Orthomerica Brand Guidelines: The Orlando Brace Maker Behind Newport and Starband

A back bedroom, a welding torch and an Orlando workshop.

Orthomerica is an American maker of orthoses — the braces, supports and shells that clinicians fit to the body — based in Orlando, Florida. The company dates its founding to 1989, and in a news post marking its 30th anniversary it gave the date as February 28, 1989.

That anniversary post describes the start as “a bicoastal enterprise.” David Kerr, it says, began the company in his back bedroom after leaving Orthomedics, an orthotics and prosthetics company; at the same time Shannon Schwenn set up manufacturing and distribution in Orlando after leaving DOBI-Symplex. Both men came from the trade they went on to supply: the post pictures Schwenn putting down a welding torch, cleaning his hands and drawing the products himself for the first catalogues, using Aldus PageMaker on an early Macintosh, before sending the pages to Kerr for editing.

The first products, the company says, were a single-axis shoe insert for tibial fracture braces and prefabricated leaf-spring orthoses. Its first big product came a few years later: the Newport hip orthosis, which the company dates to the early 1990s and which uses pieces on both sides of the pelvis. After Newport came the Starband cranial line and, in the company’s phrase, a run of “high-tech scanning systems” as the firm “teched itself up.”

David Kerr still leads the business. A press release dated February 28, 2024, issued for its 35th anniversary, quotes David Kerr as “CEO and Founder of Orthomerica” and says the business has more than 90,000 square feet of manufacturing space in Orlando and more than 240 employees.

Hip, spine, limb — and the infant head.

Orthomerica’s catalogue covers adults and children. Its website divides the range into adult orthoses, paediatric orthoses, prosthetics and technology, and within those into hip, spinal, lower-limb, upper-limb, fracture and protective-helmet lines. Named ranges include the Fuzion custom lower-limb orthoses, the Spectrum AFO system, the Prime elbow system and the TC Flex paediatric orthosis. The company also sells prosthetic work, which it describes as fully customised.

The company lists a set of registered trademarks that reads like a map of California and Florida: California, Catalina and Newport for spinal and hip products, and Orlando for a fracture system — alongside OWLS, Prime, shark-o, eBrace, SmartSoc, Starband, Starscanner and TC Flex. Its news page announces the Newport Ultra as the replacement for the Newport Lite.

The Starband is the product the company now puts first. It is a cranial orthosis — a lightweight band worn on an infant’s head — and its paperwork is public. On April 20, 2023, the US Food and Drug Administration cleared the STARband 3D under its 510(k) process as a Class II cranial orthosis, according to the agency’s published decision letter. The summary filed with that clearance lists the indications as infants aged three to 18 months with moderate to severe non-synostotic positional plagiocephaly, and names Orthomerica’s Orlando plant as the manufacturing site.

The same FDA summary shows how the product is made. Earlier Starband designs — a side-opening band and a bi-valve band with two overlapping shells — use an outer shell of polyethylene-polypropylene plastic over a foam liner, built on a positive model taken from the infant’s head. The STARband 3D adds a side opening on both sides with two latch closures, and is additively manufactured, or 3D-printed, from a scan. The summary lists more than a dozen compatible 3D imaging devices, among them the company’s own STARscanner units and its SmartSoc app for Android and iOS phones.

The company built a clinical network around the band. In March 2020 it announced an “All-Star Team” of cranial clinicians with more than 100 locations worldwide, and said its cranial products were supplied to more than 700 clinics in the United States.

Orthoses and the clinics that fit them.

Prosthetics and orthotics companies sell to two audiences at once. Their customers are mostly clinicians, the prosthetists and orthotists who measure, cast and fit, and the clinics and health systems that pay; the people who wear the limbs and braces are the ones the pictures are built around. Blatchford’s website, for one, splits into sections for healthcare professionals, with technical documentation, training and clinical papers, and for patients and caregivers.

The imagery follows from that. Product shots often show carbon-fibre feet, knee joints and silicone liners isolated on white, like engineering components, which in part they are. Next to them come people in everyday settings: walking a dog, climbing stairs, at work or at home. Clinic photographs show a clinician kneeling beside a patient to check the alignment of a socket. The language around the pictures is about mobility and independence, often in a short slogan that the company uses as a statement of purpose.

Sport supplies the most dramatic images. Running blades made from carbon fibre have become a visual shorthand for the whole field, and makers put para-athletes in front of the camera; Össur, for one, sponsors a group of them as Team Össur, English Wikipedia says, naming Markus Rehm and Jody Cundy among them. Those pictures sit beside the quieter work of everyday limbs, which make up most of what the trade fits.

The industry also has its own meeting places. OTWorld in Leipzig, a world congress and trade fair held every two years, brought prosthetists, orthotists, manufacturers and researchers together in May 2026 and has announced its next edition for May 2028, with a para-sport activity area among its features. For a designer, the category is a study in balance: precision engineering, clinical trust and personal stories, held together, in several cases, by a founder’s own name.

Place names as product names.

Orthomerica presents itself as a manufacturer first. Its website calls it a “designer and manufacturer of prefabricated, semi-custom, and custom orthoses,” and its website reflects that split, with downloadable order forms alongside a page for uploading scan orders. The company says it was certified to ISO 13485:2016 under the Medical Device Single Audit Program in February 2019.

Teaching is part of the business too. Orthomerica runs clinical courses on lower-limb orthotics and cranial remoulding, which it describes as ABC-certified, after the American Board for Certification in orthotics and prosthetics, and it publishes literature reviews and white papers on its news page.

The brand’s voice is direct and slightly informal. The 30th-anniversary post closes by saying the company’s people “must be straight shooters at all times,” and the product names lean on places rather than on technical codes. Its trademark list — California, Catalina, Newport, Orlando — carries a quiet regional story about a business that began on two coasts and settled in central Florida. The cranial line carries a naming habit of its own: Starband, Starscanner and the STAR family.

For a design guide, Orthomerica shows how a specialist medical maker can build a recognisable brand from plain product names and a single family of devices. Compare Becker Orthopedic, another American orthotics name, and Fillauer, an orthotics and prosthetics maker. For this guide we use a deep teal, a sand and a warm clay with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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