Home improvement for senior citizens

The Taiwanese manufacturer Faithful is actually a specialist in the field of fasteners and home improvement, with customers all over the globe. Australia and New Zealand alone account for a 42 per cent share of sales, and the USA and Canada for 41 per cent. Recently the company has been launching its new “Senior Care” product line at trade fairs such as the China International Hardware Show, held in Shanghai in November 2013.
The starting point for this was not only the acknowledgement in a UN report of the fact that society is aging throughout the world. More significant was another fact: that the company took a good look at DIY stores and their online shops, only to discover that these have no special departments where products for senior citizens can be found grouped together. As they concluded at Faithful, either the DIY stores don’t stock such products at all or they offer them scattered through several different product areas.
So the company set out to put together such a range. The first step was analysing the exact needs of older people who, in spite of certain limitations, want to live independently in their own home. Three key areas of interest emerged from the analysis: the bathroom, the bedroom and mobility.
Consequently an appropriate range was put together by buying in existing products and redesigning them. Faithful now has two product lines to offer in this field.

One is the “Reusable sign” line. It comprises twelve reusable stickers that feature graphic symbols. They are intended to remind older people suffering from memory loss of certain things like their keys or the first aid kit, or to label the toilet or the bathroom. There is also a series of warning signs.
The second line comes under the name of “Senior Care – safe home for happy and independent living”. It includes fixtures to provide assistance in the home, such as suction grab bars, a bathtub safety rail and a shower grab handle for the bathroom. For the bedroom there are devices such as a bed table, a bed wedge, a grabber, a clip-on cup holder and a bottle handle.
This year Faithful is celebrating the company’s 40th anniversary. It employs a workforce of around 640 altogether, 150 of them at headquarters in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, and in two Taiwanese production facilities. Some 490 employees work in the three facilities in China. Founded in 1974, the company has been supplying product to the DIY market since 1982. Its first production plant in China was brought into…