The first line of defense

CELINA - A hometown company is harnessing its wellspring of ingenuity to churn out new products to protect retail workers, health care professionals and the public during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Visions/AwardCraft, a leading global manufacturer of corporate awards, has shifted gears in recent weeks, turning its focus to making what it's dubbed health guards and intubation hoods, director of operations Matt Suzuki said. The products serve as barriers against the highly contagious novel coronavirus that's sweeping the nation.

"We were discussing how, officially, the grocery stores are kind of the front line and there's not a whole lot of protection," he said. "We started looking at protective guards and things of that nature, trying to tweak our business a little bit so we could help out during this time," he said.

The health guard is designed to protect essential workers such as grocery store cashiers from contamination when dealing with shoppers. They're going up at Wagner's IGA in Minster and soon will be in place at other retailers, both big and small, throughout the United States.

"We're producing what we're calling health guards for supermarkets and things of that nature," Suzuki explained. "It's an acrylic guard that's a barrier between the customer and the cashier to protect from the airborne COVID-19."

The 30-by-30-inch panel is made of a quarter-inch-thick acrylic and is available in multiple mounting options. Visions has the capability to imprint names and logos on the health guards to make the panels less obtrusive.

"There's lots of other companies that are doing this now as well, so we're not the only one, but we were kind of one of the first ones to come to the table with some of this stuff," he said. "You'll start to see them in Walmart, you'll start to see them in grocery stores. It's catching on like wildfire."

With their eyes to the news, company officials about four weeks ago began actively brainstorming products that could assist during a coronavirus outbreak, Suzuki said.

Visions was well poised for the task as the company specializes in manufacturing a broad range of awards and other products, many of them custom ordered, made of wood, resin, crystal, marble, glass, metal, magnets and other materials.

"We do a lot of acrylic fabrications," he said. "We've got a couple lasers and a couple C&C machines that we do quite a bit in acrylics and that's why it was kind of a good fit for us to jump in and diversify the company and help the community and help the U.S. because we're sending them all over the place to protect those front-line workers."

Officials didn't have much difficulty in adapting their procedures. Health guard production got underway about two weeks ago.

"It's something different that we haven't typically made, but it's all the same machinery, it's all the same processes that we currently use," he noted.

Officials looked to their already-established distributors to get the health guards to where they're needed.

"A lot of them are already working with grocery stores and liquor stores and gas stations and hardware stores, so we've got a good outlet to get this product out to the marketplace and have done pretty good so far," Suzuki said.

Visions has also begun turning out intubation hoods for use by health professionals when treating COVID-19 patients who need to be put on ventilators. Intubation involves placing a tube down a patient's throat.

"It's an acrylic box that sits over the top of a patient's head," he explained. "This helps protect the health care workers, that they don't get the aspirations from the patient's mouth if they're infected or if they're sick. It kind of contains it in this box."

Knowing that many health officials worked in tight spaces, such as in ambulances, Visions designers made their intubation hoods collapsible.

"These are made to break down, to be washed and to be put back together and to use on a patient," Suzuki said.

Visions personnel have gotten good feedback on the hoods from hospitals and plan to ramp up to full production next week.

"We've already started producing it. We've got several in hospitals' hands in Ohio, especially," he said. "We've got several big hospitals that potentially, from the numbers that we're getting, could be ordering several hundred to a thousand of these at a time."

Suzuki foresees both the health guards and intubation hoods becoming staple safety products, even after COVID-19 eventually subsides. It just makes sense to add that extra layer of protection during traditional flu season.

For the time being, Visions is committing a majority of its commercial focus to producing these products.

"It will certainly be our focus. Our company absolutely wants to help stop the spread of this," he said.

Visions produces roughly 35,000 awards monthly for financial institutions, hospitals, safety programs and big-name tech companies as well as clients such as NASCAR.

The company founded in 1992 has about 120 employees at its Celina facility at 1 Visions Parkway as well as 300 in other locations.