Hockey manufacturer Bauer makes masks for healthcare workers during coronavirus pandemic

Hockey equipment maker Bauer is producing masks and protective visors for medical professionals amid the coronavirus crisis. Hockey CEO Ed Kinnaly joins Yahoo Finance’s On The Move with the details.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: Let's move on from trying to prevent coronavirus from taking hold in our bodies to protecting our bodies and particularly that of health care workers. We are joined now by Ed Kinnaly. He is the CEO of Bauer Hockey, which normally makes hockey gear, clothing, equipment, et cetera-- right now is diverting at least some of its manufacturing capacity to making masks for front-line workers. Sir, thank you for joining us.

And we've heard from a lot of companies that are doing this. How exactly do go about doing it because, yes, you probably make masks for goalies, for example, but it's quite a different matter to make a different kind of mask. So how do you shift your manufacturing to address something like this? And, Sir, if you're on the phone, you might be muted and need to hit *6 in order for us to hear you.

ED KINNALY: Good afternoon. Thanks for the question and thanks for the invite onto your show. The conversion to this type of manufacturing wasn't all that difficult. We have a couple of facilities in North America, one in Liverpool, New York, and the other outside of Montreal, Québec, that has some-- what I call small scale specialized manufacturing, that we build lacrosse helmets in New York and ice skates In Québec. We were able to very quickly, in a matter of 36 hours, build a prototype mask.

We sourced some raw materials locally from New York State as well as the province of Québec and built prototypes, built some jigs, so that we could build these more easily, and then focused last week, really, on building multiple workstations in both locations. So a very entrepreneurial approach by our team in both locations. And we're used to doing some specialized manufacturing, and this was quite a different type of product, but the process in which we approached the challenge was quite similar to what we do in some other things.

DAN ROBERTS: Ed, Dan Roberts here. Thanks for joining us. If we can zoom out and just talk about the sports world right now [AUDIO OUT] as [AUDIO OUT] pretty well makes either sports merchandise, sports events hard because not only do you have the professional side paused with the NHL, but, you know, there isn't youth hockey or anything like that.

Obviously, most important is that you're helping to make these masks and this equipment, but when you look at kind of the calendar, and obviously, no one really knows anything right now, but A, is Bauer hopeful that the NHL will get to resume its season? And what are you hearing from Commissioner Gary Bettman?

And then B, how much have you watched kind of the other sports leagues right now and taking cues from them or from your kind of senior companies that make other equipment for other sports? Because everyone in the sports world is going through the same thing right now. We had the chairman of Fanatics on yesterday, and they make the official jerseys. And obviously, business has ground to a halt for them in terms of all the sales they do at stores and in stadiums. So just give us a sense of your outlook right now for NHL and for that business.

ED KINNALY: Yeah, great question. So just a-- I'll take a step back, a little bit about our company. Bauer Hockey is part of a holding company called Peak Achievement Athletics. And the other brands that are in our portfolio that we manage are Eastman Baseball and Cascade Lacrosse and Maverik Lacrosse. So from, you know, from a broad consumer sports perspective, we've been looking at different sports and the effects of the league shutdowns and youth sports shutdowns across the board.

Look, I think right now, you know, the things that we're focused on is making sure that we're leveraging the strength of our balance sheet, which we feel highly confident in. Secondly, we're working with our partner retailers. As you guys know, the business, the retail business has effectively shut down. And there is some e-commerce, but honestly it's not material at this point, and that's really fallen off too because of the follow-on impact of the youth leagues coming to a screeching halt.

The other thing that we're doing across the portfolio of brands is starting to think about when we come out on the other side of this thing, what's the call to action to get consumers back on the fields, in the rinks, and back in the stores to help stimulate the economy from a sporting goods perspective and working on strategies right now to try to do that.

We're very realistic. If we see-- if we achieve some of the unemployment numbers that our economists are throwing around, there's gonna be what I expect to be a relatively slow ramp back up for purchases through the lens of the impact on disposable income and consumption that we expect to see out there.

So, you know, we're focusing on what to do when we come out of it. We're also looking at our supply chain and working with our third-party vendors offshore to make sure that we're not building too much inventory, which has its own set of challenges down the road.

JULIE HYMAN: Ed Kinnaly is the CEO Bauer Hockey. Thank you so much for joining us.

ED KINNALY: Thank you, guys.