WHILL Brand Guidelines: The Tokyo Maker Behind the Omni-Wheel Model A

A hobby group and a remark about a shop two blocks away.

WHILL began as a side project. Japanese Wikipedia dates the start to autumn 2009, when Junpei Naito, then working on in-car cameras at Sony, and Muneaki Fukuoka, a medical-equipment researcher at Olympus who had studied with him at Nagoya University, set up an engineering group called Sunny Side Garage. Satoshi Sugie, a former Nissan designer, joined them. A Stanford case study, based on a July 2015 interview with Sugie, describes the group as engineers and designers from large Japanese companies who built things together as a hobby.

The product came out of one conversation. WHILL’s website says a wheelchair user told the group, “I even gave up going to the grocery store just two blocks away.” The company says traditional wheelchairs “prioritized functionality over individuality,” and that this is what set its designers and engineers to work. Japanese Wikipedia gives a version of the same remark, about giving up on a convenience store 100 metres away.

A concept model went on show at the 2011 Tokyo Motor Show. Japanese Wikipedia says the team then asked Shigeyuki Ishii, a wheelchair user and the founder of OX Engineering, for help, and that he told them to stop at once unless they truly meant to turn the concept into a product. Naito and Fukuoka left their employers and joined Sugie. The company gives its establishment as May 2012; TechCrunch reported in 2018 that it was founded in Tokyo, while WHILL’s own English site describes the three founders as based in San Francisco and Tokyo. Sugie is chief executive and Naito chief development officer, the company says.

America followed quickly. The Stanford case says WHILL, Inc. was formed in Delaware in 2013 to handle sales and marketing in the United States, partly because the market there was much larger than Japan’s. It lists early backers including 500 Startups, the Innovation Network Corporation of Japan and NTT DOCOMO Ventures, with Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, among the advisers. TechCrunch named SBI Investment, Daiwa Securities Group and WHIZ Partners as the lead investors in a Series C round in September 2018.

A wheel made of 24 smaller wheels.

The first product was the Model A, launched in 2014. Japanese Wikipedia says the first 50 units sold out soon after reservations opened. Its signature was the front wheel. designboom reported in November 2015 that each front tyre was made up of 24 smaller ones that rotate on the spot, allowing omni-directional movement; all four wheels were powered, and a smartphone app could steer the chair remotely over Bluetooth.

That machine took the top prize at Japan’s Good Design Award. The Bridge reported in October 2015 that it had won a Gold Award, the Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry prize, and was a candidate for the grand award; designboom named it the grand winner of 2015 that November, and Japanese Wikipedia gives the same year. WHILL’s own awards list dates the Good Design win to 2016, alongside a Design for Asia award.

Later models went lighter. Japanese Wikipedia says the Model C of 2017 dropped from the Model A’s 116 kg to 52 kg, swapped lead-acid batteries for lithium-ion and could be taken apart to travel in a car; Panasonic used it as the base of PiiMo, an automatic-following robotic electric wheelchair. The Model C2 of 2020 added rear suspension. The foldable Model F arrived in 2021, and the range gained its first scooter, the Model S, in 2022, followed by the Model R in 2024, with a detachable battery.

The company’s awards list is long. It records an iF Design Award for the Model C and a Red Dot Best of the Best for the Model Ci in 2018, when TIME also named the Model Ci among its best inventions; a CES Best of Innovation Award and an iF Design Award for the Model F in 2022; and an iF Design Award for the Model R in 2024.

What to call the product has been part of the brand from the start. The Stanford case says that in 2015 the Model A was marketed as a “personal mobility device” in America because it had not yet gained a US medical-device classification, and it quotes a mission of “delivering fun and style to sidewalk travel.” Japanese Wikipedia says WHILL sets aside the image of an electric wheelchair and defines its product as short-distance mobility, usable without a licence on pavements, at up to 6 km/h in Japan. Press releases of 2019 used the phrase “Personal EV.” Today’s English website has plain menu headings, “Electric Wheelchairs” and “Scooters,” under the mission “Delivering Fun and Innovative Mobility for All.”

Design and documentation.

Wheelchairs, walkers and scooters have their own route to market. Writing in 1991, the journalist Joseph Shapiro noted that, unlike virtually every other product, wheelchairs were not sold directly to users but marketed through occupational and physical therapists and medical supply dealers. Today’s makers still describe much the same route: Platinum Equity said in 2024 that Sunrise Medical sells through homecare dealers and distributors, and Invacare’s 2024 announcement named home medical equipment providers alongside retail and online channels.

Catalogues in this trade deal in frames, seats and options. The International Directory of Company Histories described one popular Sunrise chair of the early 1990s as made in one-inch steps of back height, seat depth and seat width. Colour sits on the same order form: Sunrise Medical’s 2025 frame palette gave its shades names of their own, such as Midnight Blue and Turbo Green.

Trade fairs are the category’s public stage. Rehacare, which German Wikipedia says began in 1977 and has been run by Messe Düsseldorf since 1999, shows aids including mobility products to users and relatives as well as to specialists; its organisers list the next edition for September 2027. Medtrade, in the United States, is a trade conference for medical supplies, according to English Wikipedia.

The people in the pictures matter too. Shapiro wrote that Quickie’s brochures showed its chairs in use by active people, at the office and elsewhere, and Sunrise Medical’s American website today quotes named wheelchair users in their own words on work and travel. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made, with the company’s own claims marked as such.

From selling chairs to running airport fleets.

WHILL’s second business moves people around large sites. The company’s English timeline records a merger with Scootaround, a rental and repair provider, in 2018; the announcement, carried by AviationPros, spoke of combining WHILL’s vehicles with Scootaround’s rental, repair and mobility-management services, while the Japanese timeline calls the same event a business tie-up. WHILL Europe opened in Amsterdam in 2018 and WHILL China in Suzhou in 2019, the company says.

Airports became the showcase. TechCrunch reported in September 2018 that WHILL was testing a summoned, self-returning device at Tokyo International Airport with Panasonic, and in November 2019 that it had run trials at Schiphol, Haneda and Abu Dhabi and was moving on to Dallas and Winnipeg through Scootaround; that report placed the company in Yokohama at the time. Airport Technology reported in October 2019 that Japan Airlines and Japan Airport Terminal would test the chairs at Haneda’s Terminal 1. WHILL says the service it launched at Haneda in 2020 was “the world’s first autonomous personal mobility service deployed at an airport.” A passenger rides to a destination, gets off, and the empty unit returns on its own. On 25 August 2026 the company announced an extension to Haneda’s new North Satellite facility, with 37 units there and use at about 30 hub airports in Japan and overseas, by its own count.

WHILL sells through several channels in Japan. Japanese Wikipedia says the Model C2 reaches users through wholesalers, rental firms and care managers under the long-term care insurance system, that direct sales began in 2020, and that car dealers have sold WHILL since 2021, along with the cycle chain Cycle Base Asahi and electronics retailers such as Bic Camera.

The Stanford case recorded in 2015 that manufacturing and component supply were in Taiwan. WHILL’s Japanese company page now lists development, production and sales among its activities, while its English page lists design and sales. The company gave its headcount as 350 on a consolidated basis in September 2024, with its headquarters in Shinagawa, Tokyo.

The newest model returns to weight. WHILL announced the Model C Lite, a folding electric wheelchair of 17 kg, in February 2026 and launched it on 30 March in the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Spain. The trade site THIIS reported that the British supplier TGA Mobility would show it at Naidex in Birmingham that month, describing it as designed in Japan, with a carbon-fibre chassis, and quoting TGA’s managing director on its recycled carbon resin.

For a design guide, WHILL shows a maker working on the vocabulary of its category as well as the hardware. Compare Pride Mobility, an American maker of scooters and power chairs, and Segway, another name built on personal transport. For this guide we use deep teal, graphite and amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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