Health check
Positioning itself as a world leader in the medical bed and stretcher market is a return to roots for Howard Wright
Wednesday, March 31 2010 || Cool company || BY Caitlin Sykes
A journey towards self-improvement may be long and, at times, difficult; not taking the trip, however, could ultimately prove harder.
So figured New Plymouth-based medical bed and stretcher maker and supplier Howard Wright when it signed up for the government-subsidised Better by Design (BBD) programme five years ago — a decision that now seems to be reaping rewards. The company’s first product to go through the complete design process instituted as a result of BBD — the M8 critical care medical bed — is helping boost the company’s export prospects and garnering awards. Last year the M8 won a Designers Institute of New Zealand BeST Design Award as well as an iF international product design award.
“It’s really nice for everyone involved — either directly or indirectly — because it’s a path we set out on five years ago when we did Better by Design,” says the company’s CEO and majority shareholder, Bruce Moller. “That gives us a sense of confidence in the process — and of more exciting things to come.”
It also signals something of a return to roots. The company is eponymously named for its founder, Howard Wright, a motor mechanic who started his own home-based engineering business in the 1950s. With a reputation for solving problems, he was approached by a nurse from the local hospital asking him to make a modern hospital bed like those staff had seen in pictures from overseas.
Wright, in fact, came up with something much better using the latest in hydraulics. In the early 60s he opened a hospital bed factory and by the 70s he was making and selling most of New Zealand’s hospital beds.
It was Wright’s 1976 M4 bed, which used remote hydraulic pumping at the foot of the bed to raise its surface, which proved an export hit and signalled the company’s shift to the forefront of hospital bed design internationally, continuing into the 80s.
Moller landed at the company as general manager in 1991, later becoming its majority shareholder when the Wright family sold on Wright’s retirement in 1997. During the 90s, Moller notes, New Zealand and the world were starting to change. Domestically the Crown Health Enterprises were introduced and, with them came a focus on costs, driving the company to look for more opportunities internationally.
“There was quite a lot of pressure on us. We became very customer focused then, but almost to a point where we did a lot of customisation work for people, which took up a lot of energy,” recalls Moller.
“We felt in a way we’d lost the leadership. We just became a responder, like an engineering shop, rather than a leader by doing research and the market looking to us and saying ‘you guys are the experts in this area’ — a position the company may have been in in the past.”
The BBD programme began in 2004 to help New Zealand companies boost their international competitiveness by integrating design principles across their business. Signing up for the programme in 2005, Howard Wright was at the vanguard, but Moller says the process wasn’t scary.
“We were keen to get all the help we could,” he says.
The key learning from the process says Moller, was the company felt it made a good product, but wasn’t considered a leader. “It created a pathway to get to that position.”
