Drive DeVilbiss Brand Guidelines: An 1888 Atomiser & the 2025 Return to Drive Medical

An atomiser built for a Toledo throat practice.

The name Drive DeVilbiss joined two businesses more than a century apart. The older half began in Toledo, Ohio. Dr Allen DeVilbiss practised there as a nose and throat specialist after serving in the Civil War, according to a University of Toledo Libraries exhibit. He noticed the discomfort of applying medicine to the throat with a cotton swab and began experimenting with atomisers. Metroparks Toledo dates his first atomiser to around 1887. The company says he worked in a backyard woodshed and that one early unit used the base of an oil can, and a 2013 anniversary statement says he founded The DeVilbiss Manufacturing Company in 1888 to produce the device.

The business soon reached well past the clinic. His son Thomas DeVilbiss joined and developed a perfume atomiser, which the University of Toledo exhibit says quickly became the company’s biggest seller; paint sprayers followed. Metroparks Toledo says the atomiser led to the DeVilbiss paint spray gun, and that the headquarters stayed in Toledo from 1888 to 1989. In World War II, the same source says, DeVilbiss was involved in military production, including protective coatings for items ranging from helmets to planes and tanks.

Ownership then changed. Metroparks Toledo says the DeVilbiss Company was merged into Champion Spark Plug on 1 January 1970 and that Champion sold it in 1988. A 2013 company statement says the name and ownership shifted several times from 1951 onward. The DeVilbiss spray-gun name today belongs to a separate business in automotive refinishing, Wikipedia notes; the line covered here is the respiratory one.

Sunrise Medical acquired DeVilbiss in 1993, and it split off from Sunrise in 2010, Mobility Management reported in 2015. By then, HomeCare reported that year, DeVilbiss Healthcare had its headquarters and manufacturing in Somerset, Pennsylvania, with distribution centres across North America and in France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Australia and China. The respiratory record the company gives runs through an ultrasonic nebuliser in 1964, a first stationary oxygen concentrator in 1977, and later the Pulmo-Aide compressor, the Vacu-Aide suction units and the iGo2 portable oxygen concentrator.

Drive Medical buys a name from the 1880s.

The younger half is Drive Medical, founded in 2000 and based in Port Washington, on Long Island, New York. Its site describes durable medical equipment across mobility, beds, wheelchairs, bathroom safety, respiratory equipment, paediatric rehabilitation, patient room products and personal care, and claims more than 5,000 products. PE Professional reported in 2016 that the company had completed 25 acquisitions since 2002. Harvey P. Diamond was its chief executive in 2015.

Buying its way across categories was the pattern. On 31 March 2015 Drive announced that it had acquired Columbia Medical, a maker of positioning bath and shower systems, car seats and manual wheelchairs. In August that year it bought the HurryCane consumer cane line, which it described as the top-selling cane in the United States. Between those two came the deal that gave the group its long name.

Drive completed the purchase of DeVilbiss Healthcare on 2 July 2015, calling it its largest acquisition to date, HomeCare and Sleep Review reported that day. Diamond said DeVilbiss had a history in respiratory care going back to the 1880s, and that Drive wanted to put the name “back on top, where it belongs.” The two companies were to run independently at first, and on completion of the integration in the Americas the combined company would be known as Drive DeVilbiss Healthcare Inc. Outside the Americas they were to continue as independent entities. PE Professional said Drive was then a portfolio company of Ferrer Freeman & Company and that DeVilbiss was bought from Vestar.

The ownership changed again within a year or so. Clayton, Dubilier & Rice agreed to buy Drive DeVilbiss from Ferrer Freeman, PE Professional reported in August 2016, with closing expected in the fourth quarter; RT later said that CD&R acquired Drive in 2016. PE Professional described products sold to more than 15,000 dealers, providers, distributors and retailers in more than 80 countries; the 2025 Kingswood announcement gave more than 100.

Wheeled products stayed at the centre of the mobility side. Stiftung Warentest looked at the Drive Medical Diamond Deluxe, a rollator that converts to a wheelchair, in a note dated February 2014, and its rollator test of 26 August 2025 includes the Drive Medical Cristallo and Nitro SL among eleven models. On the company’s blog the Nitro name extends to a Nitro Sprint travel rollator.

Frames, fabrics and ordinary days.

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.

The long name retires after ten years.

The name this guide is filed under is now a historic one. Kingswood Capital Management signed an agreement to buy Drive DeVilbiss Healthcare from CD&R in October 2025, RT reported, with existing management staying in place. Kingswood says it completed the purchase in November 2025. On 1 December 2025 the company announced that it was rebranding across all markets as Drive Medical, HME Business reported, describing the move as a return to its roots. Chief executive Derek Lampert said the founders chose the word Drive for its meaning: “momentum, purpose and a determination to push health care forward.”

For a brand study, the company’s explanation is unusually direct. A press statement on its German site says growth and acquisitions had produced a multitude of brands and a complex brand image, and that the change would mainly affect the logo and visual identity. The product portfolio was to stay the same. The change was phased by market: Drive Medical’s UK business dates its own return to the Drive Medical name to 2026 on its history page. Respiratory products keep the old name as a line, DeVilbiss by Drive, and the company says DeVilbiss Healthcare is now a brand under the Drive Medical umbrella. Its statement says the design updates emphasise continuity with the legacy identity, using familiar visual elements while modernising the look, and that the change would be phased across communications, products and corporate materials.

The buying has continued. Drive Medical signed an agreement for Compass Health Brands of Middleburg Heights, Ohio, in January 2026, with brands including ProBasics, Carex and TheraMed. HME Business reported the acquisition on 29 January, and said Compass would become a division within Drive Medical. Kingswood puts the deal two months after its own closing.

On manufacturing, the company lists offices, manufacturing and distribution facilities across the United States, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, China, Romania and Australia. It describes the DeVilbiss by Drive respiratory line as assembled in the USA of domestic and foreign parts, and says production at Somerset reached an all-time high across 2020 and 2021. On regulation, the US Food and Drug Administration issued a warning letter to Drive DeVilbiss Healthcare dated 23 November 2021. Its close-out letter of 23 October 2024 says the firm appears to have addressed the violations and that future inspections will further assess the corrections.

For a design guide, Drive DeVilbiss shows how a merged name can be unwound while the older word stays on one product line. Compare Sunrise Medical, which owned DeVilbiss from 1993, and Invacare, another name in home medical equipment. For this guide we use slate and oxide red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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