Amazon is manufacturing hundreds of thousands of face shields to sell to healthcare professionals battling COVID-19 and eventually offer to all customers on the company’s marketplace.
Amazon says that its supply chain and manufacturing expertise will allow the masks to be sold at significantly cheaper costs than competing products.
Inspiration for the initiative came from a group of 3D printing enthusiasts in Washington state who designed their own face shield. Amazon enlisted engineers from the Prime Air mechanical design and hardware teams to improve upon the 3D printed mask and mass produce it.
“When you think of Amazon you don’t naturally think of hardware design,” said Amazon VP and distinguished engineer Brad Porter in a blog post. “But many teams across the company specialize in this discipline. In one week, engineers from our world-class drone team, in coordination with the open-source group, took the initial design and drastically improved it.”
Amazon is releasing an open-sourced design for the 3D printed face shields so that others can manufacture them. The design received clearance from the National Institutes of Health for use by healthcare workers.
Amazon has donated 10,000 face shields to frontline workers and plans to provide an additional 20,000 in the coming weeks. The company aims to sell hundreds of thousands of face shields on Amazon.com at cost in the next few weeks too.
The sudden arrival of COVID-19 caused a global shortage of personal protective equipment that the technology and manufacturing industries have been scrambling to fill. The shortage presents a unique challenge for Amazon’s marketplace, where it must police price gouging on thousands of items around the world.
Amazon published a blog post Wednesday urging Congress to adopt a federal price-gouging law that would take effect during a crisis. The law would set clear standards on what type of pricing is prohibited. Under the current legal framework, Amazon works with state governments across the country to enforce a variety of different price gouging laws.
