JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – A popular teeth-straightening brand that shipped aligners to customers’ doors has shut its doors immediately — leaving customers without support or new aligners, including several in Northeast Florida.
SmileDirectClub has been in business since 2014 with more than 2 million customers. The company sold itself as a cheaper, more efficient alternative to braces or big brand retainers.
But the once $8.9 billion company is shutting down – after filing for bankruptcy – claiming it’s $900 million in debt. Treatments have stopped and so has customer care.
“Seemed very legit. They had a, like a little office in San Marco off Hendricks,” Smile Direct customer Stephanie Austin said.
Austin is one of several News4JAX viewers who wrote us about getting caught in the middle of the closure. She said her teenage daughter started Smile Direct two years ago for a gap in her front teeth and just finished.
“She still has a little gap. But I think that’s more of just her being 16. And she sees things that the rest of us don’t. I think there was a change in it, wasn’t an immaculate change. But she was unhappy with it after she completed it,” Austin said.
Austin completed her $77 monthly payments, but she said now the lifetime warranty is out the window, and her daughter doesn’t have access to support.
RELATED | Sound Off: SmileDirectClub suddenly shut down. Were you left hanging by the orthodontics company?
Other customers are required to continue paying for the aligners, even though the business has folded.
“So a lot of these people have been treated, and they’re midway through treatment. And now, we’ve performed irreversible procedures on these people, we started moving teeth without actually evaluating their underlying issues,” Dr. Pauline Le, dentist at Le Dental Spa, said.
Le is a dentist in Nocatee who said has been aware of problems with SmileDirectClub for quite some time.
“There’s a lot of DIY aligners on the market that push profits over patients. And they solved a way to build a business, and a lucrative one at that,” Le said.
According to Le, a big reason why this company did not succeed is because they were misdiagnosing treatment and did not give its customers the support they needed.
“So throughout this entire process, there is not a dentist evaluating your case and curating a customer custom treatment plan to you,” Le said.
On Tuesday, News4JAX visited SmileDirectClub’s office at Unity Plaza in Riverside. The doors were locked, the lights were off and there was no one in sight.
Austin said she found out the company had shut down through News4JAX.
“I did not get any notification on this not via email, not through the mail,” Austin said.
She also said she feels for other families who got the news mid-treatment.
Meanwhile, the company is urging people to see their dentists for a new treatment plan.
So, what happens if you were expecting aligners in the mail?
The company said it is not shipping any new products, and it is waiting for the bankruptcy process to move forward before releasing information about any potential refunds or next steps customers can take.