Page 19 - BusinessWest February 3, 2025

“Every single thing in this
office I picked myself with the architect, and it has a story behind it. Whether it helps with health and wellness or it uses recycled materials, everything here helps in some way.”
bacteria and germs all over the air, and here comes an airborne virus. There couldn’t be anything worse to happen to the high-speed hand-dryer industry; it bubbled that stuff back up, and we were in crisis mode during the pandemic.”
One low point, and there were many, came early on during the pandemic, when Denver International Airport, one of the largest and most modern in the country, placed stickers on its XLERATORs stating, “for your safety, these hand dryers have been turned off.”
“Think about all the traffic going in and seeing our product tied to coronavirus and that it wasn’t safe to use,” he said. “That was a killer.”
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control, in its many messag- es urging people to wash their hands — and showing them how best to do so — featured paper towels as the drying method.
“Only in one place on one page did it say that you use either tow- els or a hand dryer — and I thought to myself, ‘we need to update this,’” said Gagnon, noting that he didn’t really know where to begin or whom to call to achieve change at Denver’s airport, the CDC’s public-service messages, and other fronts in this battle, but he went to work rallying the players in the industry and devising a strategy for digging out.
He commissioned a study on the company’s recently introduced HEPA filters and their ability to filter viruses — not knowing what the results would be. That study, which involved 3 million viruses going through the dryer to see what would come out the other end, revealed a striking 99.99% filtration of viruses.
“I said, ‘that’s great news — we have to market the heck out of this,’” he recalled. “That gave me something to work with, and I ended up reaching out to everyone that I knew in my network ask- ing for help to get to the CDC and get this information to the right people.”
In fact, he called this his new mission.
“I talked to a business coach of mine, and he connected me to someone who used to work for the government in the state of Mas-
sachusetts who knew a lobbyist who could help get you to D.C. and places — we had never used a lobbyist before,” he said.
Excel
Continued on page 36
>>
Excel produced custom XLERATOR hand dryers featuring designs by art students.
Photo courtesy of Excel Dryer
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