Here's how we somehow started manufacturing our own proper hand sanitizer.

Trust me, this is not something we thought we'd be doing two months ago either.

If you'd like to skip the story and just see the end result, click the big blue button. Otherwise, read on.

OK! Back to the story. Back in March we were told by the state to shut down our operations because of COVID-19. Pretty good idea seeing as a bus is a small contained place with a lot of people. Still, we had been operating daily since 2011 (!!) and stopping our operations for any reason was still a huge bummer even if it was the right idea.With our facility shuttered and our entire staff laid off it was eerily quiet around the depot. The stress of not knowing how we're going to pay our bills couple with the hovering impending doom of COVID-19 was a stressful sandwich of stress. So we started working out ways to help out.Grocery delivery? Nah, that's too complicated to keep food safe and coordinate orders.Making masks? There are way better people out there for that with sewing machines and whatnot.Hand sanitizer!? Hmm. We could probably do this. Maybe.

We donned our protective gear and got to work formulating some proper hand sanitizer using the

World Health Organization formula

. We found we could do it in small batches first so that's where we started. We secured all of the proper ingredients, ordered some local bottles and labels from friends, and got to work bottling our first couple batches.

We put our first few bottles up

on our website for sale

 and they sold out in just a few minutes. That wasn't supposed to happen. So we made a few more and those sold out too. Hm. We got a few more drums of raw ingredients together and started making hand sanitizer 6 days a week. We built a better website and started offering shipping.

Before long we had so many orders that we had to build a full-on production line. Filling these bottles from a food-grade bucket just wasn't going to work anymore. We tried to buy some bottling equipment but we found the wait time on machines was 7+ weeks - and we needed to bottle more right now.So we did what any small business does in a crisis and we figured it out. We converted the center of our bus company HQ into a semi-automatic mixing and bottling operation of our own design. We hired more people. We sped up our production dramatically to about a thousand gallons a day. Plus, we went from a 7 day wait down to same day shipping. We were off to the races.

We started off just selling gallons, half gallons and quarts. But lots of people told us they wanted smaller personal carry bottles, so we started making The Littles. Each new step was another challenge and a whole mess of problems, but that's what building a new thing entails. It's supposed to be hard. That's so it feels good when you finally win.

As we produce more and more sanitizer we figure out better ways to do it each day. We get new machinery that helps us do it faster. We hire more Detroiters at a thriving wage so we can do it as a team. We even went out and bought a tanker truck so we can get materials delivered cheaper and pass those savings down to you. We've lowered our prices significantly three times to make our sanitizer as affordable as possible to everyone.

We've been lucky enough to be able to donate a ton of product to dozens local non-profits. We even formed a partnership with Meals on Wheels, our neighbor, where they'll distribute our donated bottles to thousands of senior citizens across Wayne County. We even launched Bottle for Bottle where every bottle you purchase provides for a bottle to be donated in Detroit. It's just like our social mission around Ride for Ride but, you know, sanitizer.

But our story isn't done yet! We're working hard each day to make as much affordable hand sanitizer as possible. There's still so many people out there who don't have access to this newly critical safety product. So we're going to keep our production line humming with activity as we try to push the price down even lower each day.This is what Detroit does. We get it done.

We have plenty of FDA-approved, WHO-grade hand sanitizer in stock and ready to ship to anywhere in the continental USA. We offer free shipping for all orders over $99, free curbside pickup at our Corktown HQ and a booth each Saturday at Eastern Market. We want to make it easy for you to be safe out there when you re-enter the world.As always, if you have any questions you can always reach us at [email protected] or call us at 313-444-2871.We appreciate you and hope you're doing well out there. Keep it up, you've got this.

You made it to the end of our story! As a way to say thanks for being a DBC customer all these years, we've made you a special promo code to use on your next order - or to share with a friend.Use the following code to receive 10% off your entire order at checkout:

Expiration date: May 31, 2020

BTW: We sent you this email because you've somehow supported The Detroit Bus Company at some point in the past. We love you for keeping our tiny business alive. This is the first and last email we'll ever send you about hand sanitizer. That said, if you'd like to unsubscribe completely that's cool too! Click here to unsubscribe: