albert was practicing dentistry. It used the very law Mrs. Albert's husband sponsored as a state senator to try to shut down the company.

In the early 1990s, Mr. Albert helped passed a law banning denturists from selling dentures without a license. He wanted to include language in the bill that would protect the novelty-teeth business but was talked out of it, he now says.

The dentistry board eventually dropped the case for lack of evidence. But Dr. Bukk had even bigger problems. Competitors with cheaper buckteeth and more marketing muscle started cutting into the company's sales.

From 1998 to this year, Dr. Bukk's $1 million annual sales dropped by half. The Alberts fear that big profits from novelty teeth may be lost forever, now that buckteeth are overexposed.

Imako 2.0

Mrs. Albert hasn't given up on Dr. Bukk, though. She still believes buckteeth are funny, and in the past few months she has developed an improved Imako product, which she calls Imako Version 2.0.

Imako 2.0 are a thin layer of flexible plastic that slip over front teeth. The Imako teeth are manufactured in a Chicago lab and are much more sophisticated than the ugly teeth. The Alberts plan to sell them for about $100 - more than twice the price of the buckteeth.

The Imako are pearly white and perfectly straight. And unlike the Bukk teeth, Mrs. Albert has a patent on Imako 2.0 and said she will vigorously defend it.

She acknowledges Imako marketing will be different. The product is not going to sell with word-of-mouth advertising the way the buckteeth did. People who wear Imako teeth probably will want to keep it a secret.

``It's like a padded bra,'' Mr. Albert says. ``You don't tell anybody you're wearing one.''

Once the Alberts figure out how to market their new product, though, they expect to be flooded with orders. The couple says many people with less-than-perfect teeth will want to wear them on special occasions, or maybe just to look more attractive in photos.

Just imagine what Imako could have done for coach Lombardi.

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