Meet the billionaire medical family supplying the coronavirus front line: by KristinStoller
Almost overnight, Medline’s employees began working around the clock. They quickly ramped up production of bleach products, disinfecting wipes and, yes, toilet paper. The company’s billionaire owners – the Mills family – started spending tens of millions of dollars to air freight vital supplies, including face masks and surgical gowns, from factories in China.
It’s crazy times for the family-owned firm, which has been quietly making basic medical supplies, from baby blankets to bandages, for over 100 years. Now, the company which has annual sales of $13.9 billion and is 100% owned by the Mills family, finds itself on the front lines of a global pandemic, forced to ramp up production of the medical supplies that only make up a small percentage of their 550,000-product business.
Starting in early February, Medline employees began receiving desperate calls and emails from all sorts of would-be customers."We are getting random calls and emails – anyone from a local dentist to people looking to export 20 million masks to China," says Mills. Longtime customers such as Mayo Clinic and St. Louis-based Ascension, which operates 150 hospitals and 50 senior living facilities, get first dibs on all supplies, says Medline, which has turned down orders from potential new customers to meet the needs of its existing ones first. For now customers are able to order supplies “on allocation,” meaning they can only order quantities equal to their traditional orders.
Medline’s roots go back to 1910, the year A.L. Mills moved from a small town in Arkansas to Chicago. He sold handmade butchers’ aprons that he sewed together for workers in the city’s vast meatpacking district. Soon after, a nun who worked as a seamstress at a local hospital asked Mills if he could make and sell them hospital garments.
Inspired by Sears, Irving created a medical supply catalog and expanded the company’s product line from textiles to gloves, medical equipment and surgical instruments. What they didn’t make in-house, they resold.
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