Celina Tent on track for banner year

CELINA - When the COVID-19 pandemic caused the event rental industry to dry up, Celina Tent personnel began to fret, thinking they were stranded with the loss of a key clientele base.

"Because the rental companies do not rent anything. There's no parties. There's no anything, and that was our main business as far as the commercial business," Celina Tent owner Janice Grieshop told Celina Rotarians on Tuesday.

But thanks to the unexpected emergence in June of new markets in education, health care and service industries, Celina Tent did not falter and today is on track to post its best year ever.

"Our customer base since that time has been totally different," Grieshop said. "It's just been crazy. We sent so many (tents) to schools, to California, to Colorado. We just can't keep up."

Hospitals, restaurants, breweries, wineries, schools and other businesses came calling, looking to buy tents as a way to spread out people on their premises in accordance with social-distancing mandates, Grieshop said.

"It's probably a cheaper way of getting space than to build on or add another building," Grieshop told the newspaper.

Since June, Celina Tent, which employs 115, has been running on all cylinders to keep up with demand for its products.

"We were fortunate enough to have a pretty big inventory with the warehouse we have here," she said. "We pretty much cleaned our inventory out."

The new markets should remain viable into the foreseeable future with social-distancing measures likely not going away anytime soon, even with the imminent dispersement of the first wave of COVID-19 vaccines.

Celina Tent manufactures and distributes tents, tarpaulin, ducting and military vehicle accessories worldwide. Its products are used in government, rental and hospitality arenas.

Among its products are humanitarian and military tactical shelters. It has provided products for numerous federal agencies, including the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security.

"We do a lot of work with the military, and the military contracts have been coming in also, which is good," Grieshop said. "We've got a humanitarian contract going on right now, and they ship the tents out for when there's tsunamis, that type of thing. So we're just ending that contract out."

The government contracts kept the company afloat when the pandemic broke out earlier this year.

"We were lucky enough to have a couple government contracts that needed to be finished," Grieshop said. "We took all our salespeople and everybody went into the shop and worked. We didn't lay anybody off."

The company then got involved with COVID-19 assistance efforts.

"We did the convention center in New Orleans. We made that into a hospital unit," she said. "We sent 300 10-by-10 (foot) tents out there."

Military tents produced by Celina Tent were pulled from West Coast inventory and used temporarily to quarantine passengers known to carry the coronavirus as they disembarked from the Grand Princess cruise ship. Once the ship docked in Oakland, California, passengers were placed into tents before being taken to hospitals or military bases for quarantine.

Celina Tent has seen its fair share of challenges amid the pandemic, including difficulty in obtaining supplies.

"We're at 100%," she said. "What's slowing us down now is waiting for materials. So we juggle the schedule around."

Shipping, too, is a problem.

"We find it's hard to get trucks in to get the products out," she said, explaining Celina Tent outsources product delivery.

Its workforce stayed free of COVID-19 until the end of September, when the company reported its first positive case.

"And then we've had, I think, nine cases since that, and people quarantined. It is an obstacle," she said. "We have some real good employees who can multitask. If we need help in one section, they can move real quick to that section."