Daniel Lewis - Earned awards

Earned
awards

Earning awards for products and company culture are a key part in validating messaging that Ultradent and its products really are great. For a lot of dental industry product awards, it’s a simple process: fill out a form with a little info, send in a sample, and a couple months later you find out if you won, then you get a cool badge to put on the product page. I earned a lot of those awards for a lot of products. But it’s hard to take credit for that with a straight face; the products are good, that’s why they won. I just turned in the submission.

But some awards are a fight.

In 2023, Ultradent was named to People Magazine’s Companies that Care list. Earning this involved a massive set of essays on the company and its culture, requiring dozens of interviews to get quotes and figures from key stakeholders:

From 2021–2025, Ultradent placed in the top ten of Fortune Magazine’s Best Large Workplaces in Manufacturing and Production list. Earning this recognition takes a massive internal PR campaign, as employees filling out the survey is the most important part of the process. If they don’t fill it out, we don’t make the list. I partnered with HR every year to create a multimedia internal campaign to get our colleagues to take the survey. We didn’t want to influence what they say in the survey, we just wanted them to take it. The results were fantastic, with Ultradent placing a high as fourth (2023) and staying in the top ten every year we entered:

Earning Best Mouthwash in the 2026 Men’s Health grooming awards was the result of a great relationship with the editor and pushing to get them some of the first bottles of Opalescence Mouthwash that ever rolled off the line. Knowing the grooming awards were coming up, I worked with our manufacturing teams to acquire some advance samples and send them off embargoed to my contact at Men’s Health. This award was a massive boost for the Mouthwash, which had only come out a few days prior to the release of this article and sales immediately surged:

The NBC Select Wellness Awards are highly influential to potential buyers and despite a great relationship with the team, Opalescence never broke through as a first place winner. Until 2026:

To not violate any copyrights, please visit some product pages to view awards I facilitated between 2020 and 2026. A few key products are below:

VALO:

Gemini EVO:

Transcend: