Span-America Brand Guidelines: Greenville Foam Positioners, Geo-Matt & the Savaria Years

A Greenville workshop for foam positioners.

Span-America Medical Systems is a maker of mattresses, support surfaces and beds for care settings, based in Greenville, South Carolina. Its own account of its history, reproduced on the equipment site MedWrench, says the company was led by its founder, Don Spann, and began operations in 1975 as a manufacturer of polyurethane foam patient positioners.

From there it widened its foam range, the company says. Over the next several years it added flat foam and convoluted foam mattress overlays, and in the late 1970s it also began making foam products for industrial customers, as a way of making fuller use of its design and manufacturing capacity.

The product that defined the next decade arrived in 1985. That year, the company says, it introduced the Geo-Matt mattress overlay, which it calls its leading product and which later became part of a family of foam replacement mattresses. At about the same time Span-America began selling its overlays to consumer retailers across the United States.

Two acquisitions followed, according to the same history. In 1992 Span-America bought Healthflex, Inc. and its PressureGuard product line, which took it into replacement mattresses, sold directly to hospitals, long-term care facilities and home health care dealers. In 1996 it bought Embracing Concepts, Inc., the maker of the Isch-Dish and Sacral Dish cushions, which widened its range of seating products. The company presents these steps as one line of growth: from foam positioners to overlays, then full mattresses and cushions.

From a listed Greenville firm to Savaria’s Patient Care division.

Span-America changed hands in 2017. On 1 May 2017 the Canadian accessibility-lift maker Savaria agreed to buy it, Canadian Manufacturing reported, describing the Greenville company as a maker of mattresses and beds for the medical market. The magazine said Span-America ran its main plant in South Carolina, a distribution centre in Utah and a plant in Beamsville, Ontario. The offer was made to Span-America’s shareholders, needed their approval and was expected to close in the second quarter of that year. Savaria’s chief executive said in a statement that the purchase would give Savaria better access to the United States market and add a complementary product line, and the magazine reported that both companies’ boards had approved it unanimously.

Savaria’s own timeline lists Span-America among its 2017 acquisitions, alongside Premier Lifts, Visilift and Master Lifts. Savaria says it was founded in 1979, bought by Marcel Bourassa in 1989 and listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2002, and it is based in Laval, Quebec. Its Accessibility division, by its own description, makes commercial and home elevators, stairlifts and platform lifts.

Inside the group, Span-America belongs to the Patient Care division. Savaria describes Span-America Medical Systems Inc., which it shortens to “Span,” as a maker of medical beds, therapeutic support surfaces and pressure management products used in long-term care and nursing homes. It says that in Greenville it designs and manufactures mattresses and surfaces for long-term care, hospital and home-care settings. The same division includes Savaria’s ceiling lifts and the patient-sling maker Silvalea of Newton Abbot, England, which Savaria lists as a 2019 acquisition, and a sling-sewing factory in St Louis, Missouri.

Beds now sit beside the foam lines. Product listings on MedWrench name Span-America beds including the Encore, the Advantage and the Rexx, and a caption on Savaria’s website presents a Span bed with a built-in weigh scale as an example of its Patient Care range. Savaria’s summary of the division is plain: long-term care beds, mattresses and ceiling track lifts to equip a resident’s room. It says the products are sold through distribution networks, directly to institutions and through home-care dealers, and that the division runs training for health care professionals and takes part in trade shows through the year.

How bed makers present themselves.

Hospital bed and patient-handling makers sell to buyers who rarely see the product in a showroom. Purchasing teams, nurses and facilities planners meet it in catalogues, on websites and at trade fairs, so the way these companies present themselves leans heavily on photography, diagrams and film rather than on the object in the hand.

The most common image is the bed in a calm ward: a made-up mattress, soft daylight, a tidy bedside cabinet and very little else in the frame. Cutaway views and close-ups take over in technical literature, showing the frame, the castors, the side rails and the handsets and control panels that staff use every day. Hoists and stand-up aids are usually shown in use, in care homes and bathrooms as well as hospitals, with a carer and a resident in a staged transfer.

Trade fairs are a second stage. Large medical exhibitions such as MEDICA in Düsseldorf and Arab Health in Dubai give makers a stand on which beds, lifts and mattresses can be set out as a working room. Product films extend the same idea, often following a nurse at the bedside through a short routine to show how a control, a rail or a lift is meant to be used.

Behind those images sit long ownership histories. Many of the names in this field began as small workshops or furniture makers and passed through larger medical-technology groups, mergers and listings, so the brand on the bed today often carries decades of earlier companies with it. The guides in this round look at that history alongside the way each maker presents itself.

One name, two forms: Span-America and “Span.”

Where Span-America’s products are made rests largely on its owner’s word. Savaria says the Greenville site designs and manufactures its mattresses and surfaces, and the 2017 report in Canadian Manufacturing placed the main plant in South Carolina and a second plant in Beamsville, Ontario. The company’s own history describes it as a manufacturer from the start, beginning with foam positioners in 1975.

The name now appears in two forms. Savaria uses the full name, Span-America Medical Systems, in its corporate description, and the short form “Span” when it refers to the business and its beds; the products are presented under the Savaria Patient Care heading. Product names also carry the brand: Geo-Matt has carried a registered-trademark sign in the company’s own copy, and PressureGuard and Isch-Dish came with the businesses Span-America bought in the 1990s.

For a design guide, Span-America shows how a regional maker built a recognisable name around a material, then kept that name as one line inside a larger group. Compare Graham-Field, another American maker of beds and care equipment that grew by buying established lines, and Joerns Healthcare. For this guide we use a teal, a deep slate and a soft sage with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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