🔒Opportunity vs. Disaster: How COVID-19 strengthened one company, destroyed another

One of the most frightening elements of the economic shutdown caused by the coronavirus crisis is that its actual toll on the state’s private sector cannot be known until the crisis has passed.

And half-a-year after the pandemic erupted in late winter, still no one knows when that will be.

In Connecticut the COVID-19 pandemic forced thousands of companies large and small to curb or suspend operations.

“Non-essential” businesses — from retail shops to restaurants to entertainment venues — were shut down in late March, and no one knows which ones will survive being closed or having restricted operations.

Nationally, in the small-business sector alone, between April and June as many as 1.3 million companies with annual revenues of less than $10 million closed or suspended operations indefinitely, according to the Wall Street Journal. And the casualty list could top 4 million for calendar 2020.

The same report, based on data compiled by Oxford Information Technology Ltd. of Saratoga, N.Y., also ranked Connecticut the second most at-risk state for small business failures, trailing only Hawaii.

The fates of two respected area companies — both multigenerational family businesses — serve as bookends for the spectrum of outcomes experienced by businesses struggling to cope with an unprecedented public-health event that, in the space of just a few weeks morphed into a global economic meltdown.

Success story: Modern Plastics, Shelton

It started with a seemingly inconsequential post on the Facebook page of Bing Carbone, president of Modern Plastics in Shelton.

“It was March 22, a Sunday afternoon,” recalls Carbone who was alone in his office thinking about what the shelter-in-place order that had taken effect six days earlier in Connecticut meant for his company, and the world.

“That’s the day I came to the conclusion we would go into the business of making face-mask shields,” he recounts.

“They were desperately needed, it was a PPE product, they were not available at the time,” he reasoned. “We’re a plastics company, we know how to manufacture things, so I thought, we can do this.”

To get the word out, Carbone posted on his personal Facebook page that his company was mass-producing its infection control face masks.

Within a few hours he had his first order — for 500,000 shields from the state of Connecticut.

“We had to quickly repurpose the company,” Carbone explains.

As a defense subcontractor supplying plastic components to a range of weapons systems, Modern Plastics had remained open as an essential industry. The 75-year-old company also supplies medical-grade plastics for healthcare applications, including medical devices and surgical implants for clients like Johnson & Johnson, Medtronics and others.

The plastic face shields offer total face protection for workers in hospitals, healthcare settings, restaurants, grocery stores and other close-contact spaces.

Within 36 hours of that initial order, Carbone’s team had “repurposed” the Shelton plant.

“To make a half-million shields every other day, you really have to be creative,” he said. “We had to do a lot of creative and inventive things,” including repurposing existing machinery and reinventing a number of manufacturing processes.

Modern Plastics has also begun manufacturing acrylic plexiglass barriers used in retail, restaurants and casino settings to separate workers from customers. Most of these are custom-ordered to accommodate specific size and shape requirements.

Another new product introduced during the crisis was Mod Clips, plastic clips that prevent surgical masks’ elastic strings from chafing users’ ears. By the beginning of June, Carbone estimates his company had already sold more than 2 million of those.

Since the date of his Facebook post and the end of May, Carbone says Modern Plastics has hired about 100 new employees and produced more than 13 million face-mask shields. In early June the company booked an order for an additional 35 million shields over the next 18 months — 750,000 to 800,000 units a month. Not bad.

Of course, every silver living has a cloud, and so did Bing Carbone’s: He caught the COVID-19 virus. But following a 14-day quarantine at home, he’s all better now.

COVID casualty: La Cuisine, Branford

It was the ides of March but spring was in the air at La Cuisine, the Branford restaurant/catering business that Brendan Bloom’s parents had opened nearly four decades earlier.

The future was bright — 2019 had been the business’ most successful year ever. The long winter — traditionally the slowest season for caterers — was winding down and Bloom was looking forward with anticipation to the busiest period of the business year, booking plenty of weddings and other catering gigs that, along with the restaurant/café on the Post Road, were La Cuisine’s lifeblood.

April was just days away, and that meant go-time.

“The second quarter is when things just go nuts in this business,” he said. “You’re preparing, ramping up, making sure your infrastructure is ready.”

Then the COVID crisis hit. Gov. Ned Lamont’s shelter-in-place executive order was issued on Monday, March 16. Businesses closed their doors and commerce screeched to a halt.

It couldn’t have come at a worse time. Seasonal businesses including La Cuisine rely on warm-weather months to compensate for the long, slow winter months.

But now the world just … stopped.

Bloom “thought it was going to be a temporary blip” — maybe a couple of weeks until public officials got a handle on coping with COVID.

“Obviously, that wasn’t the case.”

Bloom’s wife Christina, who runs the marketing and strategic planning side of the business, warned her husband to prepare for the worst.

As soon as it became evident the lockdown wasn’t going to end in just a week or two, the business was forced to lay off its 25 full-time employees “in order to protect as much cash as we [could],” Bloom explains.

The Blooms applied for and were awarded funding from the federal Paycheck Protection Program, which allowed them to rehire a majority of their workers to reopen, which La Cuisine did during the third week of April for online ordering with curbside pickup and delivery only.

“We did not have online ordering at that point, but we were able to flip it on in a very short period of time,” Bloom says.

But it soon became clear that the restricted revenue stream was “nowhere close” to break-even, Bloom says.

The restaurant side of the business — including 20 tables seating 50 diners on a busy day — was closed indefinitely, with no hint of when it might be allowed to reopen. And the events on which La Cuisine’s catering business relies — from weddings to corporate functions — were being either postponed indefinitely or cancelled.

It soon became evident that the business Ben and Patty Bloom started out of their Guilford home in 1982 could keep going no longer. On June 1, the Blooms announced on Facebook that the end was at hand, and that La Cuisine’s doors would close for good on June 12.

"Ultimately we have decided that our two most important assets, who are 5- and 8-years-old, need our utmost care and focus during these challenging times," the Blooms posted.

For Brendan Bloom it’s a mixture of sadness and regret and a little relief, too. Going forward, “I’m going to live a life that is not filled with gut-wrenching stress and anxiety for a little while,” he says. Because there will be amazing opportunities [emerging] from this experience.”