Rising star Mark Owen
What's so special? He's made wheelchairs look beautiful

Thirteen years ago Mark Owen was in a road traffic accident and has been a wheelchair user ever since. But during that time, he was never inspired by the wheelchair designs on offer—until he came up with his own.

"Wheelchairs are traditionally a very medical product and I just didn't feel they represented me as a person or what I wanted to use," says Owen. His idea was to design a lightweight, bespoke and beautiful chair. "We wanted to make a lifestyle product rather than a medical one."

Owen founded Nomad with his brother John in 2007. With his background in engineering—he was a welder and fitter before the accident—and his brother's finance experience, they had a good mix of skills. What they didn't have was design experience, which they decided to outsource. "We wanted something that changed the parameters of what people expected from wheelchairs. You have to pay for that," says Owen.

The Nomad MRK1 is efficient to push and highly manoeuvrable. "There's no point designing something that looks great if it doesn't work properly," he adds. But the real difference lies in its design. Cast aluminium makes the chair stronger and has allowed Nomad to experiment with how the chair looks rather than simply "melding metal tubes together".

Nomad has won a Design Management Europe award for the MRK1, launched in April 2009. The company sold 200 units in its first year.
Frustrated by "paying for hidden extras", Owen made his pricing policy open and honest. "It's about building trust and respecting people. They're not stupid," he says.

The MRK1 is the first in a range of Nomad wheelchairs, including folding, children's and offroad chairs. The firm is in the final testing stages of one accessory and three-quarters through developing another. "We've rethought the mobility solution to make it better and to make it look cool," says Owen.