Phones are ringing off the hook.

“Can you increase that order of masks from 5,000 to 15,000?” a dealer wants to know.

If the order is for a hospital, Gray Barn Industries in Mt. Pleasant gives them top priority. There are three people answering phones in this small company and they can’t keep up. Owner Zach Griebahn has to jump in and help out. All of the calls are for face masks.

Gray Barn Industries, located in the old Mt. Pleasant News building (which used to be the Ford dealership) on Monroe Street in downtown Mt. Pleasant, is a 35-year-old printing company, which evolved from printing balloons to printing shirts, cups, awards, signs and napkins. When the coronavirus hit, it virtually shut the company down. Orders plummeted on March 11 and operations almost completely ceased.

But Griebahn is a high energy manufacturing genius. In March he was talking to Bob, a business colleague from New Jersey, who was having problems getting a shipment of three-ply face masks from China. If he wanted the face masks immediately, the price was going to be anywhere from two-to-five dollars each. If he could wait until May, the price would drop to five cents each.

Griebahn froze.

Bob asked, “Zach, are you there?”

“What did you just say about three ply?” asked Griebahn.

Bob repeated what he had said.

Zach dropped the phone, grabbed a paper napkin, of which Gray Barn Industries has a gazillion in stock. He folded the party napkin over three times, stapled a rubber band to it, and placed it over his nose and mouth. Voila! The paper napkin face mask was born.

You say, “Oh, a paper napkin can’t be any good for a face mask.” You would be wrong. International medical research now confirms that a face mask of any material can stop from 95 to 100 percent of droplets coming out of the mouth and nose. Check out Griebahn’s video demonstration at the website, www.graybarn.com. Why the name Gray Barn? Zach’s last name is Griebahn. Gray Barn is a close fit and more easily pronounced and remembered.

Griebahn put the paper napkin face mask on the internet hot line for party supplies and dry goods. The board lit up. Phones started ringing immediately. Within an hour, the Gray Barn Industries paper napkin face mask was ranked number five out of 750 products.

They needed to create a production system using simple, local supplies, so Griebahn created a work flow that is now producing 10,000 to 20,000 face masks daily for local hospitals and nursing homes. It’s very labor intensive, thus making it more easy to invent — no molds to produce and very little engineering.

After a video posted on social media went viral, the demand for face masks allowed Griebahn to bring back his entire staff. Over the next few weeks, he may even have to hire additional staff to keep up with the demand.

Griebahn is a realist. When his colleague noted the price drop in masks come May, it indicated that China anticipates the pandemic to be well under control within two months. The high demand will disappear almost as fast as it rose. Griebahn is also not a war profiteer. He is barely covering costs with the sale of masks. What he is doing is paying the light bill and providing employment to his employees who all need groceries and have mortgages to pay.

These low cost, disposable masks are ideal for the general public who want to get out and about. For grocery stores, the stores could make the masks available at the shopping cart line for people when they are shopping. For hospitals, the disposable masks can be placed over the N95 masks, thus extending the life of the N95’s.

Paper napkins come in three general sizes: beverage, luncheon and dinner. The beverage size is about right for children and the luncheon size for adults. Bigfoot might need the dinner size.

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Call or text Curt Swarm in Mt. Pleasant at 319-217-0526.