The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Company revamps, reopens to crank out medical supplies
It was a Friday when Chris McCormick halted production at his Maryland company and furloughed its 23 employees as the novel coronavirus spread across the country.
McCormick had hoped Hatch Exhibits, which makes colorful displays and pop-up exhibition booths for some big clients, could ride out the crisis with the income expected to come in with one or two big jobs on the books. But the outbreak killed those projects, contributing to losses that had run into the millions of dollars.
By Monday, however, McCormick and some of his people were back at work. They had effected a dramatic turnaround, designing and producing medical gowns and masks with the same type of materials and techniques he had used to make banners and graphic displays. Now the Elkridge-based firm can hardly keep up with the nation’s frantic demand.
“Hope and purpose — that’s what we’ve got,” McCormick said. “We have something do. We’re not sitting here waiting for other people to act. We get to act. But it’s tough, man.”
McCormick, 47, who along with his wife established the business about five years ago, said the idea to reconfigure his production line came to him while he was watching the news on television.
As New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo described the dire need for personal protective equipment, McCormick thought, why not use his idle factory to make it? The next day, McCormick called in some of the staff and set to work on prototypes for masks and gowns that they created by studying designs they found online. Many designs were set up for 3-D printers, which he said can be marvelous but slow tools to use. He thought his company’s equipment — machines that handle and cut acrylic sheets and textiles — could do better.
“We had workable gowns by Monday and workable headgear by Monday,” McCormick said.
As word spread through social media, such as the firm’s Facebook page, orders started rolling in.
“It’s scary how much need there is,” he said.
At one New York hospital, medical workers were each provided with a single mask and told to take good care of it because they might not receive another. At another in Washington state, workers were reportedly fashioning masks and gowns out of office supplies.
President Donald Trump has called on private corporations to switch gears and produce medical gear, including ventilators, that are needed to treat people with the coronavirus, and some private businesses and corporations have responded. Ford, 3M and GM have teamed up to produce ventilators; Apple has said it will try to locate supplies for health care providers; and Fiat is using an auto plant in China to manufacture masks for the U.S. market, Bloomberg News reported.
McCormick said his firm has already sold about 10,000 units of headgear at about $10 a pop — which he knows would have cost a lot less only about three months ago. The company is working to iron out the kinks with the supply chain for its medical gowns, having come up with models that are still too expensive to produce. But he says it won’t be long before that problem will be solved, too. On Wednesday he was driving a batch to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to see if they would pass muster.