Sizewise Brand Guidelines: A 1988 Kansas Wheelchair Start-Up Turned Agiliti Bed Maker

A grocer’s idea from a 1988 development meeting.

Sizewise began in 1988 in Oberlin, a small town in north-west Kansas, under a different name. According to a “Kansas Profile” column published by Kansas State University Research and Extension in April 2026, a local grocery store owner, Willard Frickey, went to an economic development meeting that year where the group was looking for ideas for new local businesses. One of the ideas was a company making specialised wheelchairs. It did not catch on with the others at the meeting, the column says, so Frickey decided that if he truly believed in it, he should try it himself.

The company started with four employees and was called Wheelchairs of Kansas. In 1996 it moved to Ellis, a town the same column puts at under two thousand people. It later changed its name to Sizewise, widened its range from wheelchairs into other kinds of medical equipment, and opened a manufacturing campus of 14.9 acres in nearby Hays, all while continuing under the leadership of the Frickey family, the column says. The economic development organisation Grow Hays, it adds, later helped to bring about the change of ownership at that campus.

By 2021 the business described itself through its products and its patients. When Agiliti announced its agreement to buy the company in September that year, it described Sizewise as a maker and provider of specialised bed frames, therapeutic surfaces and mobility equipment for bariatric, geriatric, paediatric and standard patient populations, serving more than 3,000 customers in the acute and post-acute care markets.

Beds, surfaces and service branches.

Sizewise was both a manufacturer and a rental and service business. Its full name in the deal announcements was Sizewise Rentals, LLC. Agiliti said in September 2021 that Sizewise was headquartered in Kansas and ran a round-the-clock national network of 65 local service branches and four manufacturing centers. The Hays Post reported the same month that the company had headquarters in both Ellis and Lenexa, and described it as a manufacturer and distributor of specialty hospital beds, surfaces and patient handling equipment.

The range was broad within that one field. Sleep Review, a trade magazine for sleep medicine, set out in December 2021 the bed options Sizewise offered, according to information supplied by the company: cribs, beds with higher weight limits for bariatric patients, beds set low to the ground for children, and beds that can take a parent sleeping alongside a child. The magazine also described top covers made to withstand hospital-grade cleaning without harming the mattress, and mattresses that could be tailored for younger patients, from bassinet pads to air-adjustable beds that let children and teenagers choose how soft or firm they lie. Writing for a sleep-medicine readership, the magazine’s headline called Sizewise a sleep lab bed company, and most of its report dwelt on the beds and mattresses the company offered for children and their parents.

Its customers were hospitals and care providers rather than households. Agiliti’s announcement framed the purchase around specialty beds, surfaces and mobility equipment, and around greater control of research and development, manufacturing and logistics for that product category. It also pointed to the reputation Sizewise had built with bariatric patients, and said the deal would add local service branches to its own national network.

Hospital and care beds.

Hospital bed and patient-handling companies present themselves mainly through brochures, websites and trade-fair stands. A common picture is a bright ward room: a bed raised to working height, the side rails up, a bedside cabinet in a pale wood decor and a window letting in daylight. Care-home ranges are shown differently, with warmer colours, wood-look panels and beds styled to look less like hospital equipment and more like bedroom furniture.

Patient-handling makers work with a different set of images. Ceiling lifts are photographed on rails running over a care bed, mobile hoists and slings beside a wheelchair, and transfer aids in narrow bathrooms. People are almost always present: a carer and a patient or resident, usually models in staged scenes, with the equipment placed at the centre of the frame and the room kept calm and uncluttered.

Trade fairs are the other stage. MEDICA in Düsseldorf and the Dubai health fair long known as Arab Health draw bed and lift makers from Europe, Asia and North America, and many of them build furnished room sets on their stands so that buyers can walk round a bed, try the controls and see a lift in use. Several companies also keep showrooms at their headquarters for the same purpose.

Many of these companies are family-owned or have passed through several owners, and some of the oldest began as makers of wire mattresses, iron beds or orthopaedic parts. The guides in this series set out what can be checked about each company, who founded it, who owns it and where it says its products are made, and mark clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a family company to an Agiliti plant.

On 14 September 2021 Agiliti, a Minneapolis-based provider of medical equipment management and service, announced an agreement to buy Sizewise in an all-cash stock purchase, and on 4 October 2021 it said the acquisition was complete. At that point Agiliti said it served more than 7,000 national, regional and local acute care and alternate site providers across the United States. Agiliti itself began in Minnesota in 1939 as an oxygen tent rental service, according to the Kansas State University column. In May 2024 Agiliti announced that it had been taken private by an affiliate of the private equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners, and that trading in its shares on the New York Stock Exchange had been suspended.

The Sizewise name has since been folded into its owner’s. The sizewise.com address now forwards to an Agiliti page headed “Sizewise is now part of Agiliti,” which asks past customers to reorder by telephone. The Kansas plants carried on. The April 2026 column reports that Agiliti took full ownership of the Hays facility in 2025; that the campus is a main production hub for Essentia, which it describes as a multi-acuity hospital bed and an Agiliti trademark; and that the company employs more than 90 people in Hays and about 60 more in Ellis, with plans to add local jobs over the next five years. Brian Frickey, a former chief executive of Sizewise, welcomed the campus’s new chapter in the same column.

For a design guide, Sizewise shows how a regional maker’s name can give way to its owner’s while its factories keep building. Compare Hillrom, another American hospital bed name, and Stryker, which began with a Kalamazoo workshop. For this guide we use a deep navy, a muted teal and a pale wheat with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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