Dutch people rejoiced focused most on taking off the mouth cap and this weekend the time had come: the mouth cap obligation has largely expired. This also means that entrepreneurs largely stop making mouth caps for consumers, and are already working on new plans.
“I will continue for a while, because there are still people who feel safer with a mouth cap. But I am full of new ideas, such as sewing welding caps!”, says Albertje Sok proudly in her one-man business Mondkapjes Atelier in Westerbork.
Sok started making mouth caps before the lockdown. “I was a bit bored and thought: I’m going to make mouth caps for charity. Then I sewed together about 1500 euros for the Hartekind Foundation.”
Sok made the mouth caps with a lot of attention, she spent a lot of time in a good fit. “Now I make a profit with it, but I am not Sywert van Lienden, you know. I was alone behind the sewing machine almost day and night. My mouth caps were sold in Limburg, Zeeland, Amsterdam and even Belgium. In total I have 10,000 made face masks.”
From printing labels to making mouth caps
For other entrepreneurs, making mouth caps was necessary to survive the corona crisis. “Before the corona crisis, we made labels for clothing and other textile products. There was less demand for this during corona. To absorb this decline, we also started making cloth face masks,” says Marloes Evers, marketing manager at EE Labels in Heeze.
The high demand for face masks was therefore seen as an opportunity by some entrepreneurs. No record has been made of how many face masks were needed during the corona crisis, but it is expected that there will be hundreds of millions. The large use of medical masks in the Netherlands even led to impending shortages in care.
Now that the mouth cap obligation has expired, the number of orders is declining. But the company in Heeze has already found something else for that. “We hope to sell the stock via our webshop, for example to people who are going to fly. But we have now set up the production of the elastic for medical mouth caps,” says Evers.
Those rubber bands of medical masks for behind the ears were previously only made in China. “We now supply the rubber bands for the production of medical face masks. There is still a future in this, because they will still be needed in the healthcare sector. So if we no longer have to make mouth caps for consumers, we can still continue with the production of rubber bands. says Evers.
How do you make a virtue of necessity? These entrepreneurs in the clothing industry explain what they did during the corona crisis:
–
