Through a backdrop of economic turbulence and sobering daily press conferences, some glimmers of hope still manage to shine through. Enter Brampton entrepreneur and manufacturer Inti Ali of Premier Gaskets Inc. Inti speaks proudly of his family’s business, run by his father, his mother and himself. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the manufacturer of non-metallic gaskets was serving 12 different industries. Since the onset of COVID-19, the company has had to consolidate its focus to a few clients. This has not been done out of a scarcity of business, but rather from an extraordinary volume of demand from a few clients since the beginning of the pandemic.

“On March 10, one existing client came knocking and it all changed,” Inti says of the day one of his clients – a medical company for which he usually supplies foam pads for medical equipment – had a new request. The client needed Premier Gaskets’ assistance with the supply of speciality foam pads for face shields that their existing supplier could not fulfill. They then placed a significant order for 100,000 of the foam pads. To accommodate this request, Premier Gaskets had to pivot and change some of their machinery and operations. This was not a difficult task considering Inti’s father had originally built the company’s three rotary machines himself. After some retooling, Premier Gaskets began production on the requested foam pads.

Within a week, the client had returned, and this time the request was for half a million foam pads. Premier Gaskets has taken this order and in total they have orders from all their customers for roughly 1.5 million face shields to date.  They continue to get new customer requests for foam pads weekly.