1800Wheelchair

Our work centered on the Feather brand and website, though it’s still an extension of 1800Wheelchair. To establish a balanced narrative, Big Human strategists revisited 1800Wheelchair’s brand traits to quickly realign the business’s personality with its service offerings and long-term goals. Six characteristics — Diligent, Approachable, Knowledgeable, Professional, Experienced, and Caring — steer 1800Wheelchair’s visuals and communications and speak to its mission, expertise, and personalized approach to customer service.

For cohesion and consistency between the companies, Feather shares two brand traits (Diligent and Approachable) with 1800Wheelchair. Its last four brand traits — Insightful, Entrepreneurial, Practical, and Premium — are deliberate connections to Feather’s innovative take on mobility devices.

Feather has its own website, but it’s also sold by other retailers, so the rebrand needed to appeal to both consumers and wholesalers. Big Human designers customized the brand’s wordmark with light, airy typography (a subtle nod to the Feather name), lessening the weight of the original logo to increase legibility.

As a tie-in with the 1800Wheelchair brand, Feather’s core color has always been orange, but we introduced different hues and a range of complementary colors for depth and balance. Feather’s updated color palette doubles as 1800Wheelchair’s, establishing a subtle visual throughline between the two brands. We also simplified 1800Wheelchair’s bright red-and-blue logo to a clean dark blue for a light refresh.

All colors and type for Feather and 1800Wheelchair adhere to strict accessibility requirements. The final brand guidelines include instructions for color, type, and logo usage and how to apply all branded designs to packaging materials and marketing collateral.

With Feather, Piekarski and his team sought to do something the mobility equipment industry had never seen before: make wheelchairs fashionable. The concept parallels the way cars (utility items that transport us from Point A to Point B) are lavishly advertised, no matter the make or model. The best-selling Feather line offers practicality, reliability, and affordability, but it also wanted to infuse some excitement into the online experience.

Unlike cars, there aren’t showrooms for mobility devices, so with any eCommerce website, photography plays a pivotal role in presenting and selling products. For 1800Wheelchair and Feather, photography was the most efficient way to communicate feelings of luxury and style. The brands’ lifestyle photography shows consumers utilizing and enjoying their mobility devices and highlights their ease of use. All photography uses ambient lighting and natural poses, a visual metaphor for Feather’s lightweight build. For product shots on the Feather website, we leaned into Apple’s tech-forward visual style for a more elevated point of view, featuring darker imagery taken in a studio setting.

Big Human used eCommerce best practices for the 1800Wheelchair and Feather websites across every touchpoint. With such a large breadth of categories and products, we kept the information architecture straightforward and easy to navigate. Following 1800Wheelchair’s existing structure, we consolidated top-level navigation items. We cleaned up the visual hierarchy to make it easier for users to digest the content and find what they need, containing sections and categories inside borders to give everything its own place on the page. Showcasing Feather, 1800Wheelchair’s best-selling collection, was a top priority, so we placed it front and center on the homepage and dropdown navigation and incorporated color-coded ads on multiple listing pages to help them stand out visually.

Our designers also rebuilt the landing pages, product listing pages, and product detail pages for every offering on the 1800Wheelchair and Feather websites. Each mobility device has its own product description and exact specifications, so we took more cues from Apple and how it presents products on its website. Instead of overwhelming users with dense blocks of copy, we organized the pages to tell a story and highlight special features about each product as users scroll down. This approach balances usability with innovation, giving users the information they need while bringing richness to the experience.

While modernizing the websites, we focused on accessibility and created designs through the lens of 1800Wheelchair and Feather’s target audiences: wheelchair users and caretakers. Since mobility devices and medical supplies are often purchased on mobile rather than desktop, all designs are responsive and accommodate various devices, with higher color contrasts, larger font sizes, and touch targets for smaller screens. We also introduced “helpers” to ease users into the experience; the 1800Wheelchair homepage includes a quick questionnaire that recommends devices based on users’ answers.

Most wheelchairs on the 1800Wheelchair and Feather websites are customizable. Users can choose their wheelchair’s colors, frames, braking systems, and more; they can also add accessories like seatbelts, cushions, drink holders, and travel carrying cases. For a more interactive experience, we built a sequential UI to guide users through every personalizable detail.

The checkout flow follows the standard eCommerce structure, but we integrated user-centric capabilities that were missing from 1800Wheelchair and Feather’s original websites. Between “Add to Cart” and “Pay Now,” each page of the checkout flow now shows users a more robust digest of their selected products and add-ons. Wheelchairs and other medical supplies are typically bigger purchases, so we also restructured screens to call attention to both companies’ multiple financing and payment options.