Strength in Flexibility: Teak Isle Manufacturing

It has been more than a month since Gov. Ron DeSantis first gave a stay-at-home order, and during that time, essential businesses have done their best to stay afloat.

It’s also been a time that has seen many companies step up to help other businesses and people during the coronavirus pandemic. Among those lending a supporting hand is Teak Isle Manufacturing in Ocoee.

Although it is known more for making supplies for boat owners and builders, Teak Isle Manufacturing has been making PPE products since about mid-March, said co-owner Pat Brown.

“It became very evident that this thing wasn’t going away and was just getting serious,” Brown said. “We had boat builders either opting to shut down or being forced to shut down, and what we did to begin with was we found a design for some face shields that were needed. We built a bunch of face shields for the state of Florida and other testing centers.”

Before it could get that process going, the company had to make changes to how it operated — a task that presented its own problems. 

Face masks and hand-sanitizer stations were easy enough to put into place, but implementing social distancing in a warehouse setting is more difficult, Brown said.

People move around one another constantly, but Teak Isle Manufacturing found a solution. It utilized a large warehouse where the company normally stores outdoor Nativity sets it makes. In that space, work stations are separated the required 6 feet, giving workers the room to put face shields together after they’ve been cut by one of the nine Computer Numerical Control machines.

With that problem solved, the company got off to a fast start. In the span of the first three weeks, Teak Isle Manufacturing went from having never made any face shields to making 12,000 per day.

“There was a real shortage where a lot of the cheap stuff from overseas wasn’t available,” Brown said. “Most of that now has been restocked, so we kind of had to move on from the face shields to the restaurant dividers and petitions.”

By the time Teak Isle Manufacturing got around to the Plexiglas partitions, it already had missed out on the rush to get the partitions into grocery stores — although those are generally done by the companies that make the checkout stands, Brown said.

So, Teak Isle Manufacturing began working on barriers for restaurants and others. 

“What we did to begin with is came up with parts that yielded well out of different sheets,” Brown said. “There are a lot of areas where a 48-inch-wide by 30-inch-tall piece is plenty big enough.

“For the restaurant barriers, we’re able to do a variety of different sizes and shapes to make those barriers fit the ideal way they would want them to fit, as well as make them a little nicer to look at from a standpoint of really fitting them to their decor,” he said.

Currently, Brown said, Teak Isle Manufacturing is producing around 50 to 75 dividers per day.

Although the dividers aren’t a magic bullet, they offer at least one extra layer of protection for workers and customers. Of all things, it’s that extra sense of safety that Brown believes will help the most. 

The idea is if people see those safety measures being taken, they will be able to move a little easier into their old routines.

“There are going to be a lot of people (who) want to go out, but there are going to be a lot of them that are going to like to see some kind of barrier, just to make them feel a little bit better,” Brown said. “Whatever we can do to find a way to get those (restaurants) back, that’s a good thing, because that is a tremendous amount of the economy in this state.”