New Balance Making Personal Masks In Two Northeast Factories

Just one week after a group of New Balance engineers met to discuss a design for a personal facemask, in consultation with local medical and R&D institutions, the Boston-based company’s Lawrence, Massachusetts, shoe factory started the transition from manufacturing the MADE 990 footwear model to personal facemasks. 

The production started on March 30 in Lawrence and has taken less than a full week to fully scale up to producing 8,000 units daily in Lawrence, starting April 3, all part of an effort to help with a response to needs brought on by the coronavirus. And the Norridgewock, Maine, New Balance factory has joined in, starting production on April 2 with the hope of being at full scale by Friday, April 10, with 12,000 units per day. At scale, New Balance hopes to produce 100,000 units weekly across the two factories.

“We found there to be a tremendous need just for the general population, especially given the stay-at-home orders and governors of states saying that if the population goes outside, they should wear a facemask,” says Kevin McCoy, New Balance vice president of domestic product development and manufacturing. The full transition from footwear to personal protective equipment can “help out some people on the front lines and give our associates who could not wait to reach in and help their communities.” 

McCoy says his engineering team used footwear manufacturing techniques and filtration material from partners already in place in the greater Boston area. Using a combination of materials on hand at local suppliers and other materials used as reinforcers in the footwear industry —the design for fixing the straps on the facemask is a footwear material that would have otherwise gone to a landfill — New Balance was able to start production nearly immediately. 

To ensure the mask is easy to produce, New Balance crafted a unique design that allows them to simulate the way they build footwear. “While the item might be different (than footwear), the mode in which we put it together is similar,” McCoy says. “We designed it so we could produce a high-quality item and we could scale it. It is a relatively familiar process for our manufacturing associates so we wouldn’t have to retrain anyone.”

New Balance has called the new effort MADE Medical. For now, though, expect just the facemask. “In our industry, you try to make one and incrementally improve that to perfect it,” McCoy says. That said, New Balance is also working internally to create prototypes and explore collaborative opportunities to optimize 3D printing capabilities the company has in North America to potentially produce additional PPE
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products, such as gowns and foot coverings. 

New Balance is working with the states of Massachusetts and Maine to determine how and when they can start distributing the masks. Being this first wave of product is geared toward the general public, New Balance expects to charge “strictly to cover our own costs” in some situations while donating the masks in other areas. New Balance will continue to work on the design and with material specifications to, ideally, meet FDA requirements and create a product that can be confidently used by frontline medical staff. 

“I think what we are trying to do is service as many people as we can, trying to make sure we stay in front of this,” McCoy says. “We haven’t really thought about what happens after. We are in the here and now and in the moment producing as many items as we can to help as many people as we can.”