SHNUGGLE
NEWTOWNARDS-BASED company Shnuggle diversified into making PPE when the coronavirus pandemic hit the firm’s core business. Sinead and Adam Murphy were building the company into a leading name among parents with products such as an air bedside crib, air flow mattress, rocking stand, toddler baths, bath stands and many other creations. But the growth was interrupted when Covid-19 arrived in the UK, and the country went into lockdown. Although UK sales remained strong, imports were hit and Shnuggle’s owners turned their attention to designing and creating a face covering that would help save lives. Adam and Sinead quickly realised that they could help make a difference in the national effort to provide Personal Protective Equipment items. After taking measures needed to sustain the business, including taking advantage of UK Government furlough and business loan schemes, they set about creating and growing notfor-profit business Hero Shield. Adam said: “We had seen a few initiatives that had popped up all around the world. “A lot were printing 3D face shields so we kind of sat down with our head of design who was on furlough and said, ‘can we come up with a design here that we could start producing at rock bottom price and we’d prefer it to be a reusable one rather than a disposable one?’. “We came up with designs over the course of a weekend, by Monday we had done 20 different designs and 3D printed them on our prototyping printer and we’d put out a call on Linkedin to local companies who wanted to get involved and within a very short space of time we had about 20 different businesses all saying, ‘Yep, we can do that bit and we’ll do it free of charge or we’ll do it at cost’. “We said that we weren’t doing it to make money. We were trying to help the NHS and other care workers so we founded another company which was Hero Shield Ltd and we set it up as not for profit so nobody could take any money out of it. Alongside that we did a crowdfunder to cover the costs so we raised £35,000 in the end. “We managed to produce and ship out about 100,000 face shields in about six weeks.” Adam and Sinead are working to secure charitable status for Hero Shield Ltd, which is still running on a non-profit basis, and is now focussing more on charities and care services that don’t have the funds for whatever PPE they might need to get back up and running. Sinead said: “The businesses that were actually producing the face shields, we passed the orders to them and they have turned it into more of a commercial venture because we got a massive order from the NHS. “It was worth shy of £1m and we needed to focus back on Shnuggles, so we passed it over to them and they pay a royalty into the Hero Shield charity for every one that they make.” So having helped the NHS in Northern Ireland, Adam and Sinead are now focused again on their core business – creating and marketing clever products for babies and children.