All right. Thank you. And and again, I'm Brian Haynes. What I'm trying, what I'd like to do today is kind of give a perspective on how, you know,
a big company like Kimberly Clark, you know, how we address this this pandemic.
And there's a few insights as we kind of go through the discussion that I think you'll find find interesting.
And if you don't know Kimberly Clark, I don't want you to think this is a commercial, but it kind of sets the stage for the discussion later on.
You're a relatively large company. About $19 billion. And hopefully you've heard about a lot of our brands and one quarter of the world's population.
They use our our products every day. A lot of innovation over the years, 175 countries.
So as you could see Camera Clark Big Company, we have a big global footprint with to make all these different products.
It obviously takes materials and one of the key materials that's used in all of these personal care products and industrial,
you know, surgical gowns, things like that. It's called non-woven and we have a division within Kimberly-Clark called Global Non-woven.
That's where I work. I'm the technical director of that organisation and we're the largest supplier of these non-woven materials in North America.
We're the third largest globally.
A lot of innovation over the years to bring these different materials and these benefits to our to our different products.
Now these materials that are used, for example, one of these materials,
if you could make it a metre wide, it would go from the Earth to the Moon 25 times.
So the message is there's a lot of material that goes into all of these products.
Now, when the when the pandemic hit, it really turned things upside down, obviously, and it's like every day you heard about, there's mass shortages.
We need more PPE for the for the hospitals, for the for the front line workers.
And that's really where Kimberly Clark comes to play.
It kind of goes back to what we talked about earlier in terms of all these different materials that are needed for our consumer products businesses.
For example, how can they be leveraged to kind of help fight the the overall pandemic?
One of the interesting materials, and probably one of the most important materials from a face mask perspective is called melt blown,
and there's some interesting articles that were written. One said that melt blown is the new white gold.
It's actually more valuable than your gold when you think about what it brings
to the party in the Melbourne technology is produces these very fine fibres.
They're on the order of one to three microns in the very fine fibre in the poor structures you could see in the ACM image.
There's really what it allows us to filter out the coronavirus particles, so that kind of sets the stage.
Now why? Why does it matter so much? And there's a few images here that I want to kind of point out.
For example, North Carolina State, there's a non-woven institute there,
and one of the things that really amazed me is how everyone jumped in to help, you know, fight the fight the pandemic.
They actually had some pilot equipment at NC State where they actually, you know,
normally they run experiments and trials and whatnot to help support the industry.
They actually converted it to where they can actually make, you know,
face masks material to go to, to go into product that could be used by the frontline workers.
And even though it's a very small machine, you know, but running continuous operation,
they were able to make a lot of material to kind of help fight the fight the pandemic.
And one of the things I saw a lot of different universities,
other facilities with part with pilot plan operations, everyone was chipping in, you know, to define it.
I know at Georgia Tech I had some colleagues and I was speaking with and they said,
you know, basically, if we're not working on COVID, we're not working on the right thing.
Lots of individuals were, you know, using the 3-D printers to make the little ear savers, for example, for the for the face masks anyway.
So it's like globally everyone was chipping in to, you know, to fight the pandemic.
But melt blown is a very key material.
And when I was in grad school, that was actually the technology that I worked on and I would get multiple calls every day.
People all over the world were looking for melt blown to kind of help fill the mask need.
This is a little fact that you may not know of, but the actual inventor in 09:05 mask is a gentleman, Dr. Peter Sy.
He was in retirement. He went to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. I knew Peter when I was in graduate school.
He worked at the non-woven centre there. He actually came out of retirement to kind of help with the pandemic.
Looking at, you know, what can we do to sterilise the masks? What can we do to make the masks better?
And one of the things that was interesting and I call it competition is Peter, is, you know,
if you call Peter and ask him a question, he would gladly, you know, give you an answer.
He would point you in the direction of the information. He would share information on what to do.
Even so, we could, you know, do a better job, you know, to make the masks more effective.
And I call this competition. And what's interesting is, you know, five years ago, if I would have had a similar discussion with with Peter,
you know, we would have wanted to get the agreements in place. And, you know, it's kind of this corporate veil of secrecy kind of stuff.
But one of the things I noticed across the board talking with people is everyone.
We were in this fight together, OK, we kind of had this common enemy and everyone was kind of rallying to try to fight it.
So it's a way that, you know, you can still compete, right? But we cooperate and that's the competition.
It's I think it's very important.
If you look at what Kimberly Clark did, you know, we really leveraged our state of the art globe and our woven technology that we spoke about earlier,
that we used to make all these different products to help address the PPE shortage.
And when in 72 hours,
we actually made almost eight million face masks for frontline health care workers because it kind of goes back to what I said before.
We have a lot of capacity. We can make a lot of this material within four weeks.
We're making face masks for internal use to protect our people because, you know, if you think about all the plants that we have globally.
So we didn't shut down the supply chain to provide these very critical materials and products.
You know, people still needed diapers and and and toilet paper.
We had to keep our our our workers safe. So we needed to make sure that they had masks and even some of our key suppliers.
We would actually, you know, make masks for some of our suppliers to make sure that we kept them.
Well stocked within six weeks, we already had some internal converting face masks for external distribution,
and within three months we had already approved a major capacity expansions to fuel our business growth.
And certainly some of these you can actually see their press releases.
But the thing that really amazed me was how quickly we moved.
So when we when we have this very large problem to solve, things can happen very quickly.
OK, so when we get motivated and we get aligned, it's easier to kind of drive these things.
I'm pretty amazed. You know, looking back at this, what all we did in such a short amount of time.
So we kind of set the stage of of of how we responded to to do to get the capability in place.
But now what we want to do is where can we go next? OK, and I call this the next frontier.
And one of the key things that I think if any of us have more of a face mask all day long, it's really about comfort.
We all saw, you know, images of the front line workers with the with the masks on there, their faces talking about how laboured it is.
If you have to breathe through an N95 all day long.
So what can we do to make these masks better for the front line workers?
You know, for for current and future use, because I guess it's not a matter of if, but when there might be another pandemic.
So we want to be ready. Next slide. So.
Again, if you've ever wore these all day long,
there's lots of things we got a lot of good feedback from consumers in terms of it feels like it's suffocating.
It's very hot. We've unfortunately, we've heard of things like mask breath.
It can be kind of an unpleasant it just doesn't feel right. It's very hot and moist around your face.
So what we're doing now is we're looking at our technology on how we can make the experience more comfortable for the users.
And what's really bad is there's actually people that and you see this all the
time where they'll put the mask down below their nose and to be comfortable,
they'll actually put the mask in a position where it's not giving them any, any protection at all.
Right. And then I've also seen studies where example a cloth mask, if it's if it's not a like an N95 type,
masks where it can actually break up the respiratory droplets and actually atomiser make it worse versus if you're wearing and like an N95 mask.
So we've done a lot of learning during this exercise,
but our focus now is how can we make these masks more comfortable and also more efficient for the consumer?
And the pandemic really, you know, caused us to kind of focus more in this arena so we can have a better experience for it,
for our consumers and to kind of close things out.
I think one of the key messages is how the industry worked amongst ourselves and also with academia,
for example, to to fight this, this problem through the Co-op petition.
And I kind of noticed that this, you know, the corporate veils of secrecy kind of dropped a little bit because we had this common enemy.
I was really inspired by the opening video.
You're talking about the need for more competition or cooperation between industry and academia to solve these big problems.
Obviously, the pandemic was a major issue that we've all kind of lived through,
but there's other huge, monumental issues out there that we're all experiencing globally.
Yo yo energy, the issue with plastics that we all hear about the plastics in the ocean.
And I think there's an opportunity for us through competition and working more closely together that will be able to solve these problems.
I mean, think about it if if you have two companies in four competing against each other, but then if the oceans die, where does that get us right?
So we need to work on things together to solve the problems.
I think all of the examples you've heard about today is is really shows that we can do this if we're motivated and want to do it.