NEWS RELEASE
INTERNATIONAL SAFETY
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The little Ontario tech company that's helping Canada's dentists get back to work safely.
International Safety's employees knew it was their time to shine. An unlikely family-owned safety equipment supplier has been working to supply dentists, first responders and hospitals around the country with inexpensive, reusable masks with P100 filters.
For the team at Newmarket's InternationalSafety.com, e-commerce is nothing new. They have been quietly building their online shopping platform for the better part of a decade, but they have been selling specialized occupational health and safety equipment through more traditional methods since 1993.
"This pandemic has brought on new challenges, for sure, but we have seen similar situations in the past through the SARS pandemic" says KC Chang, one of the managers at the company. "Back then, people lined up around the block to buy masks and it was a daunting task to supply them."
Now, with their in-house e-commerce platform, they have been able to take orders for relatively small dollar amounts from around the country in substantial volumes while still maintaining profitability. "Our online store fortunately reached maturity about a year ago where we were able to iron out the last manual tasks associated with filling orders."
The company is an authorized distributor for companies like 3M and medical devices company Drager. They are bound by contractual obligations to keep pricing in line with prescribed MSRP or manufacturer's suggested retail price, despite there being astronomical demand for their products.
"People don't realize that when you are running a store, educating customers about approvals, and features, entering orders and also charging credit cards or counting change, it's really hard to turn a profit when the end result is a $15 box of N95 masks" says Sabrina, who used to work the sales counter. "Our website has changed all that, all we have to do is pick and pack the product and wait for the Canada Post truck to arrive."
The company received anonymous offers from around the world to buy up their entire stockpile of PPE at up to 10 times their book value early in the pandemic. "It was total insanity back in January, February and March. People were getting pretty aggressive with us, so we eventually had a company meeting to completely close our storefront and only take orders online" recalls Sabrina.
"We also had people coming right from Pearson airport from overseas flights and walking into our store to buy masks and sanitizers. Back then, no one was keeping their distance and things were getting ugly."
The elastomeric reusable half masks from companies like 3M, MSA, Honeywell and Drager range from $14 to $30, while the pair of long duration P100 filters typically sell for about $11 on International Safety's web store, internationalsafety.com.
The masks provide a superior seal to the more flexible N95 disposable masks and come in three sizes to accommodate a wider range of facial profiles. The main drawback to them is that they must be disinfected after use to limit cross-contamination when being shared and that there is an exhalation valve that does not filter the wearer's exhaled breath.
"One of the primary concerns of dentists is that the masks only protect the wearer and not others around the wearer," says KC, "but we have found that wearing an inexpensive procedural mask over the half mask solves this issue and also extends the life of the p100 filters. It provides an extremely high level of protection."
"The good thing though, is that we have many options that even go beyond these half-masks, including full face masks that include a hockey-helmet-like shield with a blower system on the waist that blows filtered air into the mask. This was the preferred solution for one EMS organization in Quebec who rolled out these Powered Air-Purifying Respirators (PAPRs) to their first responders.
"It's been really tough, but in a lot of ways we've been really lucky. There is no way we would have been able to help out our community and be part of the 'Great Canadian Effort' to slow the spread of COVID-19 using the old way of doing things" adds KC. Many years ago we tried using Shopify to sell but there were still holes in the operational side of things. We tried Amazon, too, but that brought on a whole slew of other problems. That's when we decided to go our own way and bring software development in house. We're glad we did."
In 2018, International Safety won an innovation award from their local Chamber of Commerce.
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