Company Spotlight: Pratt Miller Printing and Donating Headbands for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

Pratt Miller, a Michigan-based engineering and product development company, has been printing headbands for face shields in the effort to create PPE (personal protective equipment) for medical providers. 

On March 16, as concerns around COVID-19 continued to increase, Pratt Miller decided to send the bulk of their staff to work from home. Like many of us, the team at Pratt Miller wanted to do their part to help front line health care providers. They started by donating all their extra N-95 masks to the Beaumont Hospital. The team at Pratt Miller, living up to their tagline ‘transforming what’s possible’, wanted to do more and found plans to 3D print the top portion of a face shield, called headbands.

Pratt Miller started printing headbands on the 3D printers on the shop floor. The initial output was about 30 headbands per week. As their staff working from home heard about the work, they asked for plans too, so they could use their personal 3D printers to help. “Our team is full of makers and doers, so many of them have full machine shops in their garages. They jumped at the opportunity to help,” says Sandy McKinnon, Marketing & Communications Manager at Pratt Miller. 

Pratt Miller prints headbands in the shop, employees print at home, then a driver picks up headbands and takes them to Maker Works in Ann Arbor for final assembly and drop off at the University of Michigan Hospital. 

After Pratt Miller shared this video on their social media sharing their masks, their followers started asking for plans and now they are printing headbands at home too. As of April 27th, their community has printed 1,801 headbands. Pratt Miller has donated over $1,500 in materials, 218 hours of employee time, and 1,400 hours of machine time. 

We first heard about this story when we were in touch with Pratt Miller about their subscription renewal for InspectionXpert. Thanks to Frank Wilson and Sandy Mckinnon, from Pratt Miller for sharing this story with us. We are inspired by the amazing work that our customers do every day. 

About Pratt Miller
Pratt Miller is a groundbreaking engineering and product development company serving the Motorsports, Defense, and Mobility industries. Our winning roots in motorsports enable us to deliver ingenious solutions to our clients' most challenging problems — and wildest ideas. That history enables our team of highly adaptive innovators to apply speed, agility, and engineering expertise to every project, swiftly transforming what's possible in our clients' industries — taking what they do to the next level and changing their world for the better.

Locations: 3 in New Hudson, Michigan, and 1 in Huntersville, NC

Company: 300+ employees

All images courtesy of Pratt Miller.