Meet Alex Peck of Luxe Grillz

Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex Peck.

Hi Alex, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
When I was in high school, I worked for my friends, Robertino, dad’s jewelry store in Beverly Hills. We specialized in buying luxury watches (Rolexes, Breitlings, Audemars Piquet, Piaget, Panerai, etc…), other brand-name jewelry (Cartier, Tiffany & Co) and luxury handbags from the public, then re-sold them online and in our Beverly Hills store. My role included buying from clients interested in selling their items, listing new purchases on our website + Ebay Store, customer service, and anything else my boss needed me to do. It was an amazing experience with a ton of responsibilities and my boss was a hard working Italian who taught me that to be great at anything in life, it requires a ton of hard work. This was my first experience working in the jewelry industry and it was a blessing to work for a small company where I was exposed to everything needed to run a small business.
I get started in the grillz industry because I met a friend-of-a-friend who was in the early stages of starting his grillz business at a birthday dinner when I was 18. I interned for him for free for a few months, helping where I could before I attended USC. While I was at USC, I was not as involved in the grillz business because I was a full-time college student and working on a few other side endeavors in the cannabis space and even tried starting a company with my friend Ryan called OG Cycles. At OG Cycles, our business model was to go to police auctions, purchase about 5 beach cruisers for pennies on the dollar, repaint them, then attach gas motors on them with hopes of reselling the custom motor bikes for a profit. Unfortunately, neither Ryan nor I had any engineering experience and never perfected the construction of these bikes.
During all this, I would contact athletes and upcoming rappers on Instagram to see if they were interested in shopping for grillz, but it was far from a full-time job. While I was at USC I invested into the grillz company, becoming a minority owner, while I completed my studies and worked on other side businesses.
After I graduated from USC in 2019, my good friend from high school, Robertino, gave me an opportunity to work for him in the marketing/SEO field. He gained a ton of experience working for his uncles’ business, Bob’s Watches, and at this time he had started his own marketing firm where he managed the website and SEO for several clients across different industries. One of his clients was a cosmetic surgeon in Santa Monica and owned a med spa, another of his clients specialized in buying gold from the public, and Robertino and his dad were starting TCB The Car Buyer at the time where they bought cars from the public then resold them at car auctions to the highest bidder.
I helped Robertino on all his clients’ accounts, learning on the fly, then when COVID came around in 2020, I decided I wanted to use my SEO experience to start an ecommerce business, assuming that people might be stuck at home for a long time. After studying a few self-help books, I decided it was time to start Luxe Grillz, which I dedicated my time to making it the leading online store to shop for custom grillz regardless of where you live in the world. I quickly realized that combining my knowledge of the grillz industry with my SEO experience might be a good idea. It didn’t hurt that many people were receiving free EDD money for the government, which they used to pay me to make them grillz. Also, I noticed that most people in the grillz industry do not have strong websites and they do not offer a mailing system: we mail mold kits to all of our clients who do not live in Los Angeles. And we quickly noticed that there are a lot of people living in areas where no one offers custom grillz, so we were, and still are, the obvious choice for them.

I was very lucky because I experienced instant success and was making sales as soon as I built the website www.luxegrillz.com. This added fuel to the fire and I was off to the races. It was also very convenient that since grillz are custom made to specifically fit each person’s teeth, there was no need for me to invest in any inventory. Whenever a customer placed an order, I would take photos of their grillz before delivering the grillz to the client, then I would add these grillz to my website. We very quickly had a website with over 1,000 items and continue to add new designs based on the orders we receive from our clients. It was and still is an amazing business model. The customer leaves a deposit or pays in full, then we custom make their item in under 8 days and mail the final product to our client. We just moved into our 3rd office Downtown in the Jewelry District, but when I was just getting started, I would meet clients at the grocery store adjacent to my parents’ house. It is cool to see how far things have come as we approach our 5th year of being in business.
At first I only focused on making grillz and growing Luxe Grillz, which kept me very busy, but my grillz clients frequently told me they wish I offered traditional custom jewelry as they had poor shopping experiences working with other jewelers in Downtown LA when they wanted to design a custom ring, bracelet, pendant, or earrings. This led to me starting Saracino Jewelry. At Saracino Jewelry we specialize in all custom jewelry pieces, with a focus on engagement/wedding pieces. We also currently have licensing deals with USC and the US Navy where we use their logos to design custom jewelry pieces and pay each organization royalties on each sale. My family members do not wear grillz, so owning Saracino Jewelry has allowed me to work on engagement rings, anniversary and birthday gifts for my loved ones, which is very meaningful to me.
Two or Three years ago, a dental lab tech distributor reached out to us with hopes of selling us a 3D intraoral scanner. These scanners are used to scan patients teeth and are a modern way of taking impressions. I was very interested but did not want to spend $25,000 on something that I was unsure if it would be able to design grillz and help us cut costs. After a ton of trial and error, and working with a handful of sales reps who were tasked with proving to me that their scanner can design grillz that perfectly fit my clients’ teeth, we finally figured out the proper settings to account for the “shrinkage” that takes place when you 3D print pieces and then cast them into the desired metal. Mastering this opened more doors than I realized at the time. This scanner allowed us to keep customers’ teeth on file, cut manufacturing costs, cut down our manufacturing time, and allowed us to put grillz files into jewelery CAD designing software and create new, custom grillz designs with ease. We were essentially designing grillz the way most jewelry designers create custom pendants and rings, when most of our competition was still making grillz by hand using dental wax and carving tools.
Shortly after we figured out how to properly design insanely creative grillz using 3D CAD software, dentists from around the world started contacting us to make grillz for their patients. The most important aspect of us adding the 3D scanner to our workflow was that dentists from around the world could email us scans of their patients teeth and we could started designing custom grillz for dentists’ patients all around the world. This led us to starting Dental Rite (www.dentalrite.com) which is our newest company which we are very optimistic about. At Dental Rite, we operate as a luxury dental lab where dentists around the world send us their patients’ scans and we make custom grillz and permanent gold and diamond crowns, then we deliver the products directly to the dentist’s office. It is business-to-business and I have an awesome team of dental advisors who own equity in the business and are very happy to help me with anything I need. We are currently hiring our team of sales reps and supply chain specialists to prepare for our global launch, and we could not be more excited.
Through all the ups and downs I’ve experienced with running my own company, the most important thing has always been for me to surround myself with smart, hardworking business partners who are share my vision but also add experience and knowledge in areas that I do not specialize in. We are a very well-rounded team and I am excited for our future.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I got really lucky and found the perfect niche industry to join at the right time.
Since we only specialize in custom products, we do not carry any inventory and our overhead is very low. We like to remain lean and not have an abundant amount of unnecessary expenses.
There have definitely been struggles along the way though! Very infrequently, we have had manufacturing issues on rush orders or a client has a certain deadline they need to have met and luckily everyone we work with is ambitious and willing to put in whatever time and energy is needed.
One time I agreed to work on 6 diamond pendants for this popular streetwear brand, Rhude, fashion show, and I only had 2 days to complete the projects from start to finish and the owner of Rhude, Rhuigi, offered to fly me out to Lake Como, Italy for the fashion show and to deliver the necklaces. Halfway through the project, I realized that my passport was expired so I had to fly my friend in from Arizona to pick up the necklaces, then he flew them to Italy for me and had himself an all expenses paid SOLO vacation.
It was a stressful 2 days but everything worked out exactly how it needed to and I am lucky my manufacturing team was willing to work all day Sunday for me to get the necklaces completed in time.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Luxe Grillz is currently my most popular company. It currently generates the most revenue and takes up most of my time but I foresee Dental Rite eclipsing Luxe Grillz in revenue + time spent within the next 6 months or so.
At Luxe Grillz, we specialize in custom grillz (removable jewelery made for the teeth). They fit similar to a thin plastic retainer or night guard and are usually feauting custom logos, diamonds, engravings, opals, and other gemstones.
What sets us apart from our competition is our use of a 3D scanner and Dental CAD softwares to complete all orders, our global mailing system (sending moldkits to customers houses anywhere in the world), our quick 7 day manufacturing turnaround, and our unique SEO-focused approach to online marketing.
For our brand, I am very happy to say we do our best to exceed all expectations for our customers. We are able to complete a ton of orders on a monthly basis, about 110 grillz per month at this point, and we have not lost our attention to detail and all orders are completed in about 7 days. And we have only received 5 star reviews from anyone that has shopped with us, which reassures me that our clients are very happy to have worked with us.
We have also had the great opportunity to collaborate with many respected companies like Fenty, PETA, Coca Cola, Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford + many more.
At Luxe Grillz, we pride ourselves on breaking the industry stereotype that grillz are “ghetto” or only for people in the hip hop community. Most of our clients are not the stereotypical grillz wearers and create some amazingly artistic designs which we work with them to bring to life.

What makes you happy?
Spending time with my family/friends and making money makes me happy.
I love running my companies. I feel like it’s similar to playing a video game in “story mode” where I am able to see the benefits today from the work I started 6 months prior. Every day, week, month, and year we make progress and I do my best to continue to grow the companies and grow as an individual.
I started Luxe Grillz when i was 24 and there was a lot of trial and error and maturing needed on my part, but I have great parents and I’ve had great role models in my life who continue to mentor me on a daily basis.
I also love the Lakers and having a good time. Balancing everything is key.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.luxegrillz.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/luxegrillz
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/luxegrillz
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@luxegrillz
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/luxe-grillz-diamond-and-gold-grillz-los-angeles

Image Credits
N/A
We own all images