Five generations, one craft

Bryant Laboratories began with a family looking for a way of life that fit their values, not just a paycheck. Kyle’s great-great-grandfather Schaefer spent his career in denominational education — he was president of a school in Jamaica — before a new chapter brought him to rural Oregon, where his own son-in-law, a small-town dentist, taught him the dental lab trade. A generation later, Kyle’s great-grandfather left a farming life he and his wife never wanted for their family and learned that same trade from his father-in-law — inheriting the whole lab within a year, almost overnight, when illness cut that partnership short.

Family and education shaped nearly every move that came after. The lab relocated to Napa specifically so the kids could attend school without leaving home. A drive for education ran alongside the craft the whole way — a year of study in France (where Kyle’s grandfather met Kyle’s grandmother), a return to finish a degree at Weber State, a geology master’s pursued nights and weekends while running the lab, even a PhD in Canada, with the family’s model-making business packed up and brought along, filling orders out of a motel room when it had to.

That same generation built the lab into something bigger: a second location in Healdsburg working side-by-side with fellow craftsmen, a flexible solo practice that could travel anywhere, and — starting with a handful of “very crude” practice models made for a continuing-education dentist named Dr. Koerner — the beginning of what’s now the Koerner Center partnership. The name “Bryant Laboratories” itself came from this era: an artisan craft, practiced by real people working independently from their own homes, with the idea that it could grow by bringing more people into the craft rather than building a factory.

Today, as Kyle’s own children start finding their way into the business, they’re the fifth generation of a family that has spent over a century putting faith, family, and education ahead of convenience — and building a genuine craft in the process.