March, 2006

Starting in September, 2004, Bacou-Dalloz™ began the process of consolidating the Willson® and Survivair® brands of reusable respiratory protection. Survivair and Willson are divisions of Sperian Protection, a leading manufacturer of personal protective equipment. As a result of the respiratory product line consolidation, reusable respirators will now be offered only under the Survivair brand, while the Willson brand concentrates on disposable respiratory products. There was a brand transition period for reusable respirators throughout 2005, and a total switch over is expected within 2006.

This consolidation makes sense from a number of perspectives. End-users and distributors will be offered a broader, more complete range of respiratory products, and in most cases, this will help reduce overall inventory requirements. Plus, reduced manufacturing requirements will allow Sperian Protection to focus on developing new products and providing better customer service.

Based on the consolidation plan, the entire respiratory product lines from both brands were evaluated on the basis of benefits to the user, and the best products were selected to remain in the line. These include air purifying respirators (APR), powered air purifying respirators (PAPR), supplied air respirators (SAR), and self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA), which will now be marketed only under the Survivair brand name. Disposable respiratory products, including the popular Freedom® and new Saf-T-Fit® Plus, will be marketed exclusively under the Willson® brand.

A major benefit of this consolidation project is that Survivair now has the broadest range of facepieces to fit an entire workplace with one cartridge system. Both bayonet and threaded styles are now available for most Survivair APR products, dramatically simplifying and reducing distributor and end user’s inventory of cartridges and filters. All NIOSH approvals from the majority of Willson APRs will be maintained and converted to the Survivair brand, thus allowing cross usage of facepieces, cartridges, filters and replacement parts. This provides a seamless transition for Willson users. Only the name will change. To verify NIOSH extensions for a specific respirator style or configuration, please refer to the latest NIOSH approval labels supplied with the respirator or available directly from Survivair or NIOSH.

The new Survivair line of reusable respirators will include fourteen half-mask and eight full facepiece size and model configurations, including such well-known product brands as ValuAir®, Premier®, Opti-Fit™, Blue 1™ and SurvivairMax™, providing a fit for almost every face. In addition, the line is designed to be as adaptable as possible. With appropriate conversion kits, selected models of half mask respirators and Opti-Fit full facepiece respirators can be readily converted to PAPR or continuous-flow SAR configurations.