“We haven’t stopped working a single day”

Dani and Al­bert Fibla are broth­ers who de­cided to start a busi­ness seven years ago. Both had lost their jobs due to the cri­sis. Dani is a draughts­man, Al­bert a me­chanic. At the time they were smok­ers and began to pay at­ten­tion to va­p­ing shops – which sell elec­tronic cig­a­rettes – as they were spring­ing up every­where. Dani be­came in­ter­ested in the busi­ness and dis­cov­ered that al­most all of the prod­ucts sold here came from Ger­many and Italy. There was no pro­duc­tion in Cat­alo­nia.

In 24 hours, he set to work and began to apply for per­mits from the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment. After a week we said to our­selves, “Let’s start mak­ing them.” And they did. The be­gin­nings were in a small nine-metre-squared work­shop in El Mas­nou. “If we made 10 pots a day we were happy,” they re­call. Now, in their ware­house in Vi­las­sar de Dalt, where they have 10 em­ploy­ees, they pro­duce 10 pots per minute.

“Our team is made up of peo­ple who were also un­em­ployed. Friends...fam­ily...ac­quain­tances. We man­aged to es­tab­lish a great work­ing en­vi­ron­ment and every­one has re­sponded when called upon in dif­fi­cult times,” say the two broth­ers from Alella.

Just as the first cri­sis in the va­p­ing sec­tor had been over­come – about 80 com­pa­nies like theirs closed in Spain – the coro­n­avirus pan­demic ar­rived. “In our com­pany, we have ma­chin­ery ca­pa­ble of pack­ag­ing a prod­uct that there is sud­denly a great de­mand for hy­droal­co­hol,” ex­plains Dani. So the ma­chin­ery was put to a dif­fer­ent use. “It was dif­fi­cult at first be­cause of the whole issue of prices, and the gov­ern­ment even had to in­ter­vene,” they ex­plain. But they have not stopped work­ing a sin­gle day dur­ing the pan­demic. In fact, they had to work over­time dur­ing lock­down in order to cover all the de­mand. “We started work­ing for phar­ma­cists, and we also made do­na­tions to hos­pi­tals,” says Al­bert.

What they thought would be a pass­ing de­mand dur­ing the hard­est months of the pan­demic has now be­come com­mon­place. “When it all hap­pened, we ex­pected it to be a mat­ter of weeks. Then sud­denly we see a reg­u­lar de­mand grow­ing. Like when peo­ple used to buy cough syrup... Masks and hy­droal­co­hol have be­come every­day prod­ucts. We’re also very aware of the hard­ship all this has caused, and we hope de­mand will fall. We hope all this will im­prove and the vol­ume of hy­droal­co­hol that has been gen­er­ated in the mid­dle of the pan­demic will not be there two years from now”, they point out.

These two young en­tre­pre­neurs are al­ready think­ing of other pro­duc­tion lines in order to con­tinue the ex­pan­sion of their busi­ness: the next goal is a line of cos­met­ics.