Mitch Cahn saw his entire summer’s worth of production laid out. His shop was going to produce hats for the U.S. Olympic team, manufacturing the line that organization would wear and sell. It was already manufacturing hats for all of the Democratic presidential nominees. Then his company would make more hats for the fall. Presidential merchandise was a lifeblood for Unionwear and the Newark, N.J., factory where they are produced.

As one of the few textile manufacturing factories in the United States, Cahn said, its “Made in USA” emblem was a premium companies want to be associated with. When a presidential candidate or the team representing the U.S. abroad wants a hat, they also want it, well, made in the U.S. — and that’s Cahn’s business.

But everything went awry quickly in early March. All but two of the Democratic candidates dropped out. Then the novel coronavirus pandemic started to hit the United States in full force, dramatically slowing down business along with the rest of the country. A few weeks later, Unionwear cut their staff, too, sending workers home and trying to figure out how they would operate in this new world.

By the end of the month, it found a way to pivot. The company that had been making baseball hats and tote bags would now be making personal protective equipment for hospital workers, creating face shields and hospital gowns out of the same materials they had stocked upon to get through their usual orders.

“We’re figuring it out,” Cahn said. “It’s really frustrating. We’re all driven to make this work. We’re all driven to have actually something that’s helpful and that can get us out of this crisis. We’re driven to make sure our business survives, and we’re driven to make sure that our people are taken care of and are safe.”

At Unionwear, that is stepping into a whole new world. As Cahn tried to figure out how to comply with new CDC distancing guidelines in his factory, he talked to the director of the union that represented the employees at his company. Unionwear has its name because its staff is unionized and a part of Workers United, which is affiliated with SEIU, the union that represents hospital workers in New York City.

Cahn asked his union contact to see if there were equipment needs he could fulfill and did a study of what his company could make. N95 masks were not an option because products made at Unionwear are sewn and sewing leaves small holes, which would allow droplets to get through. Cahn considered gowns, mattress covers and hospital curtains. After the union representative met with the hospital association, the hospital association relayed a few suggestions to choose from.

Isolation gowns and clear vinyl face shields were possible for Unionwear to produce since the materials needed were already on hand. Cahn sent over prototypes on March 24 and got the order the same day, and was quickly overwhelmed by the demand.

“Somebody said we were building the plane as we were flying it,” said Edgar Romney, the secretary treasurer for Workers United.

Each portfolio Unionwear makes has a sheet of clear vinyl and the company was already sitting on thousands of yards of it. Cahn realized how prepared the company was when he received a photo of the face shield: “This is going to be so easy for us because that’s half baseball hat and that’s half portfolio.”

The other challenge was how to make it happen. The factory could no longer be full with people. Instead, he reformatted production with a smaller workforce. As of last week, 36 people came to work in the factory, which is 70,000 square feet, according to its website, while 24 worked from home. Having employees work from home was an unusual step. Workers United prohibits take-home work under normal circumstances, but made an allowance here. Cahn has learned masks can be made by one person but gowns can’t and need a production line, piecing together the homemade parts.

(Aaron Houston via Cahn)

At first, Unionwear had workers picking up supplies from the factory in the morning and then dropping off what they finished in the evening. Several weeks ago, the city of Newark set up roadblocks and the police stationed there weren’t told that Cahn’s was an essential business, he said. Now, he has someone do a circuit around the city to pick up and drop off work.

The numbers have changed for Unionwear. In normal times, it was set to produce 700,000 hats for the presidential campaign by the end of the year, about 100,000 for U.S. Census takers, and somewhere between 50,000-200,000 hats for the U.S. Olympic team, by Cahn’s estimates. All produced and sewn by roughly 170 workers in its Newark factory.

Now, Unionwear is now making 10,000 face shields a day, he said, but can build that up to 25,000 or 30,000 daily. The 1,200 gowns the company makes a day could eventually jump to 3,000.

“We’re creating an entirely new product line in a couple of days,” Cahn said. “So many things were an afterthought but we had to create: What is the product called? How much does the product cost? How do we pack it? How do we pack it? How do we ship it? We had to train all our sales people on it. We had to do this in just a matter of days. We’re still working our way through it. We’re using a lot of online tools so we can answer questions that our sales people or our production people have on the fly. It’s challenging. It’s exciting.”

Cahn launched the company in 1992, after leaving his job as investment banker at Bear Stearns. He didn’t like finance and wanted to be in a line of business that made things. He found a bankrupt factory in New Jersey, closed at the time, and bought its equipment. Then he tracked down its former workers through their union. In 1998, after watching his initial clients move their business to China, he decided to make it a selling point that his products were made in the United States and his workers were in a union.

Running a factory in America, Cahn said, has forced to be adaptable and get used to troubleshooting. He said he has enough supplies for about four to five weeks and is actively working on procuring more but said the U.S. supply chain is working at 20 to 30 percent capacity, most of it having been moved internationally, too. When suppliers tell him they’ll have more in stock in one to two weeks, he knows it’s a tell for an indefinite timeline.

“It’s one crisis after another,” he said. “We just have to adapt.”

Cahn hopes his company will eventually go back to making the products it usually makes. Some clients are putting in 2021 orders months ahead of time because they know supplies will be hard to come by. Orders from the military are on hold, but he expects Unionwear to make first aid pouches and kits for the United Nations and NATO if they have any extra capacity. For now, the hospital gowns and face shields are the priority.

“I hope that demand isn’t that great all year,” Cahn said. “Because that would be devastating for everybody.”

( Top photo of Cahn from January 2019: Aaron Houston via Cahn)