Nova Scotia Company Making Protective Masks Affordable
HALIFAX—When Sherrie Kearney sewed her first cloth mask, she couldn’t have dreamed it would completely transform how she ran her business for the next three months.
Kearney owns the Maritime Tartan Company and runs the business with the help of her husband Dale Kearney. Traditionally, they sell hand-sewn scarves, bags, robes, and other items adorned with tartan patterns.
That business ground to a halt when the Covid-19 pandemic reached Canada, and that’s what prompted Sherrie to start making protective cloth masks
But the Kearney’s move into face masks was more about helping her community than padding her profits.
Dale says he and Sherrie realized early the pandemic would be bad for a lot of people, and they wanted to help.
“We knew that there’s going to be a lot of people needing help,” Dale says. “People are losing jobs and work is drying up, so we decided let’s just do some [masks] for charity.”
With their normal sales nullified they had lots of fabric lying around. Dale says they lucked out and easily secured some elastic as well, “so we said we might as well just do it, and we just went from there.”
Sherrie took an afternoon and played around with a couple of patterns, eventually settling on a simple square folded in an accordion pattern with elastics attached.
She wanted something that was good quality, but simple and easy to make. That way she could sell them cheaply enough that almost anyone could afford one.
“We were seeing face masks popping up on the internet for sale and they were very expensive, anywhere from $15 to $35. A lot of people can’t afford that, so that’s why I made the mask that I made: it’s simple, it’s quick and easy to make, and it’s very reasonably priced,” she says.
They posted their first mask on their website in early April. Orders started rolling in shortly after. Before long, they had sold 1,226 masks, for $8 each, and raised $10,000 for charity.
‘You Only Need So Much For Yourself’
Once they hit their $10,000 fundraising goal, Dale says people started telling them to think about their own business and make some money for themselves.
Both he and Sherrie are giving people by nature, so the decision didn’t come easily.
“We even looked at getting CERB,” Dale admits, “and then we thought, well, other people are going to need CERB, so let’s just save the money for them and we can do something, we can get by, and that’s what we did.”
Sherrie says she decided to keep the masks priced at $8 and offer free shipping to most customers “because a lot of people aren’t working, and we’re not looking to make our fortune off this. We’re looking to help out as much as we can.”
“You only need so much for yourself, the rest is just greed,” she says.
As it turns out, not being greedy is very good for business. Since April 8, the Maritime Tartan Company has sold close to 10,000 masks, all hand-sewn by Sherrie.
“There are so many orders coming in for masks, it’s just unreal,” Dale says. They started opening to the public for an hour once a week to sell masks but had to stop because they were selling 800-900 masks in that hour and it was too much.
Dale says the plan was always for the masks to be temporary, but every time they set a date to return to their normal operations more mask orders flood in and they must push it back.
“We’ve already delayed our opening twice,” Sherrie says. “We’ll say let’s see what happens in two weeks and that rolls around and we’ve got hundreds and hundreds of orders, so we say two more weeks, and … by the time we finish these orders a possible second wave will be here, and then we’re going to be swamped again.”
The Latest Adaptation
Pivoting to mask-making happened almost overnight for the Maritime Tartan Company. But Sherrie is no stranger to adapting.
She’s a trained digital animator by trade, but her business after a stroke and two heart attacks forced her to start working from home.
Her grandmother taught her to sew when she was eight years old, and in 2013 she started a company that made cloth sock monkey toys.
She snagged a Canada 150 design license, and even sold one of her monkeys to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
When sock money sales began to slow, she started selling tartan products. Tartans started selling well so she and Dale capitalized on them by rebranding to the Maritime Tartan Company in 2019.
Dale says they still run the business out of a small room in their condo.
That works just fine for Sherrie. After battling pneumonia, bronchitis, and COPD she has breathing issues, and it’s scary for her to go out with Covid-19 lurking in the environment.
“It’s a whole new world out there, and I like to be home where it’s safe,” she says.