Bizwomen shield kids
Firm makes PPE for youngsters
Some superheroes wear plastic.
The three women behind the New York-based company Little Lives PPE have sold hundreds of thousands of medical-grade face shields during the pandemic to help protect kids from coronavirus and prevent them from spreading the disease to others.
Now, as the city gears up for the first day of in-person learning — elementary schools are to reopen Sept. 29 and middle and high schools on Oct. 1 — they hope more parents and schools will buy their products.
“My son’s a typical thirdgrader. If you put a cloth mask on him, or any kind of mask, he’ll chew right through it,” said Little Lives PPE co-founder Alexandra Stanton, who launched the company with Dr. Gabrielle Page-Wilson and Dr. Samira Brown. “And then he touches the outside of the mask ... and within 10 minutes [he] is rubbing his eyes. And now the gig’s up. Now we’re done.”
“I’ve learned so much in working with these amazing doctors, about how much more kids are protected by adding a face shield to a mask,” she added. “I knew this was something we needed to make.”
Page-Wilson and Brown, two Black women who met at Harvard Medical School, saw a gap in the face-shield market back in March when coronavirus hit their hospitals.
“We are all very concerned about the health and wellbeing of health care workers and all of our colleagues on the front lines,” said PageWilson, an endocrinologist at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital who divides her time between treating patients and clinical research that looks at the effects of COVID-19 on diverse populations.
“But as a mother, my mind quickly went from the front lines to thinking about how to protect my children,” PageWilson said.
So she talked it over with Brown. “One of the things we realized very quickly is that there’s a limited amount of high-quality PPE for kids made in the U.S.,” Page-Wilson said. “We started throwing around the idea of potentially creating it.”
Page-Wilson enlisted help from Stanton, a savvy businesswoman who could help get their idea off the ground.
Together, the three women founded Little Lives PPE in May. By July, they had already secured a partnership with the Bronx-based North American Plastics and began selling their recyclable, BPAfree face shields, which are manufactured in upstate Rochester.
Little Lives PPE calls its face masks PediaShields. They come in two sizes — a mini for children between 2 and 6 years old, and a mega for children over 6, teenagers and adults. They cost $7 each, and are sold on the Little Lives website in quantities of 10 or more.
“We went from idea to sales in 11 weeks,” Stanton said. “It was incredible.”
Brown said the material they used in their product was a key y factor, as some manufacturers use materials that contain carcinogens or endocrine disruptors that lead to developmental problems.
Another consideration was that some kids who contract coronavirus can get very sick.
“As pediatricians, we understand that children [are] very vulnerable,” Brown said.
“Initially, there was misinformation f about [how] they couldn’t get COVID — and if they got it, they couldn’t transmit it. We now know all of o that is incorrect.”
“Both the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics have indicated that there are groups of children who also may not be able to feasibly wear a mask, particula arly for an extended period of time — and that often involves very young children, preschool-aged children ... and those who have various special needs” she added.
“Now that kids are back in school and day care — and we know that developmentally children have a harder time doing those things like social distancing — it’s essential to providing the best level of protection possible.”