Simon Huck did the latter. Two years ago, [Simon Huck,] the successful public relations owner ... (known for his close relationship with the Kardashian family) oscillated from the vast subculture of celebrity and reality shows into the growing market of disaster preparedness. “I had so many friends and family who have been in these emergency situations,” says Huck, the founder and CEO of the emergency preparedness
company JUDY, over the phone from his apartment in Manhattan, where he’d been living since the start of the pandemic. “They’d experienced everything from household fires and floods to large scale emergencies, hurricanes, lost their homes. And the common denominator was their fundamental lack of preparedness. No one had a go-bag, a first aid kit. People had a haphazard approach to being prepared. Have you spoken to your husband or wife or kids or partner about an evacuation plan? No one had done that. None of the ground rules of basic emergency preparedness had been met.”
With this, Huck saw an opportunity and pivoted to create JUDY — its name not an acronym but rather “just a word that sticks.” JUDY’s emergency go-kits are Millennially-stylish, construction-orange bug-out bags with catchy black block lettering. There are five types of bags, costing anywhere from 45 to 250 dollars, ranging in size from a fanny pack to plastic crate. Contents include anything from basic first aid to a 72-hour self-sufficiency kit of a flashlight, duct tape, phone charger, food bars, and a hand-crank radio. Huck employed FEMA associates to help him create a more realistic kit, sans cilantro hair conditioner and bourgeois chocolate bar.