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A new product made in Detroit. (Photos: Facebook)
Not all heroes wear scrubs and first-responder uniforms.
Andy Didorosi, 33-year-old founder of Detroit Bus Co., flips from transportation provider to hand sanitizer manufacturer. In mid-March, he and a small crew -- volunteers at first, now $15-an-hour employees -- began hand-mixing and bottling medical-grade gel as a giveaway for frontliners in the Covic fight.
The mercy mission, which started when the market for event and tour rides stopped, has swelled into a wholesale and retail enterprise that ships throughout the continental United States. Didorosi added a 12,000-gallon tanker trailer to his fleet and a mechanized assembly line to his nine-year-old firm's Corktown garage on Bagley Street -- now a small factory that runs eight hours each day except Sunday.
Andy Didorosi bought a used tanker. "It's hard work, but it's worth it."
"When we started making hand sanitizer a few weeks ago we were mixing it by hand one batch at a time in small food-safe pitchers," he posts on Facebook. "Now we're blending and bottling it by machines we've designed and built -- and we're up to about 300 gallons every 30 minutes. We're already working on our next machine to do it 10 times faster.
"We are basically filling an entire long UPS truck with packages of our hand sanitizer every day now. We are one of the few producers that both sells at a fair price during this crisis and also ships single bottles to residential addresses. It's hard work, but it's worth it."
The Corktown production line.
The hand sanitizer, created amid March shortages in stores and from suppliers, is made from isopropyl alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, food-grade glycerin and distilled water. It's "manufactured to World Health Organization standards," says the multi-industry Detroit entrepreneur.
It's bottled in quart, half-gallon and gallon sizes for $18 to $45, with same-day shipping for orders placed here by 4 p.m. It's also sold each Saturday at Shed 4 in Eastern Market, and allows pickup of prepaid orders at 1990 Bagley St. between West Jefferson Boulevard and Vermont Street .
"I have a new hobby," tweets Didorosi, who also posts more seriously about the drive and heritage that propels a fast-track project from idea to assembly line when a pandemic sidelines job one:
This is what Detroit does. We retool. We figure it out. We keep moving even when everyone says it's impossible. We can be down, but we're never out. This is the spark that you feel when you visit our block. Constant reinvention.
A manufacturing town's can-do spirit.We get started no matter the circumstances. We make a system to make things faster, better, cheaper. We never stop improving. We get it done.
That spirit also is visible on the makeshift sign at right.
This imaginative businessman started Detroit Bus Co. in 2011 with one 24-seat coach and the idea of "a transit revolution." In addition to tour and other "adventures," he offers charters for weddings, convention groups, sports outings, school trips and other events. "We renovate vintage buses with hand-painted murals by local artists," the company site says.
Whether on the road or the two-month-old assembly line, Didorosi hustles harder to show the spirit of Detroit.
