Rich Brilliant Willing Pivots to PPE
The dire shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) in NYC continues to be on everyone’s mind. We are applying our lean manufacturing and rapid design approach to work with smaller, agile digital fabricators to fill the gap in the market as the nation waits on large manufacturers to ramp up production.
Collaborating with iMakr, our Industry City neighbor, we've supplied materials to complete assembly of 1000 face shields that will be shipped by the end of this week to 6 local hospitals (including NY Presbyterian, NYU Langone, Bellevue, Metropolitan Hospital, Milstein Hospital, Brooklyn Hospital Center). 9000 more clear shields will be arriving in the coming weeks and donated to digital fabricators to fill the PPE gap.
Our redesign of the BudmenxRBW face shield is currently being reviewed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and once approved, our design will meet the certification required by some hospitals. RBW’s design has reduced material usage and will speed up the 3D printing time to enable more production. Currently the 3D file is available online and digital fabricators have already been printing and assembling smaller batches of face shields to supply their local medical workers. Anything counts now and we couldn’t be more proud to have our network amplify this effort.
