On the day Mike Vaughn sent home all of his employees, he stood alone next to the production floor machinery and listened to the walls creak in the wind. In the nearly four decades since he started his hockey equipment company, Vaughn never heard the factory so quiet.
The ice had melted in rinks across North America as the COVID-19 pandemic engulfed the globe. There were much bigger things to worry about than goalie equipment.
So the Vaughn Custom Sports factory in Oxford, Mich., had to close. As did the company’s factory in London, Ont. — along with the facility for Brian’s Custom Goalie Equipment, its sister brand, in Kingsville, Ont. Almost 150 employees between the locations were furloughed.
“It was a shock,” Vaughn says. “You could see the fear in people. The unknown. The anxiety. It was just a bad moment.”
But the factories didn’t stay quiet for long.
As news was spreading about a dangerous shortage of personal...
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