KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Charlie Hustle, known for its "KC Heart" line of clothing, knew it had to adjust on the fly when the COVID-19 pandemic began.
"We sat in a room with our leadership team in March and threw ideas at the board. We had to figure out what we were going to do and pivot without baseball happening, without soccer happening, and with all the launches we had coming up," founder and CEO Chase McAnulty said.
The company sprang into action and turned itself into a mask-making operation.
"We started digging in with our manufacturers, tried to understand, can we do this? What does it look like? Two weeks later we had masks in the office, and we were selling them. Since then, we’ve been able to donate 70,000 masks to the city and sold several more," McAnulty said.
That's on top of more than 100,000 masks sold to the community to help slow the spread of COVID-19.
Now that Kansas City has a new mask ordinance in place, the company said it's not slowing down any time soon.
"We’re in the mask business now. But we’re excited to hop into hopefully getting some sports back. Major League Baseball sounds like it’s happening. Chiefs season coming up, we’re excited to get back into t-shirts as well, but I think masks will stick around a little longer than we thought," McAnulty said.
He also added that there is more work to do for Charlie Hustle.
"We’re working on a bunch of different initiatives. Obviously social justice is a big topic right now in the city, so we’re putting some money towards that and just thinking about our own multicultural strategy as we move forward as a brand," McAnulty said.
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