Covid-19 Face Shield research, development, & distribution
When Covid broke out & the US economy began shutting down in April 2020, I felt I had the rare opportunity to do some good. My father owns an automotive manufacturing business in Michigan (PGS), and with automotive production on hold, I proposed a solution rather than shuttering the factory. Pivot it in the direction the economy was headed: PPE (personal protective equipment). Specifically, face shields. We got to work immediately (him with the engineering expertise) creating a way to manufacture shields as quickly and easily as possible. The goal was effortless scalability to suit whatever demand we encountered.
Project:
Unitage
Position:
COO/Head of Sales
Discipline:
Medical Healthcare
Duration:
March 2020 - November 2020
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It wasn’t long before we secured a huge contract to supply Henry Ford’s chain of 40 hospitals with hundreds of thousands of face shields (Unitage face shields were used to conduct the highly politicized Hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus studies conducted @ Henry Ford Hospital). After that, we were able to secure lucrative deals with Google’s Waymo division, among others. After producing over 750,000 shields to meet the immediate demand presented by covid-19, demand from institutions began to fall. However with seamless production, I wasn’t ready to pack up that easily. Following a successful B2B sales strategy, I pivoted the business to a new B2C campaign. The goal was to leverage another hot ticket item; the 2020 US elections. To do that, I created a thin, interior-facing decal that worked seamlessly with the existing manufacturing design & would allow for branding on every shield. Total COGS 57¢/unit for standard shield & $1.26/unit for branded shield. They were sold for $1.50/unit & $3.50/unit respectively with profits margins of 62% & 64%. With this I took to amazon, creating listings for every possible political organization on the spectrum (to maximize my TAM). As all of this was going on, I took my first flight since returning from Greece just prior to the outbreak in the US. What I noticed was, every TSA officer was wearing a face shield! But to my extreme dissatisfaction, they were all wearing a competitors shield. Specifically the ugly “FACE SHIELD” blue foam shield manufactured by the boatload in China. As you can probably imagine, I created a slew of new designs & got to work making every connection at TSA & DHS possible. Negotiations proceeded very favourably & I spoke with very high level people in the government regarding my product, however with the decreased threat level of the virus, TSA no longer required its agents to wear face shields. That was that & after we sold that last election design in November, Unitage returned to being PGS & automobiles returned to the manufacturing lines as if no time had passed.