In France, 1.8 million people use a wheelchair on a daily basis, and 1 in 3 people will need one at some point in their lives.
Many of those who live or have lived through the experience of using a wheelchair for long periods of time will testify to the difficulty they sometimes face in the eyes of others.
For some, this difficulty is the pain of not quite fitting in with the ‘norm‘ and not having the freedom to hide it. For others, it’s a feeling of shame that comes with the impression of being considered ‘weak‘. There are a variety of reasons for feeling unwell, and it is not uncommon to see people who use wheelchairs but who do not want to leave their homes, or to meet people who would benefit from using a wheelchair but who categorically refuse to do so.
What we believe, therefore, is that to be a wheelchair user who feels good about himself, you have to start by feeling good about your wheelchair.
However, it has to be said that in France, as elsewhere in the world, the vast majority of wheelchairs on the market are not particularly sexy. This is the first part of the problem to which we are proposing an answer:
How can we offer beautiful wheelchairs that will make their users feel proud ?
By choosing wood.
Wooden wheelchairs were the historic construction material for wheelchairs until the mid-twentieth century, when they disappeared completely in favour of metal-framed wheelchairs, which are better suited to mass production.
But the emergence of new manufacturing technologies and renewed consumer interest in natural materials in the context of the environmental crisis is making the use of wood in wheelchairs relevant once again.
Indeed, however novel it may be in the current range of medical equipment, using wood as the main material for the frame of a wheelchair offers a number of advantages.
Wood gives a warm, clean and timeless look to the wheelchairs Paul has developed. And because it’s easy to work and shape, it’s fully compatible with the creation of made-to-measure wheelchairs. Made-to-measure wheelchairs are adapted to the morphology of their recipient thanks to the precise adjustment of a number of parameters during manufacture: backrest height, seat width and depth, and the position of the footrest, for example.
Carefully chosen and judiciously shaped, wood is a material with a very interesting strength-to-weight ratio.
Bingo.