When millions of respirators landed in Helsinki on a Finnair plane, Anu Kivelä knew Medanta was on the right track

A planeload of respirators and protective suits arrived in Finland at the end of April. Receiving the cargo made Medanta CEO Anu Kivelä reflect on what COVID-19 and the crisis it caused taught her: “At least that designing and making safe antimicrobial clothing and protective equipment is the right way to go,” Kivelä writes in her blog.

The last Saturday of April was one of the most memorable days of my life. I rarely use such an expression, but now there is a reason for it. When my mobile phone rang in the afternoon with the information that the Finnair plane had landed, I sighed with relief. After all, getting the plane ready for takeoff had been a really big and demanding operation. Protective suits and higher-level respirators traveled on the plane to Finland. Now they are already with our customers.

When my partner Taina Steiner and I founded our workwear company Medanta in 2008, we never in our wildest dreams planned to one day buy a flight from China from Finnair just for our own use. Protective masks were not part of our plans either. Our goal was to change the lives of Finns for the better by making beautiful, functional and high-quality workwear for the healthcare sector and nursing homes. At first, we were mostly met with skepticism on the public side. After all, Finland is a country where beauty advocates are a strange thing. On the other hand, we quickly found partners on the private side. Visionary healthcare companies began to see beautiful and functional workwear as their success factors.

Pandemics seemed like a distant thing when we expanded our business in 2015 and started developing antimicrobial workwear for hospitals and the restaurant industry, i.e. workwear that repels viruses and bacteria. We collaborated extensively with researchers and infectious disease doctors in the field. In recent years, the general public has also begun to be interested in the loss of antibiotic efficacy and hospital infections. After all, approximately 750 people die from healthcare-associated infections in Finland every year. A harmless treatment procedure in a hospital can have really unpleasant consequences for a person.

In addition to developing antimicrobial clothing in Finland, we have been working closely with Chinese textile experts and factories. Now, during the crisis caused by the corona virus, this ten-year long-term perseverance and the professionalism of our Chinese partners are becoming more valuable. There is now a real war going on in China over protective equipment, and a big country and a small Medanta can be on the same line. Now that we cannot travel to China ourselves, we can trust that all the goods we order will be as promised. Among other things, we demand that our partners go to the factory to video and photograph the completion of production.

As is often the case in good business, the idea for the respirators came from our customer. Pihlajalinna’s procurement manager Henna Rantanen contacted us back in February and said she wanted to order 15,000 fabric face masks. She said that the pandemic would change things rapidly and that it would be a good idea to prepare now. To be honest, this still seemed a bit unreal to me at the time. Many experts were still talking about seasonal flu. But we got to work right away, and I remember telling my partner Taina Steiner that we would now do this job properly, more than just the last minute. Our experts thought about the materials and our master modeler made a prototype of the protective mask.

Suddenly, calls started coming in from other customers, and the situation seemed dire. For example, healthcare companies were worried about their customers because the advice from experts was so contradictory. We had a constant hotline to China. Prices for surgical gowns skyrocketed in an instant, and suitable materials were hard to come by. Even the most seasoned procurement professionals were confused because normal supply chains were no longer working.

During the corona period, we have manufactured millions of disposable masks and hundreds of thousands of protective suits in China. We have manufactured 40,000 fabric face masks and 120,000 more will be produced during May. There have been enough delays and setbacks. Not all the protective suits could fit on the Finnair plane, and now they are being transported to Finland by train from Shanghai for two or even three weeks. In addition to the China trade, we also run our normal business. Our antimicrobial workwear is in high demand now, because workwear is being changed more often than usual due to the corona.

And of course, in this difficult situation, we are also loyal to Medanta's basic idea, which is to appreciate beauty and design. We will soon be launching a safe designer face mask. Six different designs are coming into production and the range is expanding all the time. As corona restrictions are eased, people want to protect themselves. After all, protection is already mandatory in China. We will open an international online store in May.

At Medanta, we have been able to believe in the long-term development of antimicrobial products and the importance of the quality of protective clothing. And what has this crisis taught us? That we have been on the right track.