Dolphin Solutions Brand Guidelines: The 1999 Soap-Dispenser Maker Behind WashWall

A soap-dispenser maker in the Sussex countryside.

Dolphin Solutions was founded in 1999. Companies House records that the company was incorporated in England on 27 January 1999 as Bell-Chem Products Company; it added “Limited” to that name in February 2012 and became Dolphin Solutions Ltd in August 2016. Its registered office is at Bodiam, near Robertsbridge in East Sussex, and the register lists its business as the manufacture of taps and valves and the wholesale of sanitary equipment.

The company’s own biography of its global chief executive, Jonathan Beattie, describes him as managing director and co-founder, and says the business began with an initial focus on manufacturing soap dispensers before widening into a full range of washroom products and services. Since October 2016 Companies House has listed a holding company, Dolphin Solutions (Holdings) Ltd, as owning more than three-quarters of the shares and holding the right to appoint directors. The company’s team page names Craig Turner as chairman and Beattie as global chief executive.

Dolphin describes its values as care, quality, integrity and enthusiasm, the same four words it used in a company-submitted profile in the Architects Datafile in July 2021, and it gives its mission as to “revolutionise commercial washroom design worldwide.”

Behind the mirror.

Dolphin sells to architects, developers and contractors rather than to households, and its website groups its projects by sector: commercial, retail, transport, education, heritage and leisure. Among the projects it shows are Terminal 2 at Melbourne Airport, Westfield in London and Collins Square in Melbourne. Its catalogue covers taps and showers, soap and paper towel dispensers, hot air dryers, mirrors, bins, baby-change units and fittings for accessible washrooms.

Its signature idea is putting the fittings behind the mirror. In September 2016 the trade site Building Talk reported that Dolphin had opened a showroom in Clerkenwell, London, to show architects its ranges, including the Alavo behind-mirror system, the Excel range, which the site said was manufactured at the company’s Bodiam site, and a newly unveiled Dolphin Blue panel-mounted manual tap made of 304 stainless steel. The showroom was announced by Chris Beattie, then sales and marketing director.

The current form of that idea is the Dolphin WashWall System, which the company says combines sensor taps, touch-free soap dispensers, hand dryers, paper towel dispensers and lighting behind glass mirrors, built as pre-assembled modules. It comes in two styles, Classic for high-traffic washrooms and Solo for feature washrooms, and in two specification levels, Premium and LITE. Dolphin also markets SMART washroom technology with maintenance monitoring and a service called S3 by Dolphin, which it links to extending a washroom’s lifespan.

The company says it designs and manufactures all of its commercial washroom products in its own engineering facility, and that it helps projects meet BREEAM, LEED and WELL requirements. It offers finishes including powder coating, ceramic coating and PVD coatings on its fittings.

Hand dryers are a large part of the range. The company’s catalogue sells most of them under the Dolphin Velocity name, in standard, high-speed, recessed, mini and behind-mirror versions and a hands-in model, alongside wall-mounted and hand-held hair dryers. It says the dryers can be finished in brushed or mirror-polished stainless steel, white metal, coloured glass, acrylic or solid surface, as well as the coated finishes, so that they match the other fittings in a washroom.

The newer WashWall Solo breaks the mirror wall into individual modular units, up to eight in a run, which the company says are fully assembled in its warehouse and delivered to site ready to install. Its Australian pages also name an InForm SMART System of its own and describe the company as moving towards a “cradle-to-cradle” approach to reuse and recycling, a phrase the chief executive’s biography repeats.

The washroom trade.

Washroom hygiene is a design field most people meet without noticing. The hand dryer by the airport gate, the towel dispenser in an office corridor and the soap unit above a stadium basin are chosen not by the people who use them but by architects, facility managers and cleaning contractors. The makers of these products speak first to that professional buyer, and their brands are built to read clearly in a specification sheet or a trade catalogue as much as on a wall.

Much of the work is systems design. A paper towel or soap brand usually sells a dispenser together with the refill made to fit it, so the visible object on the wall carries the name while the paper, foam or gel inside is what is bought again and again. Hand dryer makers sell the opposite way: one machine, mounted once, with filters, covers and accessories around it. Both approaches lean on a small number of named ranges rather than long product lists.

Materials do much of the talking. Stainless steel fittings, white and grey plastics and plain labelling recur across catalogues, for products that may end up in very different washrooms, from a hospital to a hotel lobby. Colour tends to appear in small accents, on a cover, a light or a refill pack, rather than across the whole object.

The category also presents itself in person. Trade fairs such as Interclean and the ISSA Show, where cleaning and facility-management suppliers gather, give makers a place to launch dispensers, dryers and digital refill services, and some fairs run innovation awards of their own. The guides in this series look at how individual makers handle those shared conventions.

From Bodiam to Braintree and beyond.

Dolphin has grown partly by acquisition. On 1 October 2017 it bought the business of FC Frost Ltd, an Essex company that designed and made bespoke, customised and standard architectural washroom products and had been in the washroom industry since 1971, Specification Online reported. The Frost business was to operate as Dolphin Solutions, with production staying at Frost’s site in Braintree, Essex, and its product codes unchanged; Beattie, then managing director, promised that service and sales contacts would stay the same.

It has also spread abroad. Its website says it maintains offices in the United States and Australasia alongside its UK business, runs separate regional sites, and has a team of more than 120 people. Its American pages speak of “restrooms” where the British ones say “washrooms.” The company also runs seminars on washroom design for architects, invites clients to visit what it calls the Dolphin Design Hub, and offers refurbishment services for existing washrooms.

For a design guide, Dolphin Solutions shows how a maker can sell to architects by turning a cluster of separate fittings into one specified object, the mirror wall. Compare Bobrick and Airdri, two other washroom-equipment brands. For this guide we use a deep navy, a sea blue and a mirror grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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