As the thought of lockdown became an almost certainty at the start of March 2020 – we began organising how to keep our employees safe & well, but also organise how we were going to be able to continue production for our Medical customers.

When lockdown was implemented on 23^rd March 2020 – we had reduced our staff numbers down to just 4 of us actively coming to work each day – we also decided that we were going to adhere fully to the guidelines set out and we only produced orders for those customers who were key suppliers to the NHS, emergency services, land, rail and telecommunication.

This ensured our office stayed open while all 4 of us were working on essential customer orders. We received official notification from one of our medical customers, stating we were a key supplier in a medical supply chain – that we were to remain open for the duration of lockdown to assist in PPE & emergency product supply.

In Early April we started to see a lot of advertisement on social media of local Northern Ireland companies changing their production to allow them to make PPE that was in very short supply & that our nurses were crying out for. Later that week, we were approached by one of those companies and we started looking at cutting the protective clear visors for them. By the 3^rd week of April we had supplied 40,000 face shields – these were then sent onto the customer who built the finished shields – all in all there were upwards of 10 Northern Ireland based companies who came together to provide these free of charge PPE products.

Shortly after this we were approached by a local university who were developing incubation kits for ICU departments, this would take the shape of a plastic surround for the patient’s bed, allowing nurses and Doctors more protection while doing their jobs. We supplied quite a few of these for our customers trial phase of their project.  

During the rest of 2020 we supplied half a million head-bands for visors and various other new products to assist in PPE supply and various medical parts. We returned to full staff levels of 13 people in September 2020 with social distancing in place, one person operating one machine, visors up between desks in the office and we continued to do contactless signatures with customers and suppliers. This way of working followed us into 2021 with the lockdowns and 2021 brought a new challenge of supplying over 900,000 medical grade foam parts for one of our long standing medical customers.

Yes 2020 was challenging year for us all, but Northern Ireland companies showed what can be achieved with support and help from a wide range of sectors pulling together.