Guldmann Brand Guidelines: An Aarhus Family Firm Making Lifts, Slings and Ramps Since 1980

A family company in Denmark’s second city.

Guldmann is a Danish maker of equipment for lifting and moving people, based in Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city. Danish Wikipedia, in an entry last revised in August 2025, says the company, V. Guldmann A/S, was founded in 1980 by Viggo Guldmann, and that it is owned today by Jørgen and Carsten Guldmann. The same entry names its products as ceiling lifts, beds, floor lifters and lifting slings.

The business has grown well beyond Denmark. Danish Wikipedia lists sales and service offices in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, France, England, Canada and the United States, and puts the workforce at 588 people in 2024, citing the Aarhus business paper Erhvervsliv Aarhus. That paper reported in March 2025 on the accounts V. Guldmann A/S had just filed for the year from October 2023 to September 2024.

The British side of the business shows up in the public register. Companies House records that V. Guldmann A/S opened a UK establishment on 1 April 2007, at Easingwold, north of York, and that a separate company, Guldmann Limited, was incorporated at the same town on 28 November 2018.

The legal name and the trading name differ slightly. Guldmann trades under the surname alone, while the registered company is V. Guldmann A/S, with an initial in front and the Danish abbreviation for a public limited company at the end. Its national web addresses, such as guldmann.dk, guldmann.de and guldmann.co.uk, all forward to language sections of a single guldmann.com site.

Lifts, floor units, slings and ramps.

The clearest independent record of what Guldmann makes is the registration and listing database of the United States Food and Drug Administration, which records the sites that make medical devices sold in that market and the products listed for each. It names V. Guldmann A/S in Aarhus as a site that manufactures medical devices, and attaches to it a group of patient lifts first listed in August 2004, among them the GH1, GH3 and GH3+. They sit under the FDA product heading “Lift, Patient, Non-AC-Powered.”

Two floor units sit in the same group: the GL5.2 patient floor lift and the GLS5.2 sit-to-stand floor lifter. Danish Wikipedia names ceiling lifts as one of the company’s main product groups alongside floor lifters, and the product names are short codes of letters and numbers rather than invented words. The same 2004 entries list a set of wheelchair ramps, among them folding, telescopic and plain versions sold under names such as EasyFold Pro.

Later listings fill in the range around the lifts. In July 2023 the FDA database added the GTP1 Transfer Platform under the heading of transfer aids, and in March 2023 a long list of lifting slings: repositioning slings, standing slings, gait trainers, slings for amputees and disposable versions, in sizes that run from children’s ranges to bariatric sizes up to 5XL. Hangers and cross bars that connect a sling to a lift appear in the same list. Some names describe the task directly, such as Twin Turner, Multi Support Sling and Hip Support, and several slings come in two versions, marked “Net” and “Poly” in the listing.

The database also shows where some of that range is made. Alongside Aarhus it lists Guldmann-Ukraine Ltd in Lviv, in western Ukraine, as a site that manufactures medical devices, with V. Guldmann A/S as its owner-operator, and registers it for the same sling range in March 2023. On that record, the lifts and ramps are listed from Aarhus and the textile slings from both Aarhus and Lviv.

The product categories are plain ones. A patient lift raises a person who cannot stand or transfer unaided, a sling is the fabric seat or support that holds the person while the lift moves, and a transfer platform helps a person move from one seat to another. Guldmann works in all three, according to the listings, with the ramps as a further line for wheelchair users.

Design and documentation.

Hospital bed and patient-handling companies present themselves mainly through brochures, websites and trade-fair stands. A common picture is a bright ward room: a bed raised to working height, the side rails up, a bedside cabinet in a pale wood decor and a window letting in daylight. Care-home ranges are shown differently, with warmer colours, wood-look panels and beds styled to look less like hospital equipment and more like bedroom furniture.

Patient-handling makers work with a different set of images. Ceiling lifts are photographed on rails running over a care bed, mobile hoists and slings beside a wheelchair, and transfer aids in narrow bathrooms. People are almost always present: a carer and a patient or resident, usually models in staged scenes, with the equipment placed at the centre of the frame and the room kept calm and uncluttered.

Trade fairs are the other stage. MEDICA in Düsseldorf and the Dubai health fair long known as Arab Health draw bed and lift makers from Europe, Asia and North America, and many of them build furnished room sets on their stands so that buyers can walk round a bed, try the controls and see a lift in use. Several companies also keep showrooms at their headquarters for the same purpose.

Many of these companies are family-owned or have passed through several owners, and some of the oldest began as makers of wire mattresses, iron beds or orthopaedic parts. The guides in this series set out what can be checked about each company, who founded it, who owns it and where it says its products are made, and mark clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A surname as the brand.

Guldmann’s identity starts with the family name. The founder’s surname is the brand, the company is owned by Jørgen and Carsten Guldmann according to Danish Wikipedia, and the products carry code names, such as GH3 or GL5.2, rather than names of their own. That leaves the word Guldmann to do the brand work across lifts, slings, ramps and transfer aids alike.

The company’s reach is international but its base is fixed. Its registered manufacturer in the FDA database is in Aarhus, with Lviv added for slings in 2023; its British establishment dates from 2007, and its sales and service offices, Danish Wikipedia says, stretch from Scandinavia to Canada and the United States.

For a design guide, Guldmann shows how a family name can carry a technical range of lifts, slings and ramps, with the products themselves named by code. Compare Liko, from Sweden, and Handicare. For this guide we use a harbour blue, a mist grey and a copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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