Pride Mobility Brand Guidelines: A Pittston Lift-Chair Shop and a Move From Red to Plum

Two families and a lift chair.

Pride Mobility began in 1986 in northeastern Pennsylvania. The company’s history says the Meuser and Kretchik families started making lift chairs in a small building on Main Street in Pittston, and the local Sunday Dispatch, in a long report of December 2022, called it an “unassuming store” downtown and described Scott Meuser and his family joining forces with the Kretchiks that year.

Lift chairs were the whole business at first. Scooters came in 1992, including a model called the Shuttle, and the Sunday Dispatch says Pride was shipping worldwide by 1998; the company dates its first international subsidiaries, in Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia, to the same year.

The family connection has been public. English Wikipedia says Dan Meuser worked at Pride from 1988, built it with his brother Scott and his father Stan, and left in August 2008 for public service while staying on the board; he has been a US congressman for Pennsylvania since 2019. Scott Meuser has long been chairman and chief executive: a 2009 trade report gives him that title, as does a company release of 2018 and the Sunday Dispatch in 2022.

The buildings tell the growth story. In 1995 Pride moved from Pittston to a 150,000-square-foot building in Exeter, which held management, research, manufacturing, warehousing and shipping. Company releases still carried an Exeter dateline in 2020.

Jazzy, Go Go and Quantum.

Pride’s reputation rests on a few long-lived product names. The Jazzy power chair arrived in 1996. The company’s history says it used patented mid-wheel drive, and it remains the name Pride puts first when it describes itself. It marked the chair’s tenth birthday in 2006 with the Jazzy Select series, and later names in the line include the Jazzy Air of 2016, with a seat that rises while the chair is moving, and the Jazzy Carbon of 2022.

The Go Go travel scooter followed in 2004. Pride describes it as compact and lightweight, a scooter that comes apart for transport, and says the line expanded quickly. Later came the Victory series, and the Baja outdoor scooters, launched in 2022.

In 2000 Pride formed Quantum Rehab, a division for complex rehabilitation power chairs, which now has its own product family, including the Edge and 4Front chairs and iLevel seating. In 2014 Pride and Quantum bought Stealth Products, a maker of seating and positioning parts and drive controls.

Not every purchase stayed. Pride bought SilverStar, a vehicle-lift brand, in 2005; the line was renamed Pride Lifts & Ramps in 2011, Mobility Management reported. In December 2018 Pride sold the division to Harmar Mobility, saying the move would let it concentrate on scooters, power chairs and lift chairs.

Lift chairs, the original product, have stayed in the range. Under the VivaLift! name, launched in 2017, Pride has advertised power recliners on television; a campaign of three commercials began in July 2020. In 2020 it launched the Zero Turn Series of scooters.

The company calls itself “the world’s leading designer and manufacturer of mobility products.” That is Pride’s own description, and it appears in its releases. Its mission statement is plainer: “to manufacture quality, technologically advanced mobility products for people with disabilities and mobility impairments.” Its stated values include “Do Well By Doing Good” and “Putting People First,” and its vision statement uses the unusual image of a “long-term Olympic gold medalist” in the industry.

How the category presents itself.

Wheelchairs, walkers and scooters have their own route to market. Writing in 1991, the journalist Joseph Shapiro noted that, unlike virtually every other product, wheelchairs were not sold directly to users but marketed through occupational and physical therapists and medical supply dealers. Today’s makers still describe much the same route: Platinum Equity said in 2024 that Sunrise Medical sells through homecare dealers and distributors, and Invacare’s 2024 announcement named home medical equipment providers alongside retail and online channels.

Catalogues in this trade deal in frames, seats and options. The International Directory of Company Histories described one popular Sunrise chair of the early 1990s as made in one-inch steps of back height, seat depth and seat width. Colour sits on the same order form: Sunrise Medical’s 2025 frame palette gave its shades names of their own, such as Midnight Blue and Turbo Green.

Trade fairs are the category’s public stage. Rehacare, which German Wikipedia says began in 1977 and has been run by Messe Düsseldorf since 1999, shows aids including mobility products to users and relatives as well as to specialists; its organisers list the next edition for September 2027. Medtrade, in the United States, is a trade conference for medical supplies, according to English Wikipedia.

The people in the pictures matter too. Shapiro wrote that Quickie’s brochures showed its chairs in use by active people, at the office and elsewhere, and Sunrise Medical’s American website today quotes named wheelchair users in their own words on work and travel. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made, with the company’s own claims marked as such.

From red to sugar plum.

Pride’s most recent move has been a large one. The company bought the former Topps chewing-gum plant in Duryea in 2003, the Sunday Dispatch reported, and for years leased part of it to Topps and to the neighbouring Schott Glass while using the rest. A 100,000-square-foot warehouse was added next to it, finished before March 2020 by the paper’s account, and in 2022 the last of the company left Exeter. The company’s history records the headquarters move that year. The paper described a 400,000-square-foot building on nearly 50 acres, with an 11,000-square-foot test lab, and about 700 local staff out of as many as 1,300 worldwide. The old Exeter building went to PowerRail, a locomotive-parts company, the same paper reported in 2021.

Where things are made is partly documented. The Sunday Dispatch described production at Duryea and at Las Vegas, with a third plant in Mississippi building lift chairs and scooters. Pride said in 2016 that its plant at Pontotoc, Mississippi, made every part of its lift chairs, from computer-cut frames to upholstery, and it called them “uniquely manufactured in America”; that claim was about lift chairs. For the company as a whole, its website lists operations in Las Vegas, Mississippi and Florida, as well as Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

The identity has been reworked at least twice. In May 2009 Pride introduced a logo and the tagline “Performance Mobility — Live Your Best” for its retail products, HomeCare magazine reported. “Live Your Best” still heads the company’s consumer blog. Then, once the Duryea move was finished, the Sunday Dispatch reported in December 2022, Pride redesigned its logo and refreshed its product line, changing the company colour from red to sugar plum.

For a design guide, Pride Mobility shows how a maker can keep its product names stable while changing the colour around them. Compare Golden Technologies, another Pennsylvania mobility maker, and Invacare, another American wheelchair name. For this guide we use a dark plum and an old rose with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Pride Mobility’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.