Sam Hooper was paying the price for retooling to make personal protective equipment.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Hooper had changed production at Vermont Glove, the company he owns, to meet the needs of a country short on masks as it was caught off guard by Covid-19.
“We had pivoted to making face masks during summer, at a time when nobody could get them,” Hooper told VTDigger.
By the holidays, demand for gloves was up, but the Randolph glove-maker was unable to switch production back in time to meet the surge in popularity of the company’s traditional products for gift-giving season. It missed out on a lot of potential orders.
“We were short on product at the final hour,” Hooper said. “We weren’t able to capitalize on all the demand that was there.”
This year is different. Vermont Glove kept making gloves through the summer.
“While we made twice as many gloves as we made last year, we’re still going to have a hard time keeping up with demand,” Hooper said.
This year, the bottleneck is caused by quarantines.
“The pandemic is still definitely affecting our operation with regard to being able to keep everybody in the building, manufacturing constantly — doing the responsible thing quarantining folks and then losing production hours there,” he said.
One selling point, Hooper said, is the work gloves, ski gloves and mitts are made in Vermont.
“We’re really happy with the support that we’ve been getting from our customers in the sense that they want to buy from us rather than whatever’s on a ship outside LA,” he said. “I think for the first time, the American consumer is starting to rethink how they consume products.”
Hooper said his entire supply chain is domestic. Still, he said, the shortage of truck drivers has affected him.
“Take, for example, buying leather,” Hooper said. “We’re buying a lot more with the anticipation of a longer lead time.”
Hooper said finding skilled workers is a challenge but not one caused by the pandemic.
“We’re talking about highly skilled workers hand-stitching gloves,” he said. “It’s just not a very common thing that you see on people’s resumes these days.”
So the company trains its employees, which takes about three months. But it takes a trained employee to train a new one, so during the holiday rush, when the company needs all employees making gloves, Vermont Glove is not training any new workers.
It’s still a very small company: 14 workers, nine of them stitching the goatskin gloves by hand.
Customers buy online, and some do so from as far away as Australia, but the company mainly relies on New England retailers such as Outdoor Gear Exchange, Common Deer, Lenny’s, Alpine Shop, Shaw’s General Store, and AJ’s Ski and Sports.
