Bruno Brand Guidelines: The Oconomowoc Family Stairlift Maker Founded in 1984

A scooter-lift business that became a stairlift maker.

Bruno Independent Living Aids is a family-owned manufacturer based in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. Its website dates the company to 1984 and describes it with two phrases that run through its headers and footers like a tagline: “Veteran Founded” and “Family Owned.” The business trades simply as Bruno, and its full legal style, Bruno Independent Living Aids, Inc., sits at the foot of every page.

The company tells its founding story in a letter from Mike Bruno, its president and chief executive, who writes as the founder’s son. His father had worked at a stairlift manufacturer and at a company that built lowered-floor vans for wheelchair users, the letter says. When the minivan arrived in the mid-1980s, the founder saw a chance to help people carry scooters and wheelchairs in their vehicles, and launched Bruno to design and build scooter lifts. Stairlifts came next. The company still makes both, and argues that home and vehicle products belong together because, in its words, needs in “those two categories often overlap.”

Bruno remains in the family. The company says more than 400 welders, fabricators, assembly operators, engineers and customer-relations staff work alongside the second and third generations of the Bruno family at its Oconomowoc headquarters. Its website calls its stairlifts, scooter lifts and platform lifts “Made in USA” and says they are crafted at that headquarters; it also says the company follows ISO 9001 guidance for design and manufacturing through a quality-management system. Those are the company’s own statements about its production.

Elite, Elan and Connect.

Bruno’s range now spans four product families on its website: stairlifts, scooter lifts, platform lifts and home elevators. Its stairlifts are split into indoor and outdoor, straight and curved models. The Elite line covers curved stairs indoors and out, and the company calls its curved stairlifts “custom-crafted” for each staircase. Its scooter lifts are sold by vehicle type, for vans, SUVs, trucks and cars, continuing the line the company says it began with.

The straight Elan is the model the trade press has covered most closely. In February 2020 the British trade magazine THIIS reported the launch of a new version, the Elan SRE-3050, with a vertical rail that carries a covered gear rack and, the company said, installs closer to the wall than other stairlifts on the market; the magazine described the lift as American-made. In a 2022 interview with the same magazine, Bruno’s British sales manager said the 2020 update brought changes to “the styling and colour palette to give it a more modern appearance.” It is one of the few published comments from the company on how its products look. The same manager described the outdoor Elite models in material terms, with marine-grade vinyl upholstery and an outdoor-specific paint finish, and a curved outdoor rail fabricated by hand for each staircase.

The newest family is the Connect home elevator series, which the website presents as its newest product line and offers in three sizes: Classic, XL and Compact. Bruno also lists a residential platform lift and wheelchair lifts, so that its range reaches from the car boot to the upper floor of a house.

The company lists a run of awards on its about page, among them a Wisconsin Manufacturer of the Year award in the new-product-innovation category, a Governor’s New Product Award, the BizTimes Milwaukee IQ award for innovation and an Oconomowoc business-of-the-year award; the page gives no dates for them. It also lists memberships of trade bodies including the National Mobility Equipment Dealers Association and the National Association of Elevator Contractors.

Design and documentation.

Home-lift and stairlift makers sell machines that end up in private hallways and living rooms, and two Swedish makers, Aritco and Cibes, present them that way. Aritco names its range around the home, with the HomeLift, HomeLift Compact and HomeLift Access, and credits the Swedish designer Alexander Lervik for several models; Cibes Lift Group says its customers choose from colour, material and function options picked by local design teams.

Naming often begins as engineering shorthand. Cibes still uses letter-and-number models such as the A5000, launched in 1992, and groups its lifts as A-lifts, with their own shaft walls, and B-lifts, which the company traces to a screw-and-nut design of the early 1970s. Aritco moved from numbered models, from the Aritco 7000 of 1995 to the Aritco 9000 cabin lift of 2013, to the named HomeLift and PublicLift lines from 2016 onwards.

Both companies describe selling largely through partners. Cibes Lift Group says it works through more than 270 certified distributors as well as its own offices in 20 countries; Aritco says it sells in 60 countries through more than 170 distributors, and that it set up a global network of installation and service partners in 2014. Cibes has also bought local lift companies and kept several of their names, such as Kalea, Aesy Liften and Apex Lifts.

Corporate pages fill in the rest: who owns the company and where the lifts are made. Cibes names its factories in Gävle, Jiaxing and the United States and a components unit in Gdańsk, and its owner, the investment company Nalka, lists it as a holding. Aritco describes its factory in Veddesta, outside Stockholm, and its place in Innovalift, a business area of Investment AB Latour. This guide sets out what can be checked for each brand, and marks what rests on the company’s own word.

From Wisconsin to Cheshire.

Bruno sells through dealers. Its website says it has the largest accessibility-equipment dealer network in North America, a claim the company makes about itself, and lists sales in countries including Canada, Mexico, Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany and India. In Britain it trades as Bruno Lifts, which THIIS described in August 2022 as the European sales organisation of Bruno Independent Living Aids, “the largest stairlift manufacturer in the United States,” in the magazine’s words. The British team told the magazine that it trains dealers at a facility in north-west England and keeps stock in the country for quick delivery of lifts and parts.

In November 2025 Bruno grew by acquisition. THIIS reported on 6 November 2025 that Bruno Independent Living Aids had acquired Terry Lifts, the Cheshire-based maker of home lifts, which Bruno says was founded in 1984, the same year as Bruno itself, and distributes across Europe and Australia. Mike Bruno called the purchase “an exciting milestone in our growth strategy,” and the managing director of Terry Lifts said his company was joining “the Bruno family.” The deal gave the Wisconsin company a British home-lift maker alongside its own Connect elevators.

Bruno’s identity rests on a few repeated words more than on any single image. The family surname is the brand; “Veteran Founded,” “Family Owned” and “Made in USA” recur across its pages; and its product names, Elite, Elan and Connect, are short and plain.

For a design guide, Bruno shows how a family manufacturer can make its surname and its origin the core of a brand. Compare Terry Lifts, now part of the same group, and Harmar, another American maker of stairlifts and vehicle lifts. For this guide we use a lake blue and a steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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