“Deciding to make masks saved the factory”

Martí Làzaro and his fam­ily run a small tex­tile com­pany in Pineda de Mar. Sporty spe­cialised in cus­tomis­ing sports­wear “for clubs, groups, events and com­pa­nies” until March this year, when the Covid-19 pan­demic forced the pop­u­la­tion into lock­down. “Sports events have been one of the most af­fected sec­tors, be­cause they were can­celled one after an­other and with them the pos­si­bil­ity that we could sell our prod­ucts,” laments Lazaro. Faced with a dark fu­ture and an­tic­i­pat­ing that the sit­u­a­tion would not be end­ing any time soon, the Làzaro fam­ily asked them­selves how they might ad­dress the new pro­fes­sional chal­lenges fac­ing them.

“After Sant Jordi we saw the pos­si­bil­ity to man­u­fac­ture cus­tom masks and the idea pleased many of our cus­tomers and dis­trib­u­tors, who thought it could work,” says the young busi­ness­man. What was sup­posed to be an al­ter­na­tive and timely so­lu­tion has be­come Sporty’s star prod­uct in re­cent months. “We wanted to do it right, using top qual­ity prod­ucts and ap­proved fil­ters. Our masks have three lay­ers: one of tech­ni­cal fab­ric, the inner layer with the fil­ter and a third layer of poly­ester with an­tibac­te­r­ial treat­ment,” he says. The masks come with a kit that in­cludes two fil­ters and an ad­justable elas­tic band to hold it in place.

Once prod­uct de­sign was fin­ished – they now have four mod­els – the prod­uct was launched onto the mar­ket in May. The sales fig­ures re­ally sur­prised the fam­ily. “At one point, 100% of pro­duc­tion time was spent on masks and the six of us didn’t have enough time in the day to meet or­ders,” he notes, adding that de­spite the change in prod­uct, there was no need to change the ma­chines they use. “We have all the pro­duc­tion processes in­side the fac­tory and we did have to ex­pand from one to three work­shops to be able to meet all the de­mand,” he says, be­fore stat­ing that “de­cid­ing to make masks saved the fac­tory, oth­er­wise we might not have had a fu­ture.” Al­though it was the same cus­tomers who placed the ini­tial or­ders, open­ing up to the mask mar­ket has al­lowed the com­pany to ex­pand to new sec­tors “which will come in handy when we have to pre­sent new prod­ucts, be­cause our net­work of con­tacts has be­come big­ger.”

Martí re­calls that after a sum­mer where “we only made masks”, au­tumn has seen the re­vived pro­duc­tion of sports­wear. “Some clubs and schools have bought equip­ment for the new sea­son and we’ve been able to re­cover some pro­duc­tion, but the dif­fer­ence is still abysmal and masks make up 80% of every­thing we do right now.” There was a point where Sporty was mak­ing a thou­sand masks a day. “Now the av­er­age is be­tween 500 and 700,” says Martí, who is mod­er­ately op­ti­mistic about the fu­ture. “The masks will con­tinue until year’s end for sure and then we’ll see how every­thing evolves, whether there’s a vac­cine and some nor­mal­ity re­turns... I’m sure some sport­ing events won’t re­turn, but we hope that new ones will emerge,” he says.

covid sto­ries