Selling Emergency Preparedness With Optimism
Simon Huck, CEO and founder of emergency prep kit company Judy, discusses how ill-equipped most people are for a disaster.
Simon Huck is the CEO and founder ofJudy, which sells emergency kits, and the principal owner of the public relations companyCommand Entertainment Group. Huck talks with#ThePlaybookhost David Meltzer about emergency preparedness, including the negative perceptions of emergencies and how planning is more critical than supplies.
Huck discusses his professional background in public relations and entertainment marketing and how it led him to seek mission-focused work. He talks about Judy's origins as an evolution of his attempt to develop better shelf-stable foods and his discovery of a market for emergency preparedness kits for families.
Huck says 60 percent of American families don't have supplies for an emergency. He says that Judy's mission is to make emergency preparedness part of households with the kits serving as a starting point for conversations about emergency planning.
Huck talks about the company's optimistic messaging, the challenges of debunking misconceptions about emergency planning and how COVID-19 affects traditional emergency preparedness plans with the prospect of "double disasters" — addressing social distancing in temporary shelters for victims of a hurricane, for example.
