Confounded
A high energy podcast with its own video channel featuring interviews with amazing people who have overcome adversity and life’s challenges to be successful in unique and wonderful ways.
Confounded
Founding PPE4People.com in a pandemic
When the world ground to a halt, Lee's sabbatical in Thailand unexpectedly turned into the birth of PPE for People, a company now at the forefront of supplying vital protective gear during the global pandemic. Our latest episode spotlights Lee's remarkable journey, from navigating the turbulent beginnings with test kits to his company's intricate dance with the PPE supply chain. Step into our conversation as we traverse the complexities of managing a remote team, the scrutiny of sourcing products from China, and how time seemed to warp in the pandemic's early days, leading to rapid advancements in medical technology.
Imagine a marketplace where care homes can secure PPE not only swiftly and efficiently but also affordably through a smart reverse auction platform. That's the reality Lee's team crafted for the UK, revolutionizing the procurement process. Tune in to learn about the inception of this platform that balances cost, quality, and speed, and hear how it grew from one to thirty live RFQs in just two weeks. Discover the critical role of user feedback in shaping this evolving marketplace and the stringent supplier criteria that ensure care homes receive the best protection without compromise.
Finally, we unveil the global expansion of this PPE revolution, where Lee's vision to tackle price inflation and accessibility materializes into the largest global PPE marketplace. Beyond the economics, we reflect on the cultural shift in mask-wearing, from a symbol of pandemic response to a staple in daily life across the globe. Lee shares anecdotes from various cultures, illustrating the collective push towards normalcy. And as we celebrate the launch of PPTV, Lee gives us a glimpse into the platform's future, aiming to streamline the PPE buying experience even further. Don't miss this deep dive into how PPE for People is changing the landscape of global health and safety.
So welcome to PPE TV, the first episode for PPE for people. And we're here today with Lee, the CEO, and we're going to discuss how PPE for people even came about and where it is today and how you, as a buyer or a seller, can use it. So, hi Lee, hi Alistair, how are you? And you are, and have been all through the crisis, stuck in Thailand, I believe.
Lee Perry:Yeah, I've been here since mid-January, so actually seven months. So I've just got an extended visa. So potentially in the year for another year.
Alastair Campbell:Wow, and you're running the whole thing from Thailand, completely remotely.
Lee Perry:Yeah, obviously I'm six hours ahead, so it's a bit difficult to get in sync with the team. So what I try and do is come eight o'clock UK time as I'm available with the team from about eight o'clock, so I'll start conversations and Slack and start work with them, and then I'll wake up to late, even in Phuket time. So I have a good chunk of four to five hours of daily time spent with the team. There's about eight of us at this minute, eights in the core team.
Alastair Campbell:That must be quite useful in a way, because actually you get stuff done, but everybody's still asleep.
Lee Perry:Well, what happens is I tend to do all my normal Phuket stuff in the morning, so I'll go for breakfast, I'll go to the beach, I'll go to the gym, so I'll get my normal day, and then, by the time the UK's waking up, I can get back to my apartment and then start to work on PPE.
Alastair Campbell:And how did you end up in Thailand?
Lee Perry:Well, I sold my last business at the end of last year and I was originally going to go on like a three-month sabbatical, three-month long holiday and then obviously got stuck here during Covid. So I had the chance to get on the last flight and go back to England, but England was on lockdown, it was quarantine, it was pretty bad and I was enjoying myself. So I thought you know why go back to England? So I decided to take the risk and stay here. Then Thailand went on lockdown. But it was pretty good because now, as of the 20th of July, Thailand hasn't had any Covid cases in 57 days, any homegrown Covid cases. The bad day imports people, get on flights and so on. So it's pretty much eradicated now. So, yeah, it started in January, stayed here.
Alastair Campbell:And you're safer there as well. You're actually safer there than back here, here being the UK, obviously. So you sold a business. You were basically taking a holiday. You got stuck in Thailand. How on earth did you go from going to the beach and going to the gym to creating PPE for people?
Lee Perry:Well, what happened is like sort of February. I was due to go back to the UK in March this year and I was going in sorry, not April this year. I was going to start a business with friends and he was going to be an investment friend, which is cool, and that was going to be sort of the start of summer this year. Then Covid happened and me and Doug were in contact with each other and Doug was saying like he's seeing the stats of the Covid infection rates and he's like it's going to go crazy. And then I thought I tried to get test kits from China and send them to the UK and send them to Thailand and I was going to try to get a bit of a business going with test kits not a lot to properly do it as such on the test kits books, to try to help identify people who have got it and had it, and so that was my way of trying to help with the pandemic.
Lee Perry:And Doug was getting me connections within Scottish H&M, nsf and also the UK NHS, and that was basically what we were trying to do to help with the pandemic with the test kits. And the test kits become a real hot potato in terms of do they actually work? Do they don't work? The Chinese factories were getting slated and these are like multi-billion dollar factories in China and they were getting some bad press from, like the European governments and so on. So it became really difficult to try to have an influence with test kits. So we then decided to start going into PPE.
Alastair Campbell:And was it fair criticism or was it just? There were some bad criticism, some bad test kits, but actually they were fine and it was just such a big unknown that people didn't know what they were buying and were scared.
Lee Perry:It's still on proven today. I think what it was is that the test kits that were coming out of anywhere it wasn't just China related issues. The way that the process is done is quite new. We would have basically break down the blood samples into DNA strands so that you can have to see the antibodies inside the bloods, and so it was. I think it was new technology. It was everything was quite rushed and the research and the data coming out was all, like you know, key to the moment. So I think the technology was getting the amount of data and analysis to then judge whether it was actually real or not, and today I don't know whether it is a genuine antibody kit that can give you the information needed. That's needed to like start to co-op people infected, non-infected, previously infected. It's quite complicated.
Alastair Campbell:It's all. It's just so new. It feels like a very long time, but it's not really, you know, it feels like months. I mean, you know we locked down and March, the UK locked down March 16th and that feels like such a long time ago now. I mean it's really extended sort of the mental timeframe, but in that timeframe, you know, the scientists have pulled out probably some quite amazing stuff. It's just compressed for them compared to the normal years they would have, I guess. So you switch from test kits to PPE, yeah, and you had some potential suppliers in China and I believe you have people on the ground as well who could actually check the quantities and the quality and make sure everything was good.
Lee Perry:I had background of working in China. So I've been to quite a few places in China over the last 15 years and doing QA and setting up factories and warehouses. So when Doug mentioned about getting other people from China, I had contacts there. So I think at one point we had five Chinese people on the ground checking factories for orders. So we got to the point where we had like we were building a supply chain all the way from China all the way to the UK and we had like a tremendous input from like loads of people, from like really high level directors within the UK or like some blue chip companies, even government backed people and government people. It was just that, yeah, a load of interest.
Lee Perry:Everyone was trying to help get the supply chain set up. So there was at one point I'd say we had maybe a hundred volunteers willing to help with the supply chain, but it was so complicated it was really really a nightmare to try to get a supply chain all the way from China to the UK, because what happened is the Chinese government then started adding restrictions and custom clearance. About 5,000 suppliers went down to 100 suppliers. It was called the Blacklist or the Whitelist. I should say so the Whitelist was all the approved suppliers in China and the Blacklist was all the non-approved suppliers. So as we were betting suppliers, they were getting taken off the Whitelist and put into Blacklist. So we had to consistently try to verify suppliers to get access to all of these goods and then bring it to the UK. Then there's the financial side, the letters of credit, and you're talking tens of millions of pounds of kit that we were had to potentially then order on letters of credit and more TTs it just got. Yeah, it became quite a huge challenge, right.
Alastair Campbell:I guess, yeah, sorry, I guess financially. The other issues of course, with the way these things are ordered anyone saying I'll have a million pounds. Please were they paying the full million up front or a significant amount of it.
Lee Perry:Well, a normal deal from China is normally you would find a supplier. You would then issue 50% up front and then 50% of goods are ready. So the majority of the deals you would have to risk 100% of your money before the goods left China and that's a huge risk to people. Now that's a normal way of doing business, but for most people who deal with China, however, when you've got an explosion of buyers who have never dealt with this type of financial system before and deal with direct with China, it was really a and many nightmare scenarios were getting envisioned by these buyers in the UK and most of them wouldn't want to commit 100% of their money up front to a company that they've never dealt with before. So it'd be cool.
Lee Perry:That real stumbling box tried to get quality product from China into the UK and into the baseline response the baseline response of the NHS, doctors, clinics and so on. It would become a real huge problem. So we had genuine intentions of getting this is all non-profit. So we had genuine intentions of getting quality product from China into the frontline into the UK, but no one wanted the spend money. It was. You know. It just become a nightmare because there was a few nightmare scenarios of real stories where goods were getting held in customs in China or the wrong goods were getting shipped into the UK. So there was this like this wildfire of suspicion and rumors and it just become impossible to do business.
Alastair Campbell:But there must have been. Like never mind there's a suspicion there would have been and there were cowboys and horror stories galore at the time, because obviously you know people are willing to write big checks for something they're quite scared of, take some risk and I guess I can see the difficulties of getting government to actually pay up front. But I guess a lot of people would have been, not a lot, some people would have been burned, because if you have 4,900 unregistered suppliers who can make similar products in China, that stuff is still heading to Europe and nobody knows until it gets there. And even some of the reports that they didn't even when you got it they didn't even know. Even those masks in Turkey, very famously, that the government bought weren't even suitable. Is that right?
Lee Perry:Yeah, there was numerous part of stories. I think Italy government had test kits that failed to test at the proper levels. I think Spain had similar issues with test kits. Obviously there was rumors with Turkey suppliers but it was an isolated to anyone country or anyone supplier by it. It was the wild west and what we were trying to do is take out that wild west issue away from the buyers to help them buy genuine products, to help save people's lives. Some of the stories that we heard was government's military taking ownership of goods designated to go to a buyer like a hospital or a private company. Steal those goods when the plane lands on the Talmach in an airport, reckless thing, by force, almost. Yeah, it was going on numerous occasions, it wasn't just one off. It become a free for all. Everyone was trying to save each other's lives. It was that if someone found out about, certainly like three M masks landed in a certain airport and they had the military there, it was occasions where those military would go and take ownership of those goods. It was crazy.
Alastair Campbell:It's amazing, because what you've actually got there is a situation where everyone's ever something like the world uniting to fight this disease, governments all saying, however, they should all work together. But really, if you land a million three M masks on our soil, we're going to have them. If you don't want to give them to us, we're going to take them. That actually happened.
Lee Perry:Yeah, it definitely happened on numerous occasions.
Alastair Campbell:There'll be some reckoning after this, won't there? Because those stories are real and they'll come out and some governments are going to be quite embarrassed, I think, by what will seem with the benefit of hindsight. Won't seem quite so, it will seem very selfish.
Lee Perry:Yeah, yeah. Well, it does obviously with the EU. What happened in Italy? So I think Italy were really annoyed at the way that the EU handled the protection of Italy. So you've got governments. Now I want to go with each other about the way that he should have dealt with things and yet you're going to have governments getting accused of stealing people's goods on the tarmac of airports all around the world, and I'm sure this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Lee Perry:We listen to these stories over like a two month period, but then we backed out out of that. It was just getting too risky. The buy is that they want to send millions of pounds through our network, and we can understand why. So the stories that I'm telling you now is just the tip of the iceberg. So once all this is calmed down, I'm guessing there's going to be hundreds of stories with billions of dollars, you know, getting mentioned. There's a book in there for you. I don't know them all, but I'm sure someone in these big supply chains knows all what was going on. But yeah, the Wild West is definitely an app name that was getting banned about during this pandemic.
Alastair Campbell:Is that your trademark for you? The wild COVID, wild West. It's a pretty good proverb on the high seas, quite literally.
Lee Perry:Yeah, there's definitely a big difference somewhere.
Alastair Campbell:So where are you now and how does the process work and who is actually helping you now? As you said, you had hundreds of volunteers. I know that's now fewer and the process is now more of a marketplace. Is that correct?
Lee Perry:So what we've done is we've created a smart reverse option. So we've got a list of approved suppliers, the majority registered in the UK. So we're focusing on the UK and then we're going to start working it to Europe and America and beyond. So it's a reverse option site where, let's say, I'm a care home and I want 5,000 bucks, I would put my RFQ, which is a request for quotes, on the system and up to 200 plus suppliers can then go and quotes for that RFQ. So me as the care home, I then log into the system and I can see a whole host of quotations anywhere from whatever the market price of the mask is to below the market price to way above the market price. So everyone's obviously got different supply chains. Some can do it at the most competitive price, some of them can't do it at the most competitive price. But it's not just about price. It's about have you got C certification for that product? Have you got productivity insurance for your company in case there's any claims? Also, there's like a rating system. So has anyone rated yet? Have you done any transactions on the platform before? So it's early days. It's.
Lee Perry:This smart reverse option has only been live for about two weeks. So it's a case of getting buys and sellers into the system to create this momentum, which is where we are now. I think at this precise moment I'm getting told that there's 150 people live on the website at this minute. So we've gone from having one RFQ two weeks ago to potentially we've got maybe 30 RFQs live at the site at this minute. Maybe more depends on how many of these 181 people live on the site doing RFQs, but obviously we've got buys and sellers. So they're not all buyers, but it's early days, we haven't really done any promotion of the website, so it's got to be. It should be a really good platform If you want to get the best possible price from all the suppliers, all the major buyers, so all the major sellers in the UK, the buyers can go and get quotes Within an hour. Within an hour, you could have 100 quotations from 100 approved suppliers with the product that you want to buy.
Alastair Campbell:So I think there's a few things to unpack there. There's the supply side, and when you said UK suppliers, are all the suppliers on there just now. Are they supplying into the UK or are they in the UK?
Lee Perry:The majority of the suppliers in our platform are based in the UK and supply in the UK, but I'm guessing they will supply for the parts of the world as well. But our platform is specifically built at this minute around UK registered suppliers, uk suppliers that have got limited companies in the UK and buyers registered in the UK trading us companies or limited companies, but basically all these transactions will be predominantly UK based.
Alastair Campbell:So you're actually in effect not doing the validation itself into who is behind the company and etc. But if they've got product liability insurance or they've got the CE certificates and you can obviously find them in companies house and validate at least that, then they can supply. And then the buyers in the UK don't have to be limited to companies though. So you could have a small private care home, can actually go on and say we want a small amount of masks, I guess, and the suppliers who do big volume stuff at really cheap prices won't quote for that because they don't want to send 5,000 masks maybe, but somebody else will. It would be slightly more expensive, but you can get it tomorrow, etc. So you've got kind of three levers speed, price and quote.
Lee Perry:So we've got quotes on the system.
Lee Perry:Now I would accuse for five items to eight items that might have a value of 10 pound, 20 pound, but we've also got quotes on the system that you know a range from 5 million to 10 million pounds. So there's this, you know, wide variety of very small orders and really huge orders, but 80% of our quotes are going to land somewhere between a few thousand pounds and say it would be the sort of average sort of orders in the middle. So we're trying to work out a way to handle small orders in the best cost effective, delivery and focused way. And then we've got the huge orders which are going to be directly with the back to ease and then they start to like look at the less of the credit and all of those big financial mechanisms need to be the big orders. So yeah, just like. So the small, medium and large, and 80% are going to be medium or size.
Alastair Campbell:Now I guess this will sort of because it's all brand new, right? So this is going to sort itself out, I guess, because you should have suppliers being able to start saying, well, we're not going to quote on anything below this volume or this price, so therefore you won't send them the quote for you know Alice's 10 FFP2 masks. And then you'll get suppliers to say we are not cheap because we actually have it in stock and we've bought it ourselves. Therefore they can't do the scale price, but then they can deliver it to somebody the next time.
Lee Perry:Yeah. Well, we've got an option on the platform now where a supplier can actually put in all the products that we sell on the platform I've got set, and so you could say these are the products that I supply and I don't want to quote, I don't want to be notified of any order queue that is less than this quantity, yeah, for this particular product. So the suppliers who have got minimum order quantities can go into the platform and set the threshold level so that they don't get bombarded with hundreds of quotes that they don't want to be quoting because it's too small, whereas you'll make it on the flip side. You'll have suppliers who focus on high volume, low value orders, who will then that'll be their bread and butter, and they can say, yeah, I don't want to be notified of anything approved at thousands because it's not my business, I want to. I just want to have all the small orders.
Lee Perry:So we want to try and make that as easy as possible, but with with you know, web based platforms, everything is trial and error and iterating. So we are, on a daily basis, getting feedback from buyers and sellers and we are changing and adapting the platform hour by hour Until we find this like equilibrium where we try and make as many people as happy as possible. You can't make everyone happy, obviously, but we'll try and make as many buyers and sellers as happy as possible. Platform so we can cover the majority of the orders.
Alastair Campbell:It's still quite amazing because it's like the 80 of this or since you started.
Lee Perry:Yeah, I think it was 7th of April. 7th of April is when we got going, so yeah.
Alastair Campbell:So roughly days 75 ish, and you've had two iterations. You've got hundreds of suppliers who actually accredited in some way shape before me, even if it's just they've got product liability insurance You've got buyers placing orders for millions of pounds and it's days 75. I'm trying to, I'm trying to imagine another start up if to use the word, that language which in 75 days has got hundreds of buyers and sellers and is processing them from like a one pound or 10 pound order to a million pound order. It's not very common?
Lee Perry:No, not at all. It's probably the fastest start up I've been involved in. I've been involved with. This is my fourth tech company start up as a founder and I think since the 7th of April to now we've had over a thousand buyers registered with the site and an average order quantity is somewhere between five to 10,000. So a few times that by the thousand buyers. It's in that tens of millions of PPU requested items. So you know that to go from zero to tens of millions of request is phenomenal.
Lee Perry:But you know it's probably to do with the pandemic. You know within a, within Exodore, that he's high and strange times with them, with the, with the agency and the threats of COVID. It's just we've been in the right place at the wrong time, if that makes sense. Yes, no one wants it to happen, but we we've just tried to help we. Our intention has been genuine, 100% genuine. You've been non-profit for the first few months. We're still non-profit. You know we think we're going to have to adapt the strategy at some point. But our strategy is to help as many companies and people get genuine PPE, but as cheap as possible, as fast as possible, without getting ripped off, and that's been our E-Pros. Sorry, from day one to where we are now and everyone's a volunteer in the team.
Lee Perry:Everyone's a volunteer at this moment in time. We've obviously got a limited company set up now and the cost of the business is being funded by Doug. So Doug Scott is is founder, my partner and an investor. So any cost associated to one of the one of the business Doug's been, you know, funding from his own, his own cash, and Doug that's the 460,000 masks himself out of his own money and he was distributing mastercare homes in Litchfield and and Solula beyond.
Alastair Campbell:So it's it's all being borne from a genuine need to help people and hence you know the name of the company yes, and I can, there's no, I think and also professionalizing a little bit, finding some way to take some margins so you can actually have full-time staff.
Alastair Campbell:That actually helps makes it more likely that the system will just improve and get better. Because there's no reason, of course, that this could not work in any European country, because you're going to have suppliers that are covering Europe, you're going to have suppliers that cover the globe, some of whom you've already got, and then it becomes a point of how can you build the system or the systems so that it scales itself, because you could go down the road of, you know, you could get volunteers to translate it, volunteers in every country. You only need one expert per country to tell you what kind of you know his product liability, to see you know what, what is the equivalent in that country, and of course, it just grows itself. I guess, as long as you've got a core team, you can pay to help manage the process with the volunteers in the sort of for the right vision.
Lee Perry:Yeah, we definitely want to scale. I think the concept of this minute is get the UK product market fit, which is a terminology in startups, where you get the product right that fits the market. We're close to getting that synchronization with the market and the product. Once we've got the UK market pretty much sorted and delivered on what we expect, then we can scale across the world, into Europe, into America. How we do it?
Lee Perry:In terms of the resources needed volunteers paid it's going to be a difficult one because everyone, all the countries, globally I've got different dynamics with the level of COVID and the level of faith and so on. So whether we could get volunteers in every country, I don't know. But I think the idea is to go and raise investments at some point so that we can then start scaling into different countries and help different countries get access to this platform to keep the price gouging down, to keep the quality product delivered into the different countries as high as possible. So, yeah, the platform is scalable into multiple languages, multiple countries. How we do it, we don't really know it, just running it in terms of the unknown roadmap.
Lee Perry:Yeah, so we know what we need to do, who's going to fund it and how it happens. We don't know what it's going to be.
Alastair Campbell:But it can. But there's no reason it can't, because I think you just talked to something really interesting there. It stops the price gouging and it means that you have a safe place to buy it, because there must have been a mad scramble for this stuff within the care home sector and they must have bought it from just about anyone, whether it was any good or not, and to move it to a point where actually I can go here and it's accredited and it's safe, and I'll get it and I will be ripped off. I think that's the key thing, because remember some of the pricing you showed me the beginning and the same mask was like 20 P per unit if you bought 5,000 or 2.50. If you bought 5,000, there's some people lying in beaches today who have got a lot to answer for, I think.
Lee Perry:Yeah, definitely, and price gouging has definitely got to be looked upon. See anybody the UK government come the end of this year? What? Once the year panic is over, there's got to be some people potentially going to jail, and I think they deserve to go to jail. We're talking like 10 times the normal value and even though the supply chain the cost of flights from Asia into the UK went up horrifically and the cost of the raw materials went up yeah, the price gouging was way above the inflation rates of the cost of the supply chain.
Lee Perry:People were just maliciously putting the prices up just to make it more profit and more profit. So our system completely reverses that. Our system goes from allowing buyers to be ripped off by going to the market. This is our own internal market which makes a healthy competitive place to get the best price. And in fact I've seen some of the quotations where on our platforms that go from, say, hypothetically, 3 pound per mask or down to 80p for a mask, like for the N85 mask, for example, whereas those masks I think at the height of COVID in March and April N95 masks were anywhere from like 4 or 5 pounds for a mask.
Alastair Campbell:I saw them at 10. I saw like a box of 10 for 100 quid. It's just a very good thing.
Lee Perry:We tell you probably even more. It's crazy. I'm talking trade prices for volumes of like 10,000, 20,000. It's crazy. It was crazy. It's calmed down a bit now, but anyway, ops platform tries to strip out the players.
Alastair Campbell:It's just to be clear. We've talked about masks probably a bit too often. It's not just masks, I mean, it's any form of PPE, correct?
Lee Perry:Well, we've got around about 25 individual product skews on the website at this minute. But to give you some idea, so 3M, who everyone knows as one of the main players, they've got 5,000 individual skews for their PPE division, just their 5000 skews. So if you then turn that by the other hundreds PPE players, honeywells and all of them type of companies, you're probably looking up. I wrote 100,000 individual SKUs for PPE globally. Maybe more, but that's a minimum 100,000. So our platform is just focused on the core products, but it's going to scale. So we're going to be looking to scale the PPE product range in accordance to the global market and then allow all the distributors and resellers and all the supply chain to then add all of their products into this platform and create a global reverse auction platform for all of these PPE products in the tens of thousands. That's quite ambitious.
Alastair Campbell:He says that my goal is to build the single most largest PPE marketplace.
Lee Perry:Yeah, I think that is the goal. The goal is to create a global PPE reverse auction platform for every PPE item that is needed by consumers, both business consumers.
Alastair Campbell:That's the big shift, isn't it? It's not just. I think that's why we get told not to wear masks, because there weren't any for the NHS, but I think that's the big shift, isn't it? It's not just if you run a mum and pop corner shop, you'll want a supply of masks to get real as they arrive at the shop, because they will turn up and have forgotten them and then they'll still want into the shop, and then you've got anyone who's visiting elderly parents or wants to get together. I mean, there is this weird dance right now between groups of people who can get together, not wear masks, and yet if you go to shop you have to wear a mask, and I think that's confusing some people slightly, maybe.
Alastair Campbell:I think you've got that. So what you're basically is we've got the key Today. You've got the key components. People need masks, gowns, gloves, all that kind of stuff, and eyes and individuals. A consumer can just go on there and buy a box of each of these things for my family. I can go into that. I don't need to be in the health sector.
Lee Perry:Yeah, yeah, everyone needs masks. I think globally everyone, from whether it's the man on the street to the hospital. It's both a consumer item and a business item that's needed by everyone. Here in Thailand, I went to a cafe a few days ago and they're selling this on hand sanitizer at the shop. Yes, by the countess, and this is a cafe and this is not just an exception. Yeah, so you've got everyone. Even restaurants have had to be selling masks.
Alastair Campbell:I can absolutely believe it. I don't see why they wouldn't. Because you've got to wear one to go in. So you rock up at Ted Baker or wherever. Why would you not? If you don't have one, you have to buy one.
Alastair Campbell:You can see that in America we're not wearing a mask. Brigade and people I saw a great thing of the guy put up a mirror outside his restaurant and he said if you're not willing to wear a mask, look here and as an arrow pointing at the mirror and the mirror just had. It's stupid, don't come in. And you get this thing where people don't want to wear them. I think in American situations people don't want to wear them because in their sense it's like they're being forced to wear them and I just don't think it's needed. I know there's certain people I know who don't think it's needed and some of them have been to the pub and think it's all great and it's all normal. And for the rest of us we think, well, I wear the mask because I'm looking after other people, not because I'm looking after me. And if we all wear one, that's how it stops. And obviously you experience in Asia it's been quite common, if you've got a cold or flu, to wear a mask to stop you spreading it.
Lee Perry:Yeah Well, I remember I had to do a visa run just before COVID. I had to go to Malaysia to get a stamp in my visa to get back into Thailand and basically I had to. I was going to go for a week into Malaysia and as COVID's getting worse and worse, basically all the countries are going into lockdown. So I had to get on the plane, go to Malaysia and I literally got on the next flight back to Thailand. But when I was in Malaysia I seen it was the Mars, so it may as, which is the Middle Eastern flu virus and SARS and COVID. So Malaysia's been checking temperatures and looking for people that may be infected with multiple viruses essentially for years, and it's the same in Singapore and Hong Kong. So that's why everyone's walking around with masks in all the major Asian airports waiting for COVID.
Lee Perry:Because of SARS and MERS, they were on the radar for the last few years. I think we're seeing this coming really Well. We'll be able to hear that and hence why a lot of these Asian countries Malaysia, singapore their COVID ratios are really low. So because they had, you know, they have higher experience with SARS and MERS over the last you know, 10 years or so where they ordered the odd systems in place. As I say, thailand has a local COVID case for 57 days, and that was today. That was the news today. So Thailand's got a grip of COVID really well, and it's the same in Vietnam, singapore, malaysia, probably many of them.
Alastair Campbell:It's cultural. They've adapted to it before they're used to it. They've got the systems in place and Europe and the rest of the world just didn't, I guess.
Lee Perry:But the other thing if you get caught not wearing a mask in Thailand it's a 20,000 bar fine, which is 450 pounds.
Alastair Campbell:Whoa yeah.
Lee Perry:That's a lot. So the laws and the implementation of the laws in Thailand are way, way more draconian than in the UK. Yeah, the UK. Everyone was basically doing what they want most.
Alastair Campbell:We still are. I wouldn't even tell you what the noise I could hear from the local pub last night. Yeah Well, I think that it will come. If it comes back, especially in second wave, then it will get stricter, because there cannot be any of this. I suggest you do this. If you're going to do that, if you think it's a good idea, it's going to change, isn't it? And I guess that's why PP for people is a great thing, because people will then all, as consumers, need to buy it. Now, whether they buy it from PP for people is a moot point, because they'll need to buy it from somewhere, and every retailer that you were seeing earlier, like the coroner shops and so on, why would they not have a whole section of gloves, masks, hand sanitizer, gels, all that kind of stuff? And also, if you're looking after elderly parents and all this kind of stuff, you should have gowns and all this kind of stuff. It just makes sense.
Lee Perry:Yeah, yeah. Well, what we want to do is, obviously, we don't. We don't process the transaction or, on people's, we want to be like the you know the money supermarketcom In order to reduce that. Reduced prices, keep people honest, you know, have pre-approved suppliers. So ultimately, it's yeah, it's a, it's a platform. We want to be like the, the company that you go to to get out, to get your quotation, whether you're a missons.
Lee Perry:Or the, or even an individual or the huge organization. We, we keep that price competitiveness going. I can't think of another platform in the UK and maybe globally, that allows this type of. You know put, literally hundreds of suppliers come for your, for your needs, whether it's five Masks or whether it's a million masks. You've got hundreds of suppliers you know are all competing. And what we're gonna add as well is a, an ability to reap bids. So you, at this minute I supply, will give a bid for your 10,000 must and then that's it, the, the option ends, and then whoever wins. But we're gonna even to create more competitiveness, we're gonna allow suppliers to reduce their bids, not increase their bids, but to reduce their bids to even to make it even more competitive.
Alastair Campbell:So they, you tell them that, you tell them they're out and then they can actually go hold on a sec. They're down five percent and see if I stay in. Yeah.
Lee Perry:Well, why wouldn't?
Alastair Campbell:you. Why wouldn't you automate that? We might just be simple, just to automate, so like they can Set a bunch of rules.
Lee Perry:We're going to try, yeah, we're creating the logic in the platform now and depends on, like, the average price, because obviously you, you, yeah, you can have someone who goes in at 50 pm Us and someone comes in at five pounds of us, just for argument sake that you've got this huge average. Yeah, this, you've got this. Okay, but an average really represent the average because you've got these extreme prices.
Alastair Campbell:There's a difference in the average bid, average sale bid price and the actual average purchase price, because nobody's gonna buy them at fiber. Yeah, if there were 50 p to fiber, but actually majority of them are gonna sit right down here 50 p to 75 p or whatever. I think of this outlier over, she needs to exclude the outlier. So now when I go in by 5,000, I don't see that, I just see the ones that are close to the reality.
Lee Perry:Well as as the, as the platform Develops and as orders increase through the platform, we're gonna get yeah, we're gonna have some clever AI in the background looking up the price and structures and getting the average, as you say, the actual purchase price. Look just the closer price and it's gonna change. So the more, the more users that use the platform, the clever the platforms going to get.
Lee Perry:Yeah, I mean the sense the more, the more accurate the data. So you know what we want to do is be like that's the price and index sites for all the other the UK. So if you want to know what the going prices are for your view of PPE, then we're gonna have real-time data on the home page to allow everyone to see what the, what, the average prices are, whether it's the small orders, the medium size orders or the large orders. Obviously you know prices. They take it by quantities, but we're gonna try and split it into that the small, medium and large actually so that you know what, the, what, the what, the price that you should be paying, based on their, their data analysis that we do and from all the buyers and sellers.
Alastair Campbell:Well, that's fantastic, a very interesting interview. Thank you very much. Yeah, that's nice, that was. That was a really interesting first episode of PPTV and thank you, lee, for coming on. Lee is the CEO of PPE for people, who is behind this TV station, as we call it. We're gonna be doing some buyers, some sellers, and also updating you, where visually, with how the website works and new functions and features on the website to help me buying PPE a better experience. That's it for today. Thank you, oh you.
