Two entrepreneurs are shipping bespoke wheelchairs to Iraq after building a successful business – following life-changing road accidents which left them paraplegic.
Russel Simms and Greg Eden are at the forefront of a Staffordshire-based success story which first began after they suffered appalling road injuries 30 years ago.
Both found themselves relying on wheelchairs for the rest of their lives. But they dramatically turned their fortunes around with a manufacturing concept which has mushroomed into a market leading company with a £3 million turnover.
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The two men met when they were playing for Birmingham Bulls wheelchair basketball team – and realised there was a gap in the market for bespoke sports wheelchairs.
Now, 25 years later, Burntwood-based RGK is producing around 1,500 hand-made wheelchairs a year, supplying dozens of countries, with its latest order to the Paralympic Federation in Iraq.
Former Paralympic and Great Britain basketball athletes, the pair’s firm supplied the Paralympic basketball team for London 2012 with wheelchairs as well as other international teams.
Mr Simms, 48, from Lichfield, said: “We met because of the injuries we suffered and our love of sport. It was a pub chat after training and we felt we had very similar ways of thinking. We started building chairs out of my kitchen and garage.
“We launched the company in 1988, and there were just three of us in the beginning. Now today we employ 44 people and we have a £3 million turnover.”
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Both men found themselves wheelchair-bound after suffering terrible injuries in the 1980s.
“I was in a road accident in the 1980s and it changed my whole life. I was working on a farm at the time. I was driving too fast in a Land Rover going down a big hill and crashed.
“I have been a paraplegic ever since. It was a tough time – it’s your teenage years. Greg had been in a motorcycle accident a couple of years earlier, he was 18 at the time.”
But the two men’s chance encounter playing wheelchair basketball sowed the seeds for RGK, which Mr Simms describes as the Midlands ‘best-kept secret’.
“We are supplying a load of chairs to Iraq, wheelchairs for their Paralympic Federation. They took 30 chairs, it was a good-sized order.”
Mr Eden, 51, said: “What we do is life-changing. We manufacture as many for daily use as we do for sport.”