Nashua Firm Making its Mark on Dental Industry

If your dentist has ever asked you to bite down on a thin piece of paper to measure your jaw pattern, there’s a good chance that paper was delivered by a small company in Nashua.

Bausch Articulating Papers in Nashua is the North America distributor of dental products developed and manufactured by Dr. Jean Bausch GmbH & Co. KG in Germany, which primarily consist of articulating papers.

“It’s a little piece of paper, but it holds so much information,” says Donna Kraus, president of Bausch Articulating Papers. Kraus and her late husband, Ronald, started a small distribution company in 1993 called New England Dental to market dental products. When one of Ron’s cousins married into the Bausch family, he began a conversation with them and found they were traveling to the United States three to four times a year to attend dental shows, Donna Kraus says. So in 1997, the couple started a new company, Bausch Articulating Papers, in their basement, to market and distribute Bausch products in North America. “They asked if we would help out with their specialty papers and increase their market share,” Kraus says.

The staff at Bausch Articulating Papers, from left: Susan Frye, logistics coordinator; Donna Kraus, president; Karen Baker, office manager; and Peter Brown, business development manager. Photo by Matthew J. Mowry.

Under Ron, the business gradually grew until his passing in 2012. With support from her team and the Bausch family, Donna Kraus took the reins. In 2013, she did a complete audit of the company’s marketing strategy and began working with a small marketing agency. That led to an 11 percent increase in sales. The company generates about $2.2 million in annual revenue, which has held steady for the past two years, Kraus says.

All that revenue comes from a focus on people’s bite patterns. For a variety of reasons, dentists need to know how a patient’s jaw is aligned and where the teeth on the upper and lower jaw meet each other. It’s called your occlusion.

For decades, dentists have used slim sheets of paper with ink on them to measure occlusions. The patient bites down on the articulating paper, which leaves marks on the upper and lower teeth showing where they meet. In the early 1950s, a German family of dentists named Bausch developed and marketed a new line of articulated paper that wasn’t just coated with ink but impregnated with ink to leave clearer, exact marks without smudging.  It became the major brand used in the dental industry.

Bausch Articulating Papers has 54 authorized distributors in the United States. Peter Brown, business development manager, who joined the company in January, says the challenge is making sure they are educated about the entire product line, which is a focus of the company now. Kraus is excited that Bausch is planning to roll out a digital product that can be plugged into an iPad and provide a digital image of an occlusion.

For more information, visit bausch.net.