HIBT Lab! Armbrust American: Lloyd Armbrust

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2022

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Lloyd Armbrust spent the bulk of his career in newspaper operations and advertising...until early 2020 when he started hearing about the spread of a dangerous new virus and a critical shortage of surgical masks. Most masks at the time were made in Asia, and when supply chains started to break down that March, many Americans had a really hard time finding them.

This week on How I Built This Lab, Lloyd walks us through the whirlwind journey of launching a mask manufacturing business at the height of the pandemic, along with some of the factors that hold us back from producing more goods within the United States.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:10.0	Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab.
0:12.6	I'm Guy Ross.
0:14.0	This is the place where we break format and experiment with ideas and stories that you
0:18.9	might not hear on our Monday episode.
0:21.7	So remember the early days of the pandemic when we were all freaking out when you would
0:26.4	literally see someone walking towards you on a sidewalk and you'd cross the street
0:31.2	because you thought you'd get COVID just by passing them.
0:35.0	The days when we were disinfecting packages and mail and even vegetables from the grocery
0:39.9	store.
0:40.9	Okay, maybe that was just me, but it was a scary time.
0:44.6	And even scarier was the shortage of things like hand sanitizer and lice all in most
0:50.3	importantly surgical masks and N95 respirators.
0:55.0	And the reason for the shortage was because most of these products are made overseas, particularly
1:01.0	in China.
1:02.5	And the demand for personal protective gear skyrocketed so high that Chinese manufacturers
1:08.8	at least at first couldn't keep up.
1:11.4	So Lloyd Armbrust and entrepreneur who ran a company that sold ad sales software to
1:16.5	newspapers decided to make a pivot and try to tackle the problem.
1:21.5	And within a few short weeks he literally set up a manufacturing business making surgical
1:27.2	masks in the US.
	...

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