Exactech Brand Guidelines: The 1985 Gainesville Joint-Implant Maker Now Sold as Advita Ortho

A surgeon, his wife and an engineer.

Exactech began in Gainesville, Florida, in 1985. The trade publication ORTHOWORLD reported in October 2017 that it was founded by Bill Petty, an orthopaedic surgeon, his wife Betty Petty, and the biomedical engineer Gary Miller; the orthopaedic news site OrthoStreams gave the same three names in 2024. From the start the company worked in joint replacement, and OrthoStreams described its early focus as knee, hip and shoulder implants.

The company grew into a listed business. ORTHOWORLD says Exactech went public in 1997, and by 2017 it distributed its products in more than 35 countries. OrthoStreams named the Optetrak knee system among its signature products. Exactech also had a spine business for a time, but in the first quarter of 2017 it sold its spine product assets to ChoiceSpine; ORTHOWORLD reported that the sale let it concentrate on joint reconstruction in the hip and the knee and in “extremities,” including the shoulder and the ankle.

In October 2017 Exactech signed a definitive merger agreement under which TPG Capital, the private-equity firm, would buy all of its outstanding shares. ORTHOWORLD reported that the deal was expected to close in the first quarter of 2018 and that Exactech would then be a privately held company headquartered in Gainesville. The same report noted that TPG had earlier been a part-owner of Biomet before that company was bought by Zimmer (the two now trade as Zimmer Biomet), and that a former Biomet chief executive was a TPG senior advisor.

Knees, hips, shoulders and ankles.

By the 2020s Exactech’s catalogue was organised around four joints. The ranges named by ORTHOWORLD in November 2025 give a fair picture of it: the Equinoxe shoulder, the Vantage ankle, the Alteon hip and the Truliant knee, together with the Newton balancing technology and GPS, a computer navigation system for joint surgery. Its successor’s newsroom marked ten years of GPS Shoulder in September 2026 and ten years of the Vantage ankle in October 2026.

The company’s later history is dominated by recalls. In a notice dated 23 March 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said that many Exactech knee, ankle and hip devices made between 2004 and August 2021 had been packed in bags that were missing one of the oxygen barrier layers specified for them, and that those devices had been recalled in 2021 and 2022. MedTech Dive reported in January 2024 that the 2021 and 2022 recalls were first made because of wear of unknown cause, and were later linked to the packaging problem.

The shoulder line followed. In January 2024 the FDA issued an alert about Equinoxe shoulder devices packed in the same kind of bags after, in the agency’s words as quoted by MedTech Dive, Exactech “declined to initiate a voluntary recall”; the publication noted that it is rare for a device maker to decline. Exactech’s own website, in its 2026 form, lists a separate 2025 voluntary recall of certain Equinoxe reverse shoulder humeral liners whose dimensions, the company says, were found by its own quality inspection to be slightly out of specification.

How orthopaedic makers present themselves.

Orthopaedic device makers sell to a narrow, expert audience: surgeons, theatre teams, hospital buyers and the distributors who serve them. Their brand material is shaped by that audience. Product imagery tends to be precise and technical, with implants rendered as clean metallic objects, often lit against dark or neutral backgrounds so that the form of a stem, a plate or a screw reads clearly.

Clinical imagery sits alongside the renders. X-rays, bone models, anatomical cut-aways and diagrams of a joint or a spinal segment show where a device goes and how it is meant to fit. Many makers also photograph surgeons in theatre, in gowns and masks under surgical lights, and show the trays of instruments that accompany an implant system, laid out in rows that suggest order and completeness.

Education is a large part of the picture. Device makers run training courses, cadaver labs and online technique guides, and much of their visual output is instructional: step-by-step surgical technique documents, animations and videos. Congresses matter too. Large meetings such as the annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) and the congress of the European Federation of National Associations of Orthopaedics and Traumatology (EFORT) are where new systems are often shown, on stands designed to carry a brand at scale.

Corporate identities in the field are usually restrained: sans-serif wordmarks, a small set of brand colours and a great deal of white space, with the visual drama left to the product and the clinical image. Many brands also sit inside larger groups, so a single name may appear alongside a parent company’s mark. That makes the typeface, the palette and the treatment of imagery the main tools a maker has for being recognised.

Chapter 11 and a new name.

Exactech did not come through the recalls as an independent company. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States in October 2024. The Australian law firm Clayton Utz, which advised Exactech on the Australian side of the case, stated in November 2025 that the company’s Chapter 11 plan included the sale of substantially all of Exactech’s assets to a new entity controlled by its lenders, Advita Ortho LLC, and that the plan took effect on 31 October 2025. Following that, on 13 November 2025, the Federal Court of Australia approved the settlement of a class action brought against Exactech and its Australian subsidiary, the firm said.

ORTHOWORLD reported on 3 November 2025 that Advita Ortho had launched as a global medical device company with the former Exactech assets and a team of Exactech employees. Advita now owns and distributes the Equinoxe, Vantage, Alteon and Truliant lines, along with the product data and engineering and manufacturing know-how built up over more than 40 years, the report said. Its owners are funds managed by affiliates of Strategic Value Partners, Stellex Capital Management and Greywolf Capital Management. Advita says it named a new chief executive in November 2025.

The exac.com website, as it stood in 2026, says that Exactech does not offer direct sales or distribution in the United States; it carries recall information and claims contacts for implants fitted before 31 October 2025, and points visitors to Advita. The products themselves are now presented on the advita.com website under the Advita Ortho name, with the line “Advancing: Life.”

For a design guide, Exactech shows how a set of well-known product names can outlast the company that created them and move to a new corporate brand after a restructuring. Compare Zimmer Biomet, the joint-replacement group formed from TPG’s earlier holding Biomet, and Stryker, another American orthopaedic maker founded by a surgeon. For this guide we use a deep navy, a slate teal and a bone white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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