Wheeling
&
DME DEALING B Y
J O H N
Across North America, we found wheelchair users running their own DME businesses that sell everything from recreational equipment to everyday chairs to elite sporting equipment. These dealers use their personal experience and hard-won knowledge to help improve the lives of their customers.
L O E P P K Y
J
ohn Squires first connected to the adaptive equipment industry when he became a quadriplegic in a 1987 diving accident. He founded Ohio’s first wheelchair rugby team, competed in numerous handcycle marathons and even met his wife, Annalisa, working in the industry. The two of them spent more than a decade subcontracting with Bike-On.com before deciding to venture out on their own with Rolling in Paradise in 2021. Their goal: Provide the kind of personalized customer service that has become harder and harder to find in the durable medical equipment industry. “It used to be you had a choice. You could go down to a ‘Bob and Mary’s DME shop’ whose owners may have had a disabled child, and you felt that they had empathy for you. In the mid-’90s, things started changing because insurance was cutting everything back,” says Squires. “We feel that it’s incredibly important that providers in our community are actually disabled people rather than nondisabled folks just selling very expensive pieces of equipment to our community. And, you know, that’s what we’re finding.” They’re not the only ones. Husband and wife Reg McClellan and Chantal Benoit spent a combined 47 years playing on Canada’s national wheelchair basketball team. Today, they run 49 Bespoke, an Ontario-based company that sells custom-fit RGK wheelchairs alongside a variety of everyday mobility products. I purchase from 49 Bespoke for some of my own DME needs. McClellan’s experience as a wheelchair user lets him challenge norms in the industry, such as the key measurements used to fit a person for a chair. In wheelchair sports, where the wheelchair is often considered an extension of the body, convincing an athlete to get a tight-fitting chair isn’t difficult. 49 Bespoke has a harder time convincing new everyday users of the benefits of a formed fit. “Right now, people are still being taught to measure outside-inside-outside the thigh and add one to two inches for winter clothing or whatever,” says McClellan. “But we measure outside the thigh to outside the thigh and then see if we can have a rigid side guard to allow an even snugger position.” In addition to reducing the chair’s overall width, McClellan says a snug fit can provide stability similar to what athletes experience when they strap their hips into their sports chairs. McClellan’s mission to get people into chairs that promote an active lifestyle began in the late 1970s. That’s when he took a trip to California to have Jeff Minnebraker, inventor of the revolutionary Quadra wheelchair, build him an everyday chair. While there, Minnebraker asked if he was interested in being the Canadian distributor for the product. Finding out all he needed to do was buy 50 units helped McClellan make up his mind. “I said, ‘Well, geez, I know quite a few people, so why not?’” MARCH/APRIL 2022
19
