Growth Due to COVID 19

COVID 19 has made a lot of trouble for a lot of people all over the world. Economies have been twisted and turned upside down, people have lost businesses, and families have lost loved ones. However, COVID 19 has made me a lot of money at my business. I work as a manager at a medium sized textile company that manufactures textiles for commercial and industrial use. We ship hundreds of thousands of products daily all over the country, and our sales have almost doubled due to the pandemic and our quick reaction time. 

When COVID was first becoming a threat to us in the United States, we were originally very concerned with the way our economy was headed. It seems that multiple parts of every industry were being shut down one after another; we were sure that we would be next. Our textile products were not necessarily deemed as essential for the wellbeing of our country, so we were sure that we would have to temporarily decrease production or shut down entirely as COVID swept over our country; however, things began to take a turn around when we had plans drawn up to manufacture face masks for the general public. In fact, we were given a monetary grant from the government to cover any necessary changes in capital or machinery that would allow us to create textile fabric for facemasks and other PPE. This was a huge breakthrough for us and is exactly what we needed to stay open for the year of the pandemic.

We quickly worked with our designers to come up with a blueprint of fabric and stitching for our facemasks, and brought our engineers in to work out any problems with our current manufacturing processes. While we are set up to produce textiles, slight modifications had to be made in order to accommodate a switch to creating personal protective equipment like facemasks. As soon as our selection was live through our website, we had orders absolutely flying in from retail stores all over the world trying to get a hold of them. The biggest buyers were places like Walmart and Target, who were quickly looking to stock their shelves with facemasks. We unfortunately did not tap into the medical market, as none of our products were medical grade and were tailored more to the everyday consumer. We still had no trouble selling our masks; in fact, we had trouble making enough of them every day to be able to ship out to our buyers.

Not only that, but we also had problems when it came to shipping and packaging. We were sending out hundreds of thousands of shipping boxes each day, and still we could not keep enough on hand to keep any sort of inventory. To get more shipping boxes, we had to start outsourcing our own manufacturing of boxes and start buying them from a foreign wholesaler of boxes. This ensured that we had enough boxes to ship out our products in. We also had to increase productivity in the factories, so we hired more labor and increased our wages on a full scale level. This brought in more employees and allowed us to see some great increases in efficiency and productivity in our workers. While COVID may have been an awful time for some, it turned out to be a really good thing for my company.