RIVERVIEW, Fla. — Saying that becoming an entrepreneur is “in his DNA,” longtime Tampa Bay area GOP political strategist Nick Hansen is now offering Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in small quantities to the public.
What You Need To Know
- Hansen getting family involved in new endeavor
- Hansen says effort has been a great learning experiment
- Visit OrderNowProducts.com to order face masks, hand sanitizer gel, K95 masks
- More coronavirus stories
Hansen had been working for the past year and a half as the southeast director of government affairs for the cannabis retailer MedMen. He was laid off as the spread of COVID-19 began shutting down businesses across the country in March.
Sheltering in place with his five kids at his home in Riverview, Hansen also began helping out his brother Nate, a medical device sales director who was working on procuring large amounts of PPE for business groups and Fortune 500 companies.
That’s when he realized that there didn’t appear to be many outlets that offered small quantities of PPE to individuals.
“I asked my brother, ‘Well, could I buy them and set my own site up and start marketing to folks who couldn’t get it?” Hansen said.
Nate Hansen was thinking along the same lines – to combine Nick’s political expertise in working with online operations with his own deep knowledge of procurement for hospitals and medical devices.
“I can help you get what you need in order to provide the average Joe family with what they need,” Nate recalled telling his brother.
The website Hansen created, OrderNowProducts.com, offers 3-ply disposable face masks, hand sanitizer gel, and K95 masks, their most popular item.
(The K95 mask is the Chinese equivalent of the N95. The CDC lists K95 masks as a suitable alternative when N95s are not available.)
Hansen says the endeavor has been a great learning experiment for his kids on how to create a website, do inventory, and work with stocking and shipping items out. And he’s thrilled to work with his brother, as well as “giving something to folks that they don’t have access to at an affordable cost.”
He’s not completely out of the political world this cycle, though. In addition to working with some Pinellas GOP candidates, he’s also still very involved with Make It Legal Florida, the advocacy group seeking to put a constitutional amendment on the 2022 ballot that would legalize recreational marijuana.
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