Netti Brand Guidelines: Alu Rehab’s Norwegian Comfort and Dynamic Wheelchairs

A chair built for a friend.

Netti is a Norwegian wheelchair brand made by Alu Rehab AS, whose parent company is based at Klepp, in Rogaland. The company tells its origin as a story about friends: in the late 1980s, it says, a group of Norwegians set out to improve daily life for a friend who used a wheelchair, and began developing a completely new chair with extensive adjustment. That chair, by the company’s account, led to the founding of Alu Rehab, to offer the same seating comfort to other wheelchair users.

Its website says “Netti by Alu Rehab was established in 1989” and marks 1989 as the year the first Netti was made. The official record starts a little earlier. Norway’s Brønnøysund business register gives Alu Rehab AS a founding date of September 1986 and lists its activity as the manufacture of bicycles, wheelchairs, mobility scooters and similar vehicles. The register shows the company as active, with 26 employees.

The company calls its business “Netti by Alu Rehab” and publishes its website in English, Norwegian, Danish, German and French. One phrase recurs across its pages: chairs that “enable joy of life.” Its history page is titled “More than 30 years of joy,” and the company says its focus since 1989 has been the joy of life of wheelchair users — a line that does the work a slogan does elsewhere.

Seating for long days.

Netti’s chairs are aimed at people who sit in a wheelchair for long periods and need a chair that can be closely adjusted. The company describes its field as “long time seating” and says it is one of the few providers in dynamic seating and for users with complex demands; we give that as its claim. Its current families include the Netti 4U, the Netti III, the Netti V and the AdaptPro. Alongside them are heavy-duty versions of the Netti III, a family for children and young people, and a Netti Customized service for individual builds, which includes the Netti 450 chairs and the Netti Bed.

The Netti V shows the approach. The company describes it as combining an active and a comfort wheelchair, with flexible seat depth, width and height, so that the chair can be adapted as a user’s needs change, often without new parts. It gives a lowest seat height of 386 millimetres with 24-inch rear wheels, adjustable to 486 millimetres by moving the wheel position. The Netti Dynamic family goes further: its seat and back units move with the user and return to a resting position. The Netti Dynamic iQ combines, in the company’s words, “TA’s unique power wheelchair design with Netti’s dynamic seat unit.” We give these as product descriptions, not as claims about outcomes.

Around the chairs Netti has built a method. The Netti Method, as the company calls it, combines training from Netti Campus — seminars, webinars and online resources — with Netti 5 Seating Steps: clarify expectations and challenges, observe and assess the user’s situation, define a seating strategy and set goals, create the seating solution, and evaluate it. A downloadable form takes therapists and dealers through the five steps, and the website adds guides on taking measurements and on setting the seat height of a Netti V.

Category

Wheelchair and seating makers sell to several audiences at once: the people who ride their chairs, the therapists and seating specialists who measure and prescribe them, and the dealers and funders who supply them. Their catalogues and websites tend to show all three sides together — people using chairs at home, at work, outdoors and in sport, next to plain product views and pages of measurements and options.

The product picture is often a clean side profile on a white or pale ground, which lets the frame line, wheel camber and seat angle read clearly. Close-ups follow the materials: welded aluminium and titanium tubes, carbon-fibre weave, castors, push rims and folding mechanisms. Some makers name their models after the frame material or the sport, and offer made-to-measure versions built to a rider’s own dimensions.

Sport is a large part of the visual language. Court chairs for wheelchair basketball, tennis and rugby, with steeply cambered wheels and rear anti-tip castors, appear alongside racing chairs and handbikes. An International Paralympic Committee feature from April 2013 noted that, beyond size rules, basketball-chair designers face few restrictions, and that recent advances had come mostly in materials and welding. Makers often show their chairs with Paralympic athletes and club teams, and some sponsor sports associations.

The trade meets at fairs. REHACARE in Düsseldorf describes itself as a trade fair for rehabilitation, prevention, inclusion and care, with its next edition set for September 2027; in the United States, Medtrade serves the home medical equipment trade. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its chairs are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Klepp, Ry and Xiamen.

Netti is open about where its work is done. Its website says the Norwegian parent company is the home of product development and of all Netti Customized products; a subsidiary at Ry, in Denmark, runs the logistics centre that ships to all of Europe and to South America; and a subsidiary in Xiamen, China, carries out the company’s own production, with weekly shipments to Denmark. “Since we produce our products ourselves, we can secure the high quality level that Netti is known for,” the company says; that is its statement. It adds that many of its Chinese and European staff have been with Netti for more than 15 years, that it has its own staff in Sweden, France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and that dealers and importers represent it in more than 30 countries.

Ownership is presented on the same site. Netti’s contact addresses now use a Meyra Group domain, and its Norwegian pages describe a merger of TA Service, Netti by Alu Rehab and MEYRA into one Meyra Group, offering chairs for active users, for those who need a powered chair and for people who cannot change their own sitting position. The site does not date the combination. TA Service is the maker behind the TA power chairs that the Netti Dynamic iQ builds on, and the Norwegian site lists TA power chairs alongside Netti’s own range.

For a design guide, Netti shows a brand built around a working method as much as a product, with its own vocabulary of campus, steps and joy. Compare MEYRA, now presented as part of the same group, and Permobil, another Scandinavian wheelchair maker. For this guide we use a fjord blue, birch white and slate with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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