Bold innovations help GOJO thrive during COVID-19, create 140 billion Purell doses in 2020

Carey Jaros remembers the moment vividly when she had to make her first bold decision in January 2020 as the world was figuring out what to make of the COVID-19 virus.

She was on the job for less than two weeks as the new president and CEO of Akron-based GOJO Industries, maker of Purell sanitizer.

Jaros, 44, had just succeeded Mark Lerner as leader of the company with deep Akron roots on Jan. 1, 2020.  Lerner had told Jaros, who had been with the company since 2016: “You may think you’re ready, but you don’t know what it’s like until you’re actually in the seat,” Jaros told a crowd at the Akron Roundtable on Thursday.

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Then came that day in January when she and colleagues were sitting in a room at GOJO.

“We had to make the decision — before the virus had even come to the U.S.,” she said. “Do we turn all of our plants — and at the time was two, now there are five — do we turn on that capacity 24/7 and start making stuff not knowing what’s going to happen?”

“I remember everyone was sort of turning to me and I was like ‘Why are you all looking at me?’ I realized ‘OK, I actually have to make the call.’ "

"Thank goodness we have this concept of molecular leadership and there was a whole group of people in that room and lots and lots of people who had been helping people in that room and we had the ability to get that information to make it together,” Jaros said.

GOJO did decide to ramp up it’s production and it paid off, said Jaros, whose speech was entitled “Thriving in Times of Disruption.”

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Every day between that first decision and well into 2021, Jaros said, “the facts on the ground were changing all the time.” GOJO ramped up production around-the-clock, but didn’t have enough products and raw materials to run the lines as supply-chain disruptions hit the global economy.

GOJO went through it’s entire ethanol contract — a key product in Purell — by the end of April 2020, Jaros said.

Innovating amid the pandemic

The company did all kinds of crazy things to make things work, she said. When it couldn’t get bottles to put Purell in, leaders reached out to fellow Ohio company Procter & Gamble.

P&G made small bottles usually used for Dawn dish soap available for GOJO to use for Purell.

“We filled millions with Purell,” she said.

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GOJO trucked Purell made in Wooster to a plant that had previously filled isopropyl alcohol bottles before and used its bottles.

“All kinds of different, strange versions of Purell were out in the world. Same juice; different container,” she said.

The company in spring 2020 made the decision to place orders for new equipment that would take nine to 12 months to come in. “We knew if we didn’t get in line, we were never going to have a chance,” she said.

The company expanded production and also began blow-molding its own bottles and injection-molding all components in a Purell bottle and refills that go in dispensers, she said.

“We make all those components and then we have robots that put them together really fast,” she said, with a new production line making almost 400 bottles a minute.

The company also invested in its own proprietary source of ethanol. There’s a plant in Coshocton sourcing corn from many Ohio counties “and we are making our own ethanol so that we never again have that problem of not having access to raw materials," she said.

“All told, in the course of 2020, our amazing GOJO team was able to produce 140 billion doses of Purell,” Jaros said to claps from the audience.

“It was a wild, wild ride,” she said.

'The never normal'

In her remarks, Jaros quoted work by Belgian author and “futurist” Peter Hinnsen, author of “The New Normal.”  GOJO had brought Hinnsen to Akron in the past to talk to employees. Hinnsen’s message is people who are waiting for the “new normal” will always be waiting and he now calls what is here “the never normal,” said Jaros.

The never normal is a period that isn’t stable or predictable and is a period of constant shocks, some of which feel seismic. Many of them are shocks our world has been seeing with technology, biology, ecological and geopolitical events, Jaros said.

Hinnsen also said these shocks will create tremendous opportunity because every time a shock happens or a combination, it’ll create change. That change is going to create new behaviors, new needs, new activities and problems that need solving.

But Jaros said the pandemic response didn’t start in 2020, but with the company founders and their humility to say they didn’t know everything and their courage to experiment, knowing every failure is a learning opportunity.

The late Jerry Lippman and his wife, Goldie, founded GOJO 76 years ago to create a cleaner to replace workers having to wash their hands with kerosene and benzene to remove carbon black and graphite.

The cleanser Lippman helped create and refine with a Kent State University chemist did so well that local service station owners who were originally ordering stopped ordering. Lippman went to ask why, said Jaros. The service owners said the cleaner was so good that employees were sneaking the supply home and the owners couldn’t afford to keep buying more.

So in 1952, Lippman invented the first portion-controlled soap dispenser. He had his young nephew at the time, former longtime GOJO CEO Joe Kanfer, w to the dump to harvest cranks from car windows to use on the side of the soap dispensers, Jaros said.

“So that same story really plays out over seven decades of GOJO growth and expansion,” Jaros said. “It's about going out, finding real human problems, talking to people, understanding their circumstance or struggle... designing a solution that works and not getting it right the first time but having the self esteem and also the commitment to keep making those bets and keep learning as we try with new experimentation and just getting better and better and better over time.”

It took seven years for GOJO to find the right formula for its surface spray that met their aspirations for safety and efficacy, said Jaros. 

It took seven years to make a profit with Purell sanitizer, she said. Now Purell soaps and dispensers and santiizer can be found around the world, she said.  

During a question and answer period, a question was asked where in the world GOJO does not have Purell. Jaros said she gets pictures from people all the time of GOJO soap dispensers, including at the North Pole and the tip of Argentina. 

North America is where Purell has the highest amount of sales, but there are manufacturing facilities in France and distributors all over the world, she said. 

Beacon Journal staff reporter Betty Lin-Fisher can be reached at 330-996-3724 or blinfisher@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her @blinfisherABJ on Twitter or www.facebook.com/BettyLinFisherABJ To see her most recent stories and columns, go to www.tinyurl.com/bettylinfisher

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Bold innovations help GOJO, Purell thrive during pandemic