Whirlwind History
Around about the Year 2000, the impact of rapid globalization of the world economy began to be felt in the rehabilitation sector in the developing world. These effects were both positive and negative. They forced Whirlwind to engage in an internal debate about how best to move forward and led to a major shift in the organization’s strategy and functioning.
On a very practical level globalization meant that critical parts, like steel tubing & bearings, were becoming more and more available in standardized sizes around the world. Less customization of designs was required at each site. At the same time, the price of wheelchairs decreased as manufacturers in Asia greatly expanded their reach into the developing world.
The California-based Wheelchair Foundation began buying large numbers of very low cost standard wheelchairs made in China. The Wheelchair Foundation gave wheelchairs away for free throughout the developing world. The Wheelchair Foundation’s success in fundraising through groups like Rotary International meant that tens of thousands of wheelchairs were being distributed annually. For Whirlwind’s network, the immediate effect was unfair competition for the more than 40 small shops that Whirlwind had started or assisted. It is hard to make a business out of selling something that someone else is giving away. Typically for six months after several hundred wheelchairs were dropped in the local market, the small shops would have very little business. Fortunately for the local producers, donated chairs typically were too weak to last in many cases. As donated chairs broke down business might pick up again although some producers did not have the financial flexibility so these dynamics were terminal. Less active wheelchair users, like the large elderly segment, were often well served. But, active users were not.
But the Wheelchair Foundation had also created an awareness in the international donor community of the vast need for wheelchairs in the developing world, thus making significant funding for wheelchair purchases available for the first time. This funding is important because most wheelchair riders and their families are usually the poorest of the poor, many of whom make as little as a few hundred dollars a year. The lack of purchasing power had meant that the small shops did not produce many wheelchairs.
Over the next few years, the availability of wheelchairs in developing countries created hundreds of thousands of new riders who learned through experience that the wheelchairs that they had been given and so joyously received did not function well in the rough and dirty environments that are most everywhere in the developing world. The chairs broke and spare parts were usually not available, let alone affordable. These riders became educated consumers and their desires for better wheelchairs were communicated through various NGOs back to the donors and other stakeholders in the field.
Responses to the Wheelchair Foundation were varied. Some organizations, such as Free Wheelchair Mission, chose to emulate the Wheelchair Foundation by raising large amounts of money from donors to buy chairs made in China, but they provided a wheelchair that is considered an abomination by anyone with any experience in the field of rehabilitation. Motivation Charitable Trust, based in Bristol, England, which was founded in 1991 and had followed a small shop model similar to Whirlwind, chose to withdraw from local manufacture and establish production in China, albeit of models that were distinctly superior to the models then being made in China. Los Angeles-based Wheels for Humanity, which had been collecting used wheelchairs in the United States, refurbishing them, and shipping them overseas, began to focus more on proper distribution, which the Wheelchair Foundation rarely did and which the Free Wheelchair Mission never did because its chairs were one-size-fits-almost nobody plastic lawn chairs with wheels, rendering fitting unnecessary because it wasn’t even possible.
In 2006, the first International Conference on Manual Wheelchairs in Developing Countries was held in Bangalore, India. Sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and organized by the International Society for Prosthetics and Orthotics (ISPO) in cooperation with the World Health Organization (WHO), the conference brought together most of the major players in the field, resulting in a consensus that there needed to be guidelines for the proper provision of wheelchairs in the developing world. Whirlwind sat on the conference’s organizing committee.
In 2008, the WHO published its Guidelines on the Provision of Manual Wheelchairs in Less-Resourced Settings. The Guidelines provide extensive information and recommendations for those wanting to be involved on any level in helping provide wheelchairs in these environments. A number of Whirlwind’s staff contributed to the content, and Whirlwind’s executive director Marc Krizack was a member of the editorial board.
Publication of the Guidelines had an immediate impact on wheelchair provision by establishing the importance of proper provision as well as appropriate equipment. USAID, by far the largest single funder of international disability projects in the world, began to limit funding for wheelchair projects to those that included proper provision.
Meanwhile, Whirlwind looked at its existing loose network of manufacturers and disability NGO allies around the world and made the decision to develop that network into a franchise based around larger-scale regional production. The idea was to produce high volumes of high quality wheelchairs at competitive prices to win the competition for donor dollars and build profitable and sustainable businesses. Whirlwind secured funding from the Arthur B. Schultz Foundation (ABS) to continue design work on an all-terrain wheelchair that Whirlwind had begun with a US government grant that came through the Center for International Rehabilitation (CIR) of Chicago. The ABS grant also helped Whirlwind transfer the RoughRider® to production at the Kien Tuong Private Enterprise Wheelchair Factory in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. In 2008, Kien Tuong became the first of six factories to make the Whirlwind RoughRider®.
Making the transition from small shop production to medium and large scale production was not an easy task as Whirlwind had to learn to design for much higher tech production methods without sacrificing local reparability and local replicability. Where heretofore Whirlwind’s relationships with the more than forty small shops had been based on trust alone, Whirlwind now had to develop very specific and detailed contracts that were still founded on but went well beyond the personal and more charitable basis of prior relationships. Now relationships were principally business relationships, with the contract moving into the foreground.
For all of this to work, however, a key component would have to be Whirlwind’s ability to attract donors and purchasers. In mid-2006, Whirlwind learned that a major donor/purchaser of wheelchairs, the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS) Humanitarian Services Program was serious about providing improved wheelchairs. Whirlwind contacted LDS and invited them to participate in the first Wheelchair Consensus Conference to be held in Bangalore in November 2006. In January 2007, LDS informed Whirlwind of its desire to purchase thousands of RoughRider® wheelchairs annually. When production began at Kien Tuong in June 2008, LDS was Whirlwind’s first purchaser aside from the ABS Foundation. Since that time, Whirlwind and LDS have partnered in developing Whirlwind production around the world. The LDS wheelchair program is separate from their ecclesiastical program and Whirlwind remains a secular and non-sectarian organization.
As of the writing of this brief history, Whirlwind has larger capacity production in Mexico, Turkey, South Africa, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Whirlwind plans to add new factories only in countries which make it difficult to import wheelchairs, including Brazil and India. Whirlwind is currently extending its production network to Wheelchair Provision and Assembly Centers (WPACs) that will be sustainable businesses that serve the local need for wheelchairs and wheelchair services where manufacture is not economically viable.
The rapid expansion of globalization and the move to larger scale manufacture has revolutionized Whirlwind as an organization. When Hotchkiss began Whirlwind along with engineering professor Peter Pfalezer, there were no desktop computers and all design work was done on paper. Even as desktop computers became commonplace, the CAD software remained expensive. So, the principal design methodology was descriptive, that is, many prototype and testing iterations to develop and refine a design. It was time-consuming and cumbersome compared to designing using a program such as SolidWorks. In the post-globalization Whirlwind, Whirlwind uses more prescriptive design. CAD has become a staple component of Whirlwind’s design work, although multiple prototypes, rigorous testing, and user feedback continue to play important roles in product development.
The early Whirlwind was hampered by poor communications with its worldwide network. Many places didn’t get decent email communication until after 2000. International phone calls were expensive, and there was no such thing as Skype. Whirlwind was not able to maintain regular contact with most of the shops in the Network. However, in the late 1990s two Whirlwind staff, Jan Sing and Kurt Kornbluth, traveled to many shops around the world to assess their capacities and needs. As email became more widespread, the cost of communications went down and the frequency of contacts went up. Today, a Whirlwind engineer overseeing the startup of production in a factory in Indonesia can hold free daily video calls with the design team back in San Francisco, and sometimes people in a half dozen countries can be involved in a video conference call.
As a program at San Francisco State University, Whirlwind benefited from certain institutional strengths. Larry Ware, then Chief Financial Officer of the University and also head of the University Foundation (since renamed the University Corporation, San Francisco State) was very supportive of Whirlwind’s efforts and agreed to provide Whirlwind with a line of credit to help set up larger scale production. The University Corporation also honors purchase orders from large wheelchair buyers and floats the funds to pay the manufacturers for wheelchairs which have been ordered by these donor/purchasers. Although Whirlwind has not received any financial support from the University since 2001, the University continues to provide Whirlwind office and shop space and to provide accounting and fundraising support services. Thus, the university has served as an incubator for Whirlwind’s expansion.
Today, Whirlwind takes two tracks with each of its designs. One is to design for medium to large scale manufacture at a central facility in order to keep costs down and quality high. The companion track is to ensure that each wheelchair component has a small shop analog for when a key repair or replacement part needs to be manufactured locally or where it is more cost effective to manufacture a component locally rather than have it shipped from a central facility. In this way, Whirlwind hopes to retain the advantages of decentralized small shop production while benefiting from the advantages of larger scale production.