Mint Hill Smiles: How Two Dentists Built a Practice Around People, Purpose, and Community

In November 2019, two best friends from dental school signed a lease in Mint Hill, North Carolina, and opened their doors to exactly zero patients. Within months, a global pandemic shut down elective dental care across the country. By every conventional measure, it was the worst possible moment to launch a business. Dr. Shalini Kamodia and Dr. Stephanie Marvelli built it anyway.

Today, Mint Hill Smiles is a four-doctor, women-owned practice with more than 800 five-star reviews and one of the strongest reputations in the greater Charlotte area. This is the story of how deliberate choices, not luck, created that outcome.

A Practice Designed Around the Patient

Dr. Kamodia and Dr. Marvelli met at the University of Michigan, where they completed dental school together and became close friends. They shared one conviction: a dental practice should be built on purpose, designed entirely around the person in the chair rather than the dentist's convenience or a corporate spreadsheet.

That principle shows up in concrete, unglamorous ways. Every treatment room has a television on the ceiling streaming Netflix, because eyes deserve somewhere comfortable to look. Every patient is offered a comfort menu with weighted blankets, neck pillows, and noise-canceling headphones. New patients receive a tour of the office before anyone touches their teeth, because familiarity lowers fear.

The reception area features a coffee bar, a cookbook library, and a moss wall the founders built themselves over two weekends with two hot glue guns. None of this is accidental. The practice welcomes the people other offices overlook: patients who are afraid, who have not visited in years, or who carry the memory of a bad experience elsewhere.

Two Founders, Two Complementary Roles

The partnership works because each founder plays a genuinely different role. Dr. Kamodia is the integrator. She drives the systems, strategy, finance, and clinical vision. She is the reason the practice adopted advanced technology early, and she leads its pediatric airway program.

Dr. Marvelli is the visionary. She keeps the culture, tends the human side of the business, and makes sure the daily work connects to something larger than production numbers. The warmth patients feel when they walk in, the way the team greets them and remembers them, is something she cultivates carefully. Her clinical specialty is implant dentistry, and she is the doctor patients trust for complex, full-arch restorations.

Both are mothers of young children. Dr. Marvelli frames her ability to take maternity leave and hand the practice to a capable team not as a compromise but as proof of what they set out to build: a practice that runs well without requiring its owners every single day.

Technology That Serves the Person, Not the Brochure

Mint Hill Smiles invested early and aggressively in technology, but always through one filter: does this make care better, faster, or more comfortable for the patient?

The practice mills porcelain crowns in-house using a digital scanner and chairside milling machine. That means a crown is often a single visit instead of two, with no temporary and no return appointment. It uses CBCT 3D cone beam imaging to plan implants precisely and to evaluate children's airways. Digital intraoral scanners replace goopy impression trays entirely. Every set of X-rays is reviewed with AI assistance through Overjet before the doctor sits down with the patient. Multiple 3D printers produce clear aligners, retainers, and surgical guides on site.

The result operates like a modern medical facility while feeling far less clinical than one.

Sleep Better Charlotte: Changing Children's Lives

The work Dr. Kamodia describes as the heart of her career is pediatric airway dentistry, offered under the Sleep Better Charlotte program. Many children struggle with breathing and sleep problems that go unrecognized for years. Snoring, chronic mouth breathing, teeth grinding, restless sleep, bedwetting, difficulty focusing, and behavior labeled as hyperactivity can all trace back to how a child's airway and jaw are developing.

A narrow upper jaw means a narrow nasal passage. A child who cannot breathe well through the nose does not sleep well, and a child who does not sleep well does not grow, learn, or regulate behavior the way they should. The window to influence this is limited, because most jaw growth is complete by roughly age twelve. Treatment during those years, often with a palatal expander, can change a child's trajectory in ways that are far harder to achieve later.

A Mission With a Number Attached

Mint Hill Smiles is working toward donating 5,000 free dental procedures to its community by 2030. To date, the practice has donated 1,152 smiles. That mission takes several forms: free dentistry days in Mint Hill, a community giving event called Smiles From the Heart, and annual international mission trips.

In April 2026, Dr. Kamodia and Dr. Marvelli traveled to the Dominican Republic with two hygienists and three dental assistants. They spent three days in the Bateyes, the sugar cane communities where Haitian refugees have lived for generations, and one day at a local hospital. Many patients spoke only Creole. Many had never seen a dentist. In four days, the team donated 351 procedures.

The founders are clear about the connection. The practice can give this care away because its patients choose it, and the team can travel because the business supports them.

Built for the People Others Overlook

For patients without dental insurance, the practice created Brush365, an in-house membership plan covering cleanings, exams, and X-rays for one predictable price, with no waiting periods, no annual maximums, and 15 percent off other treatment. It is a direct response to an insurance model that has barely changed in decades.

Women-owned and fully independent, with no corporate parent, Mint Hill Smiles answers only to its patients and its values. The practice was recently recognized among the Best Dentists in America, a reflection of the trust it has earned across Mint Hill, Matthews, Indian Trail, Stallings, Weddington, Midland, Albemarle, and southeast Charlotte.

For those who have avoided the dentist, dreaded it, or wondered whether a child's restless sleep means something more, this is the practice built for them. Those interested may schedule a visit, tour the office before anyone touches their teeth, and see what dentistry feels like when it is designed on purpose.Visit the website below to begin. Connect with Mint Hill Smiles, Sleep Better Charlotte, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.