Project N95
Learn how Onport helped US-based marketplace, Project N95 distribute PPE to frontline health care workers during the Covid Pandemic.
I think the main benefit of Onport is that it allows us to bring vendors onboard more quickly and expand our product assortment. We can just bring new suppliers onboard faster and that just saves everybody a lot of time.
Danielle Pierson
Director of Sourcing and Marketplace
What inspired you to create an online marketplace?
Project N95 started in March 2020 and was a response to the pandemic in the US - it started off quite small and was focused on fixing the issues of the PPE shortage for healthcare workers. The small team was made up of doers, of people willing to go the extra mile to fix the issue that was in front of them and quite quickly, the organization grew to over 100 people by April 2020.
What value do you feel the marketplace model has given to your particular company?
It really helps to keep prices down - something we came across a lot on other sites was price gouging, people took advantage of the short supply of PPE. By having an option of different vendors to choose from, we could find a price point which was more suitable for us and our end customers. It also helped us in terms of areas such as sizing, having options to supply a variety of sizes was very useful and having just more vendors onboard ultimately helped us in terms of distribution so we could achieve our overall strategy to get as many masks to those who needed them as possible.
How did you first hear about Onport?
We were searching for apps which could support a shopify store, as we planned to migrate over to that platform and we came across Onport. We had a number of legacy suppliers who we wanted to keep them on using, even if they weren’t on Shopify and I think the fact that we could still work with them using Onport was a big deciding factor in us opting to use the Onport platform.
How do you feel Onport has aided your overall performance, in which areas did you see the most improvement?
One of the key benefits is that we are able to onboard vendors much faster which allows us to expand our product offering - for instance with KF94’s, a mask which is similar to the N95 mask but has some differences which may make them more applicable to different users. Onport has allowed us to get vendors who supply it onboard faster so that really helps us in our overall mission statement.
Download the How Onport Empowered Project N95 To Distribute PPE During Covid case study PDF
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