Haemonetics Brand Guidelines: The Latham Bowl, Plasma Machines & a Boston Head Office

A plastic bowl, spun fast, then thrown away.

Haemonetics was founded in 1971 by Jack Latham, a scientist whose invention gave the company its start. English Wikipedia places the founding in Natick, Massachusetts. The International Directory of Company Histories, in an entry covering the company to 1997, says the business opened its doors in 1972, and that Latham had developed its first machine, the Model 10, in the mid-1960s while working as a scientist at the consultancy Arthur D. Little; Abbott Laboratories marketed it for a short time, and when Abbott stopped, Latham raised money from private investors and set up Haemonetics.

At the heart of the machine was the Latham bowl. The same entry says Latham designed it with Harvard scientists and doctors to remove glycerol, used as an antifreeze, from frozen stored blood: a plastic, disposable bowl spun at high speed so that the denser red cells separated out. Because the bowl and its tubing could be thrown away after each donor, there was no stainless-steel chamber to take apart and sterilise. The company dates the bowl’s invention to 1968.

The idea grew into apheresis, the collection of one blood component while the rest is returned to the donor. The directory says Haemonetics automated platelet collection in the mid-1970s and went public in 1979.

Ownership then changed quickly. In August 1983 American Hospital Supply Corporation bought Haemonetics; when Baxter Travenol acquired American Hospital Supply two years later, it sold Haemonetics on because of antitrust concerns, and in December 1985 a group of investors — mainly current and former employees, with Du Pont — bought it, the directory says. Haemonetics was taken public again in May 1991, listing on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker HAE.

From plasma rooms to the operating theatre.

Haemonetics sells to two quite different customers. Its Apheresis business serves plasma and blood collectors; its MedSurg business serves hospitals, the company’s website says. English Wikipedia draws the same line between donor products, which automate collection and processing, and products for blood management in surgery.

On the plasma side the line runs from the PCS plasma collection system — launched in 1984 by the company’s timeline, and introduced shortly after the 1985 buyout according to the directory — to the PCS2 of 1993, with a blow-moulded collection bowl, and the NexSys PCS of 2017. The company says NexSys gained its Persona technology in 2020, a new collection bowl and Express Plus software cleared by the FDA in 2023, and FDA clearance for a Persona PLUS version in 2026. For blood banks it made the mobile MCS apheresis systems, from 1992. The directory says that in 1991 Haemonetics took over direct distribution of its blood component and plasma collection products in Japan from Labo Science of Tokyo, and that in the 1990s the company also ran blood-bank management services and owned blood banks in Arizona, Kansas and California.

In the operating theatre, the Cell Saver system collects and washes a patient’s own blood during surgery for return to that patient. The company dates it to 1974; the directory places its introduction in the early 1980s. The company says it acquired the TEG 5000 haemostasis analyser in 2008 and introduced the TEG 6s in 2015.

Software and devices were added by acquisition. English Wikipedia lists the Edmonton software firm Fifth Dimension, Information Data Management, Neoteric Technology in 2009 and Global Med Technologies in 2010 — Fifth Dimension and Information Data Management were merged on 21 August 2007 into a subsidiary called Haemonetics Software Solutions — and says Haemonetics bought the Pall Corporation’s transfusion medicine business on 1 August 2012. More recently the company says it added the VASCADE vascular closure products in 2021, OpSens in 2023, Attune Medical in 2024 and Vivasure Medical in 2026.

Design and documentation.

Plasma companies sell medicines that most people never see on a shelf, so their public image is built around the people at either end of the chain. Websites, annual reports and recruitment pages for the sector tend to open on donors: someone relaxing in a reclining chair in a bright, clean collection centre, a nurse at their side, with the equipment kept small in the frame. The tone is calm and grateful rather than clinical.

The middle of the chain is shown through hands and buildings. Close-ups of gloved hands holding vials, labelled blood bags and racks of tubes signal laboratory care without showing a face, while aerial photographs of large fractionation plants, steel tanks and clean-room corridors stand for scale. Collection-device makers add their own register of machines, tubing sets and touchscreens, usually photographed on white.

At the far end are patients. Several of the conditions these medicines are used for are rare, and the companies’ storytelling often leans on named families, children and long-term patients, often filmed at home or outdoors, alongside patient-organisation partnerships and awareness days. Scientific credibility is carried by medical congresses such as those of the International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis (ISTH) and the American Society of Hematology (ASH), and by industry meetings such as the Plasma Protein Forum.

The visual identities themselves are mostly quiet: corporate sans-serif wordmarks, generous white space and restrained palettes, with brand colour used sparingly against photography. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A US company with a British spelling.

The head office has always been in Massachusetts. In the 1990s it was in Braintree, south of Boston, with an international headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland, and an office in Tokyo, the directory says; the company dates its first international headquarters to 1981. In 2019, it says, it opened a new head office in Boston. English Wikipedia records manufacturing sites in Holbrook, Massachusetts, from 1988, and in Union, South Carolina, bought in 1995; the company says it opened a centre of excellence in Clinton, Pennsylvania, in 2022.

The name uses the British-style “haem” spelling. The company now describes itself as “a global medical technology company,” and its website sets out four values — “Think Big, Take Action, Win Together, and Always Learn and Improve” — and closes with the line “We make it possible. You make it matter.” These are its own words.

For a design guide, Haemonetics shows how a single engineering idea, a bowl that spins and is thrown away, can anchor a brand that later reaches from plasma rooms to vascular closure devices. Compare Terumo BCT, another maker of blood-collection and apheresis systems, and Baxter, whose takeover of American Hospital Supply led to Haemonetics being sold in the 1980s. For this guide we use a deep red, a maroon and a slate with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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