COVID Response Case Study: O’Neills

10 July 2020

O’Neills is Irelands largest sportswear manufacturer, and synonymous with Gaelic games. The company has over 100 years experience in developing, and delivering cutting edge sportswear, but with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic saw a way to contribute to Irelands effort against the virus: to produce much needed personal protective equipment (PPE) for front line workers.

As Kieran Kennedy , Managing Director, O’Neills, explains “With the COVID-19 outbreak and demand for scrubs, gowns and other PPE O’Neills entered a completely new market overnight. While we are expert in fabric knitting and textile manufacturing moving into the whole area of PPE required rapid upskilling and learning to provide the best possible response to the health sector. We needed support in terms of understanding the machinery, fabric properties, investment and output potential to maximise our response.”

AMBER assisted O’Neills through our Industry-Covid Consultancy response to link the company to our scientists and produce a rapid research report. The report outlined the kinds of materials required to make PPE, the equipment necessary for generating PPE, the cost and capacity output that the business could expect, the raw materials and supply chain for additional equipment for future work.

The impact for O’Neills was significant, as Keiran explains “through the Covid-19 consultancy report, the team at AMBER provided rapid cutting edge information and advice during a time when it was key to move at pace to respond to the needs of our health sector. The report gave us all the information we needed in a very short timeframe, this helped us to understand what investment we needed to make and develop our business case which will support us as the crisis continues. We have no hesitation working with AMBER again and we will recommend the service to other businesses who need scientific research and advice”