Vanguard Soap was founded in 1943 at the height of World War II and was immediately part of the national wartime infrastructure.

For only the second time in the company’s history, it’s being called on to maintain production, both as a critical piece of the defense industry because it makes components used in ammunition by the U.S. Army, and by the Department of Homeland Security. 

An entire nation washing its collective hands for 20 seconds each, numerous times a day, burns through a lot of soap.

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Vanguard shareholder Ken Roberts looks at the new output levels from the plant at Brooks Road and South Third and shakes his head.

“Stores all over the country are out of product: Costco, Target, Walgreens and grocery chains,” he said. “They’re seeing anywhere from a 50% to 200% increase in sales.”

“We were on target to do around 70 million bars this year before this came up,” he continued.

“Who knows now. We have to hope our raw material supply chain doesn’t get disrupted. It’s not there yet, but 45 days ago, there was no sign about every college student in the country getting sent home.

“We’re managing through a lot of unknowns right now.”

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Vanguard manufactures soaps for private labels sold in every big-name pharmacy, grocery and big-box chain in the nation. Besides those names, which it doesn’t reveal, it produces Costco’s signature Kirkland soaps and millions of units of liquid soaps, also for private labels.

As a critical industry, Vanguard is required to maintain normal production in the midst of a virus surge now threatening every industry in the nation.

In anticipation of its own shortfall, on Friday, the U.S. government set up the framework for how civil service workers will apply for mission-critical positions in the national emergency.

“It’s quite an interesting situation when we hear, and our employees hear, the governor and the mayors say ‘Stay home,’” Roberts said.

He can hardly believe the sense of employee esprit de corps wrapping its arms around production in a sense of can-do.

“Before Safer at Home went into effect, we had a 7-8% absenteeism rate. The day after Safer at Home, it dropped to 5%,” said human resources director Pam Cannon.

The urgency makes the company’s history seem newly relevant.

Founder Charles Breazeale earned a chemistry degree by age 19 during the Great Depression and went to work for Tennessee Soap Co., the forerunner of Vanguard. In 1943, after developing his own line of wash powders, the owners let him keep the plant open nights to make his powders.

In 1945, Breazeale bought the plant and expanded into bar and liquid soaps, and janitorial products.

“He was in his late 20s and wasn’t allowed to be drafted because the soap-making industry was critical to the war effort,” Roberts said.

(Roberts’ wife, Lisa Roberts, is the granddaughter of Charles Breazeale.)

Son Jim Breazeale took over in 1966 and ran Vanguard until 2014.

“I managed during the Vietnam conflict, and we provided a lot of bar soap to the GIs and scrub soap for their pots and pans. But we were not declared an essential industry, that I recall.

“Vietnam and Korea were much more local wars. They did not have the same scale as World War II or what we are in right now,” Jim Breazeale said.

“I cannot imagine having to manage through this. You need your employees to come to work and do their job while at the same time, you realize they are exposing themselves, to some degree, to risk,” he continued. 

As Vanguard ramps up production, it’s doing it with the onus of having to spread workers out in the plant to keep them safe, which makes communication harder in the noisy manufacturing environment and changes plant processes.

“It’s been very much a united effort,” Cannon said. “It actually has made us better at what we do. With the social distancing, we have to overly depend on our communication skills.”

Vanguard has hired 13 people in the last two weeks – a nearly 10% increase in its workforce – including four new workers who do nothing but sanitize surfaces, including doorknobs.

“A lot of people are applying to work for us,” Cannon said. “They very much are aware that we are an essential business. We overly communicate that to our employees. They have a letter they have with them saying they are essential.

“Our employees are sharing that with their family and friends. This is an essential place, and we are hiring,” she said.

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It is benefiting from a rich pool of the newly laid-off.

“We’re seeing a lot of warehousing, a lot of skilled forklift operators and a lot of people with vast experience in logistics,” Cannon said.

“We’re benefiting from an astute group of applicants.”

The company needs machine operators and mechanics. It needs people with chemical experience and applied logistics backgrounds.

“And production supervisors,” Roberts said.

Because it manufactures for other companies, Vanguard has been hamstrung some when it comes to in-kind donations because it can’t donate its clients’ labels.

It’s digging down into those policies now, Cannon said.

“We are starting to look aggressively to serve nonprofits to fill the gap in the Mid-South,” she said.

“We know that is something else we can do,” she said.

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Friday, Sacred Heart Southern Mission, from Walls, Mississippi, picked up six pallets of soap for distribution to the agencies it serves.

“This is the first time we have donated to them,” Cannon said.

There’s a camaraderie at the plant now that Jim Breazeale remembers seeing during other emergencies.

“It was always very gratifying to me, whenever there was a crisis, like an ice storm, our employees would bend over backwards to get to work. I would always be impressed how they would close shoulders and cover it,” he said.

“They knew they were important to the company and each other. In the crisis we are in today, I would like to think they are doing it out of a sense of patriotism.”