The press release came just now, and as I looked at it I thought, “I know that guy in the picture.” It was Todd Miller, CEO of Isaiah Industries in Piqua, OH. We used to attend the same church. I put one of his metal roofs on my house (which helped me sell it quickly and got me to Illinois). By the way, I vouch for the metal roof.
Much like the Polish engineers I wrote about last week who set up a face mask production line in a hacker space, Miller reports Isaiah Industries pivoted from metal roofing to metal nose strips for face masks responding to Covid 19 and have produced and shipped approximately 500,000 metal nose strips for face masks to over 3,000 people at no charge. Requests for the rust-free strips are coming in at a rate of 40,000 per day at www.metalnosebridge.com.
“Our current production capacity is around 100,000 strips per 8-hour shift,” says Miller. “With a total shipping cost thus far approaching $25,000, we have been blessed by several individual and company contributions to our effort. As a company, we did receive PPP funding which has allowed us to stay open and be able to contribute to COVID-19 crisis relief in a meaningful way.”
According to Miller, the company has had several commercial requests to produce strips for large manufacturers of face masks. “Interestingly, we’ve always dreamed of having a division of our company producing products for the medical industry,” says Miller. “Much as we all regret the COVID-19 crisis, it could be the unlikely route to achieving that dream.”
As the daily demand for face masks continues to grow exponentially, Miller and his team have gone into overdrive to help hundreds of thousands of people across the country. Miller says the requests are coming in so rapidly (several a minute) that he had to pause the website temporarily so his team could catch up with orders. He also said they will be charging for shipping, but not for the product, moving forward.
Way to go, Todd. Another example of innovation in response to crisis by manufacturers.
