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From industrial-strength cleaning supplies to hand sanitizer with Gett Products

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 Evan Gettinger, Co-founder of Gett Products, to learn about his company’s response to the pandemic and how the Gett Products team quickly pivoted to making hand sanitizer to meet their customers’ needs.

What is Gett Products?

Gett Products is a New York-based manufacturer of professional cleaning products for businesses. We supply businesses around the world with industrial-strength cleaning supplies. With three generations of experience, Gett Products is committed to developing and delivering no-nonsense products that get the tough jobs done.

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

We’ve worked with our suppliers for 10-20 years. However, COVID-19 completely disrupted our supply chain. We’ve had to overcome three main hurdles. The first was getting access to raw materials, to manufacture our products and package them. The second was the price increases across the board. Our suppliers had to pay more for their products, so in turn, we had to pay more as well. Because of these price increases, we had to face a third hurdle which was the changes in payment terms. Despite working together for over a decade, we had to pre-pay for a lot of materials.

How did you change your business in response to COVID-19?

Gett Products made several changes to our product portfolio in response to COVID-19. We quickly pivoted to making hand sanitizer to meet increasing market demand. Once guidance was issued by the FDA, we registered as an FDA facility and were able to formulate healthcare-grade hand sanitizer that our customers needed. In addition, we stepped up our production of hand soap and our EPA-registered disinfectant to meet the increasing demand. In the past, most businesses who used our concentrated disinfectant formulas were commercial cleaning companies; now we’re seeing requests coming in from all types of businesses. In response, we’re registering it in more states and developing a “ready-to-use” disinfectant formula that doesn’t require mixing and can be used more generally.

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

As we expanded the product line, we also expanded our network of suppliers and came to heavily rely on our CRM system to do that. We are very proud that during this time we were able to hire more people too. We expect that to continue! This experience has led us to develop even better systems and processes, making our team far more agile and solutions oriented in the face of challenges and uncertainty.

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