If some business owners threatened by the pandemic saved the day with a deft strategic pivot, then Michael Taylor landed a double axel with a flourish.
Taylor is the owner of West Coast Exhibit Factory, which until this year made custom-built trade show and convention exhibits and booths in a 25,000-square-foot warehouse in Anaheim, California. The company, centered on large group meetings, was thrown into immediate crisis as events were canceled when the virus emerged in March.
“I had 35 people I laid off. I had zero revenue,” Taylor said in an interview. “It was gloomy days."
The coronavirus case count had just reached 1 million worldwide, the stock market was crawling back from a drop, and federal government aid hadn't yet been distributed. Financially, he said, "I have never had such a scare in my life." Getting his 20- and 21-year-old children to follow a state stay-home order was, he added, "like herding cats," as they accused him of "ruining their lives."
To battle ennui and claustrophobia, he moved his living room furniture outside, onto his driveway. He was there, cracking a beer at 8 a.m. with some neighbors, when the idea came: West Coast Exhibit Factory could design and fabricate lots of things, he thought — why not branded hand-sanitizer stations?
Such stations would be in high demand during the most intense parts of the pandemic, when almost total quarantining was necessary, and would be essential to reopening the economy once the crisis eased. And his hand-sanitizing stands would come with a twist: personalized images such as logos or phrases provided by the buyers.
"I saw an opportunity for branding and advertising," he said. "It definitely put your eyes on the content directly in front of you when your hands are under the dispenser."
The challenges of starting the business were substantial. Given the near-total prohibition on in-person sales calls, the company decided to dive into e-commerce as its means of reaching customers — through Amazon, Shopify and its own new website — in a strategy that was no small feat, Taylor said.
"The education has been a hurdle," he said. "I’ve been educating myself on e-commerce because I’ve never been in e-commerce, but we are a true e-commerce company."
Then there was the question of materials. Consumer brands of hand sanitizer were almost impossible to obtain, but Taylor had an in with an Anaheim-based wholesale producer, American Sanitary Supply Co., which is owned by a neighbor.
American Sanitary Supply already made the gel in Taylor’s hometown, which allowed him to sidestep the difficult work of finding a manufacturer that was trustworthy, Food and Drug Administration-approved and able to quickly deliver on his orders. Though his workers could conceive and make most of the components, they could not easily make the sensor-based, no-touch dispensing devices. But once Taylor found a supplier in China, they were set to go.
He and his team went to work, and his new business, Antiviral Station, was born from the old.
“I tweaked a few items myself and made a few prototypes, and we moved directly into producing at my warehouse,” Taylor said.
Once the company had its process down, it was able to go from order to delivery in three to five days.
Antiviral Station sold its first lot on May 13. One of its earliest customers was Orange County, and since then other big names have followed.
Antiviral Station has supplied brokers at Cushman & Wakefield, which posted its wares at elevator doors in office properties. It has a high-velocity model capable of sanitizing 250,000 sets of hands a day that could appear in places such as the NFL's Los Angeles Rams’ brand-new SoFi Stadium.
Taylor said his company produced 3,500 units in September and about 4,000 in October. He has been able to bring most of his employees back already, and orders are growing.
Asked if he would eventually go back to the convention and expo business, Taylor said he isn’t sure.
“I’m not like a lot of my other competitors. I’m pretty OK, and my future is a lot brighter than it was back in April and May,” Taylor said. “I don’t foresee trade shows for a period of at least one year, but it’s hard to predict.”