A frightening family experience led money manager Thorne Perkin to a business opportunity that is now paying off thanks in part to the pandemic.

Years ago, Mr. Perkin’s young son had a series of staph infections. When one sent his son to the hospital, Mr. Perkin noticed how frequently doctors sanitized their hands.

His family was sent home with a powerful skin cleanser that was effective—but unpleasant. “The idea just hit me: Why is there no premium product hand sanitizer in the marketplace for consumers?” he said.

Inspired by this experience, Mr. Perkin helped launch a hand-sanitizer business in 2015 that became known as Olika. It began selling sanitizer in 2017; and, this week, publicly traded biotechnology company Amyris Inc. closed on an agreement to buy the company. Mr. Perkin said he and his family invested more than half a million dollars and received a return of more than 10 times their investment in the Amyris purchase.

On the largest scale, there are pandemic winners such as vaccine-maker Moderna Inc. The company hadn’t yet developed an approved drug two years ago. But there are also smaller beneficiaries in the medical business and industries alongside it. It is hard to say what those companies’ futures would have held if the pandemic had never come along.

“The company certainly had some dark days before the pandemic, and then I feel like we had righted the ship and had the company moving in the right direction,” Mr. Perkin said. “Then the pandemic came and that just catapulted it into a totally different level.”

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

How have your sanitizer-buying habits changed in the past year? Join the conversation below.

In the case of Olika, Mr. Perkin knew his job at Park Avenue-based Papamarkou Wellner Asset Management kept him too busy to launch a company by himself. So he turned to his cousin, Nic Perkin, who is chairman and chief executive of New Orleans-based Perkin Industries. The cousins put in money and found additional investors to start the business.

Amyris CEO John Melo and Olika CEO Alastair Dorward declined to disclose what Amyris was paying for Olika, though they said Olika investors were being paid mostly in Amyris stock. Those shares have more than doubled in 2021.

Olika made its hand sanitizer more luxe than the standard squirt bottle. It sprays onto hands as a mist and comes in refillable containers whose design evokes the image of a bird. It is available in fragrances that include mint citrus and cucumber basil.

Olika was up and running before the coronavirus pandemic intensified consumers’ focus on cleanliness. That newfound interest sent U.S. sales of hand sanitizer jumping almost sevenfold in 2020 from the year earlier and sometimes left store shelves stripped bare of the product. Mr. Dorward said Olika experienced a surge in demand in the spring of 2020.

“Within a week or so we sold out,” he said. “We probably sold more in one week than we sold in the entire previous year.”

Write to Karen Langley at karen.langley@wsj.com