First I would like to thank you all for your all your overwhelming messages and donations as a reaction to my previous blog ‘life in the red zone‘.
We have received support in all kinds of ways: purchases of the bundle we created with Elite + Zwift to raise money for the hospital in Bergamo, direct donations from some suppliers and customers to this hospital, dealers calling us to place some extra bike orders to support our business, masks and sanitising soap to distribute to the doctors, nurses and other groups of people that are fighting now at the front line to save lives.
We also received loads of emails, calls, whatsapp messages, skype messages, wechat etc providing encouragement to our team. We are all in this together, and together we will overcome! Of course, we also see reports from other countries, some of which take it very seriously and some who still downplay the risks. I just hope none of you will have to go through what we’ve seen the past few weeks.
Untill last weekend, we were allowed to keep our factory in Italy open and continue to ship bikes from our warehouse. But during the weekend the Italian government announced that for the following weeks all companies had to shut down operations except those producing parts for medical use..
All companies were given 3 days to prepare for this total shutdown. Around the same time we figured out that our carbon factory could produce an essential part to turn a Decathlon diving mask into a ventilator mask. This conversion was invented by a doctor from Brescia, and via the Bergamo innovation network a call went out to produce these. And so we started. These ventilators are right now in extremely short supply in Italy, and they save lives, so it’s nice we can still make ourselves useful and literally be a small part of the puzzle.
So during the last 3 days we worked extremely hard as a team to secure 2 things:
1. Start production and get the required approvals to make these valves in our factory
2. Move a large part of our Italian stock to a second warehouse in Denmark, a country still up and running and much less impacted by the virus
And I am glad we made it! 3T is open for business, operating from home and shipping daily from Denmark for the next weeks, while our factory is running 24/7 producing valves.
Our operations in Taiwan and Toronto are also open, with most people are working from home.
Please all stay safe, ride your bike and stay healthy!
