Our Story
Our design process for Flo Mask Kids.
The world was a much different place from when we first started our journey in 2018, but our mission remains concrete: build the world's best face mask, period.
Living in California, we're subjected to annual wildfires that result in toxic smoke, lasting weeks at a time. As a dad to three young kids in elementary school, I grew increasingly desperate to find a solution as they returned home from class feeling physically ill. The masks available at the time had huge gaps around the edges or questionable filtration efficiency with their cloth materials. Certainly not good enough.
As a product development professional, it was clear to me the mask industry forgot about kids when they created N95 masks. In fact, there exists no equivalent mask standards for kids here in the USA. This mission suddenly became deeply personal and that's when the idea for Flo Mask was born.
Our Flo Mask team is made up of award winning product designers from Silicon Valley, having spent our entire careers building products for the world's best tech companies (Google, Apple, Motorola, Logitech). We have deep expertise in creating solutions around human factors and Flo Mask proved to be one of the most challenging we've ever done.
Our two year journey to scan little faces using an industrial grade 3D scanner, design, prototype, learn, scrap, start over, redesign, refine, prototype again and again is what's required to build what we believe to be the world's best face mask for kids.
Flo Mask Kids won the Phase 1 BARDA Mask Challenge in 2021, beating out 1,500 other teams across the USA. This gave us the confidence to build our adult version, Flo Mask Pro, which was a Runner Up in Phase 2, hosted by BARDA, NIOSH, and NIST. Flo Mask Pro with the Pro Filter has gone on to be certified by the EU Notified Body for meeting FFP2 standards for Europe, cementing its performance.
Our iterative process in building Flo Mask Pro.
Flo Mask is crafted with the very best materials and tested to the highest standards. We've obsessed over every detail as if our own families are wearing them, because they are.
And now, we've built a community of tens of thousands of kids and adults around the world that wear Flo Mask.
- Kevin Ngo, Inventor of Flo Mask, Founder and CEO of Air Flo Labs