The San Francisco-based company Redfora counts on individual citizens, and increasingly businesses and universities, to have a desire to be prepared. The company has a few ideas on why it’s seen its signature product, the earthquake bag, fly off shelves lately.
One of the reasons is the recent earthquake in Los Angeles that got people thinking about preparedness. “The easy answer is that people take emergency management seriously when they have a shared experience,” said Skyler Hallgren, co-founder of Redfora. “When there’s some sort of emotional memory that they can connect to.” After the Los Angeles quake, sales of the Earthquake Bag spiked from a few dozen a day to a few thousand a day.
The biggest challenge for Redfora and for emergency managers is trying to encourage the average citizen, who generally has little time or desire to think about being prepared for an emergency, to take steps and do it. “It’s sort of the last thing they want to think about,” Hallgren said.
But Hallgren said he thinks he’s seen a shift in that mentality during the last couple of years. He said in the past, being prepared for an emergency carried with it a stigma and that that is fading. “We’re seeing the type of person putting together an emergency plan increasingly being normal folks, suburban moms, taking it really seriously and wanting to have a plan together to be ready for anything.”
He said each time there is an event like the Los Angeles quake, that all-important cultural element changes a bit more. That cultural element of being prepared is, perhaps, the biggest change recently and Redfora has set out to make it easy for residents to participate.
“Essentially, we wanted to make it simple, practical, approachable for the average person through both education and products, knowing that the person who’s going to build a bunker is going to do it themselves and is really passionate, but that’s a small percentage of the population,” said co-founder Zach Miller.
Redfora’s earthquake bags range in price from $39 to $600 and cover preparedness for an individual all the way up to a family of six for seven days. They also have bags for pets, for traveling in an automobile, and the bags can be customized online when ordering.
Every bag has the essentials — food, water, communications tools, etc. — but it’s the degree to which those basics are covered that separates each bag.
“The average home has more than one person, so with a few clicks of a button, you can customize your earthquake bag for one through six people for three to seven days and choose a bag that’s right for you,” Miller said.
“If you want it waterproof, if you want a backpack, if you want wheels on it, we have almost 100 varieties.”
On top of the product is the template for developing a preparedness plan.
Hallgren said he can think of a hundred things he’d like to tell people to do to prepare, but it’s important to keep it simple to start, lest they get overwhelmed.
“It’s as simple as having a basic conversation around the dinner table, but that can be intimidating, so we’ve broken it down into steps to make that part easy and approachable to everybody,” Miller said.
The keys to the plan are making sure everyone at home knows what the plan is for work, school and what to do if the family gets separated. Another is the reunification plan, how to get in touch and where to meet. The Redfora plan gives families a playbook for all of that and a template for doing a walk-through at home.
Organizations such as the University of Oregon are getting on the preparedness bandwagon, to make sure their employees can be safe and accounted for during a disaster and to maintain continuity of operations.
“We use them in two ways,” said Krista Dillon, director of operations for Safety and Risk Services at the University of Oregon. “We bought the earthquake bags for all members of our Incident Management Team. We will need them to respond in an emergency and it’s important for them to have basic supplies. Second, the university’s bookstore created a partnership with Redfora so that bags can be purchased online and picked up at our bookstore on campus.”
