Salts Healthcare Brand Guidelines: A 1701 Cutler’s Trade Turned Birmingham Stoma Care

Instrument makers and cutlers in Wolverhampton.

Salts Healthcare dates itself to 1701. The family business says it was established in the early 1700s, and a Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce news release of June 2023 gives the year as 1701 and says the firm was founded in Wolverhampton before moving into Birmingham. The founders were John and William Salt. In a feature for Birmingham Business, the journalist Jon Griffin quotes Peter Salt describing them as father and son, instrument makers and cutlers; English Wikipedia describes them as brothers who began as apprentice locksmiths in Wolverhampton. We give both accounts.

English Wikipedia sets out the early line of the trade. It says John Salt became a surgeons’ instrument maker and cutler, and handed the business to his son William in 1755; a later Richard Salt moved the works to larger premises in Dale End, Birmingham, in the 1800s, and the firm moved again to Bull Street in 1845. The same article says Salts became Cutlers to Her Majesty in 1845, was named Cutlers to the Emperor of the French in 1867, and received an honourable mention at the Paris Universal Exhibition of that year.

Through the nineteenth century the work shifted from cutlery towards trusses and orthopaedic devices. Peter Salt told Birmingham Business that Thomas Partridge Salt invented a spring-loaded truss that was patented in the 1800s and wrote a book on the treatment of hernias and trusses; English Wikipedia names two treatises by a Thomas Partridge Salt, one on rupture and one on the lower limbs. In the First World War, Peter Salt said, the firm set up special limb-fitting clinics in London, Manchester and Birmingham.

From limb fitting to the stoma bag.

The turn that shaped the modern company came after the Second World War. English Wikipedia says that changes to limb-fitting contracts under the new National Health Service left Salts looking for a new focus, and that about three years later Professor Brooke of Birmingham approached the firm to make collection devices like those he had seen in the United States. In the Birmingham Business feature, Robert Salt says the American maker would not let Salts produce its bag, so his father, Edward Salt, worked with the surgeon on a design of his own; Peter Salt calls it the first such bag in the UK. The chambers’ release of April 2026 repeats that Edward Salt and Professor Brooke created what it calls the first modern-day stoma bag. Those are the family’s and the release’s words.

English Wikipedia adds that the first handmade bags were made in small numbers and were not very profitable, and that the work led on to a full range of stoma care products. Robert Salt makes the same point in the feature: the ostomy work was a turning point for the company, he says, but not a financial one until later.

Today the company describes itself as having two divisions. Salts Stoma Care designs and manufactures stoma care devices and additional products, and Medilink is a national network of dispensing care centres that supply stoma care and continence products by all manufacturers; the company’s website gives the number of centres as 17. Its current bags are sold as the Confidence BE range, in closed, drainable and urostomy versions. In April 2026 the chambers’ release reported the launch in Australia and New Zealand of Confidence BE go, which the company calls the world’s first ostomy product with an interchangeable cover system.

On manufacturing, Robert Salt told Birmingham Business that the company makes everything in the UK, while adding that it was looking at the possibility of making products abroad and had not decided to do so.

How the category presents itself.

Wound-care, ostomy and continence companies sell mostly to nurses, surgeons and pharmacists, and their visual language tends to reflect that audience. Brochures and websites in the category often favour soft-focus close-ups of skin and dressings, clean white backgrounds and pale, calm colours, with the product shown in use rather than as an object. Nurses appear again and again: at hospital bedsides, in clinics and in community care, changing a dressing or talking with a patient at home.

Ostomy and continence brands face a different task. Their users live with the products every day, so the imagery usually moves out of the clinic and into ordinary life: discreet lifestyle photography of people with a stoma swimming, hiking, travelling or at work, with the pouch rarely in view. Packaging across the category tends towards pastel tones, plain product names and clear labelling that has to read on a ward shelf and in a home bathroom alike.

The trade also has its own calendar. Companies meet clinicians at congresses such as the conference of the European Wound Management Association (EWMA) in Europe, the Symposium on Advanced Wound Care (SAWC) in the United States and the annual meeting of the Wound, Ostomy and Continence Nurses Society (WOCN), where stands, posters and education sessions carry much of a brand’s presence. Swedish Wikipedia records that Mölnlycke prepared a position document on its Safetac technology together with EWMA.

The companies in this guide range from a Swedish textile mill of 1849 and a Dijon family group to British ostomy specialists and American medical-technology firms. Each guide sets out what can be checked — who founded the company, who owns it and where it says its products are made — and separates documented facts from the company’s own claims.

Ten generations and an Aston headquarters.

Salts has stayed in the family. The June 2023 chambers’ release describes it as still 100 per cent family-owned, with the brothers Peter and Robert Salt the tenth generation of the family at its head; the April 2026 release names Peter Salt as group chairman and Robert Salt as chief executive. The headquarters is in Aston, Birmingham, beside the Aston Expressway, the Birmingham Business feature says.

The firm has also grown abroad. In June 2023 the Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce reported that Salts had acquired MCare AB, a Swedish supplier of ostomy products that had worked with Salts for many years. In April 2026 the chambers reported that Salts had moved from working through agents to a direct business model in Australia and New Zealand, and said the company now had international offices and operations on five continents. The 2023 release also quotes Peter Salt saying the company had opened a dedicated skin research clinic and a training academy the year before; the company’s website lists the Salts Academy for healthcare professionals.

Around the products the company runs services for people living with a stoma: a home delivery service, a team of stoma care nurses, podcasts and an app called Ostique Connect. Its stated line is “caring, listening and innovating to improve lives”; Robert Salt told Birmingham Business that the phrase came from marketers and became a mantra inside the company, and that Salts had tried to make its products look less medical and more like an everyday item.

For a design guide, Salts Healthcare shows how a three-hundred-year family name can carry a modern range of stoma products. Compare Welland Medical, another British stoma care maker, and Smith+Nephew, another British medical company. For this guide we use a deep teal, a soft aqua and a warm coral with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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