When the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on hospitals and health care facilities became apparent, we began reaching out to our peers in the fabrics industry, to state officials, and to local hospitals to see how our fabric design and fabrication resources could help create personal protective equipment (PPE). As it turns out, our search led us just up the road to our neighbors, Flowfold.
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| This is Leslie. Leslie is normally busy being the Vice President of Transformit but these days she and a number of other Transformit employees have set aside their 'normal' tasks to help our neighbors at Flowfold make face shields for the essential health care workers who are on the front lines of this fight against COVID-19. |
Flowfold, maker of minimalist wallets, packs, and travel accessories, had pivoted their entire production line to manufacture face shields, a crucial piece of equipment that helps keep health care workers safe during prolonged face-to-face contact with potentially infectious patients.
The team at Transformit, with extensive experience prototyping, creating with fabrics, stitching, and fabricating, eagerly joined forces with Flowfold to help ramp up production of face shields. In the weeks since, with components Flowfold fabricates using an advanced material cutting machine in their shop, we have been producing upwards of 2,000 face shields a week.
Ironically, before this pandemic, which has become synonymous with social distancing and isolation, we had never come together to collaborate with our neighbors at Flowfold even though our shops are just a few hundred feet apart. In addition to this corona-initiated neighborly collaboration, we are also finding ourselves talking more these days with peers and customers to share ideas, lessons learned, and opportunities to help others and each other. And in the midst of the hardships caused by this pandemic are people and experiences for which we are grateful and cherish—the ingenuity and camaraderie of our customers and peers, the community of our neighbors, and the extraordinary generosity of health care professionals who are caring for those in need.