For two weeks, Jim McConnell was worried.

As president of McConnell Labs, which makes specialty products used by nail technicians, he watched salons the world over shut down due to the pandemic. In the proceeding weeks, his company saw a quick decline in orders.

Luckily, it didn’t last long.

“Sales shot back up soon after,” he said. “We figured that nail technicians went to work at home and had their clients show up there instead.”

McConnell said that thanks to flexible business owners and their clients, the last few years turned out “just fine” for McConnell Labs, which sells to consumers under the name Light Elegance Nail Products.

But now that businesses have reopened and once again doing in-person service, there has been another short term slowdown. He surmises that nail techs have returned to salons already stocked with products purchased pre-pandemic.

“We’re seeing another slowdown, but don’t think this one will last long either,” he told the Spokesman.

Like many business owners, McConnell said the last few years have been stressful, as the company tried to plan for what would come next.

“We had no idea how we were going to deal with (the pandemic),” he said. “It was one of the strangest things we’ve ever seen in our lives.”

McConnell said the company has navigated complications before, including the national trauma of 9/11 and the economic slowdown of 2006-2008.

But these last few years threw a number of new curveballs at the company. In addition to changing consumer behavior, they also dealt with supply chain problems and the fast-rising costs of raw materials.

“We have had price increases from the same supplier not once, but twice, in the same month,” he said.

McConnell estimated that many of the raw materials they use in nail products jumped 15-25 percent in the past two years. At times, the company saw backlogs on supplies. Everything from boxes to packaging equipment to more specialized pigments, resins and acrylic acids were hard to come by at time.

Some thickeners that the company uses are also common in hand sanitizers and foaming soaps. That means they were almost impossible to secure during the height of COVID-19, which forced the company’s chemists to reformulate many of their products.

And that requires more than just updating the recipe. A careful list of ingredients is required by most countries they ship to, in addition to the stringent labeling requirements required here in the USA. As the availability of raw materials changed rapidly, McConnell said the company had to make sure they could be flexible in changing their list of materials, communicating that to customers, and making sure to meet regulations.

It was a difficult to balance, he said.

“We just tried to stay mobile and fluid — to keep on rolling with it,” said McConnell. “Whatever transpired, we tried to flex with it.”

The company has 33 employees at their manufacturing facility on Umatilla Ave., with multiple open positions. Their 20,000-square-foot facility is almost entirely used to manufacture, label and knit products that are shipped to nail salons.

Looking to the future, McConnell said that the company’s success will be predicated on their ability to hold their own against Chinese competitors, who often use cheaper but less safe materials.

“Some of the stuff they use is illegal in cosmetics (in the EU and the US)” said McConnell, who noted that his company’s “Made in the USA” tag still carries weight in the industry.

Dealing with the rising cost of labor, and the difficulty of holding on to good staff, will be key to the company’s longterm prospects, he said.