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Positive pivots: from furniture to medical devices with Frog Furnishings

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned our world upside down, with small businesses being hit especially hard. This is a pivotal time for SMBs, and the way they respond to the pressure will determine how their business runs for years to come. Many companies are taking this difficult situation and turning it into an opportunity. In our Positive Pivots series, we're diving deeper into what these innovative businesses have done, and what lies beneath the surface to produce this kind of creativity and resilience.

This week we spoke with Nick Paradise, General Manager of Frog Furnishings, to learn about his company's response to the pandemic and how being prepared, having unflappably positive attitudes, and innovating through the open source economy is keeping them on top — and helping to curb the spread of disease.

What is Frog Furnishings?

We're a furniture company that makes outdoor furniture out of recycled plastic. We serve a lot of markets — park and rec, schools, municipalities, universities, private business, hospitals. We make 95% of our products out of recycled plastic, and then also have some steel.

Where do you get your supply from, and was it impacted?

We have factories overseas in China that supply some parts — so there's been some impact there, but it's not a huge piece of what we do. So we have a lot of control over our supply-chain process — being a manufacturer and having everything made right here in Kansas City.

How did you prepare or respond to changes at your company?

We saw this coming in advance, and were already doing things to make sure our entire workforce could work from home, like taking inventory of whether people have the hardware and skills to work remotely. But we supply to FedEx, Amazon, hospitals — so we did have the ok as an essential business to be manufacturing and shipping. Even after communicating with customers that we were shutting down, order volume wasn't slowing a lot. So we had a three-man shipping team come in, but everyone else was working from home.

Thanks to Jack, the company's president, we have some good cash reserves and are strong financially. So every employee is getting a full 40 hours of pay. But to be prepared, he got in touch with his banker in advance of any legislation passed and asked that he stay on top of things however he could. So when the small business bills passed, we were the first to apply and be processed in Kansas. That will help us continue to pay people if we can't go back to work. Our goal is no layoffs, no furloughs, and for people to keep their health benefits.

I also put out a one-page letter to all customers explaining our plan to shut down. But when orders kept coming in, we updated the letter and sent it to all employees and customers again. We've gotten positive feedback already, from people saying they understand where we're coming from, and everyone knows we're assessing our business on a weekly basis, and what our plan is this week might not be our plan next week. We also communicated with the few suppliers we have, and everyone's been really understanding. The conversations are easy to have because every business is affected in one way or another.

How did your products pivot during this unusual time?

I have a doctor friend at KU Med who called and said they heard about containment boxes a doctor in Taiwan made, and shared the design for them. It was a five-minute video that the doctor put together, showing how he made the box, and showing how the box protects the doctor when they're doing an intubation on a patient. If that patient is sneezing or coughing or spitting, the particles are contained inside the box and they don't get out into the room, or all over the doctor.

I took it to my engineer the next morning, and he set up the drawings for our CNC router. Luckily for us, we had just installed this brand-new router machine about two months ago, and it allows us to make really, really high quality products. It was perfect for this product.

So we had this big, expensive machine just sitting there for the last three weeks, and suddenly we had a way to use it and make products for the medical field. Interestingly enough, we also had a bunch of polycarbonate and acrylic sheet sitting around that we use for message centers, like at a park — putting a map or directions inside it. It was exactly what we needed for these containment boxes.

Day two we spent figuring out the specifics on the router, and we had a prototype in two days. KU Med had been working with a company that said that they could probably begin production in about three to four weeks, and we literally had our first prototype.

Frog Furnishings' first prototype of the containment box

We shared it with another doctor at a hospital in our network here in Kansas City, and they made some modifications and quickly had a phase two prototype that he actually used on 15 patients last week. The hospital loves them and is purchasing these containment boxes for 14 other hospitals under their umbrella.

How do you think the pivot you made in response to COVID-19 will impact your business long-term?

This is something that might actually become a new product line for us. We made an internal decision that we are going to be doing them basically at cost during this time. The hospital was shocked, and said the price would normally be five or six times what we were asking. It's not about profits right now, but in the future we are absolutely going to look into it.


Want more stories about resilient SMBs, resources for the coronavirus economy, or information on how you can digitize your business to make more sales? Head to Alibaba.com/BuildUp!

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