The $1,000 Wheelchair - New Mobility

Tanner Green is concerned about the tiny aluminum plugs left behind when you cut 30 holes in the seat rail of a wheelchair. The cutting is done by an enormous robotic laser controlled by a computer model. A tech feeds a 20-foot aluminum tube into the machine, makes a few clicks on the computer, and the machine gets to work, cutting the tube to length, 30 holes for the axle adjustment, two channels for clamping in the footplate tubes and two etchings to help line up the tube on the bending machine. Running at full speed, the cutting takes just a couple of minutes.

It’s mesmerizing to watch. When the laser is done cutting, sometimes the leftover material just falls out, but sometimes it stays in place. “Then, you have to grab a screwdriver or some other tool and get them out yourself,” Green says as he starts whacking and prodding at the just-cut seat rail. Some plugs come out immediately, some are more stubborn. In all, it takes as long to get all the plugs out as it took for the laser to make the cuts.

For Green, the chief engineer at Not a Wheelchair, this is one of the thousand complications standing between his team and a rather lofty goal: upending the manual wheelchair marketplace. If you’ve heard of Not a Wheelchair, it’s likely because of its owners, Zack Nelson, the star of the 8.8-million-subscriber YouTube channel JerryRigEverything, and his wife Cambry, a para and manual wheelchair user. The Nelsons got into the mobility equipment business a few years ago when they released The Rig, an electric, adaptive off-road device with a simple yet robust and functional design priced significantly lower than anything else on the market. Now, they’re bringing that same ethos to manual wheelchairs.

Not a Wheelchair aims to offer a base-model, custom manual wheelchair at a similar or better quality than most of the insurance-approved wheelchairs in the U.S. for $999. Yes, that’s just under $1,000 for everything — wheels, handrims, tires, side guards and rigid, angle-adjustable backrest included. And the company plans to have a turnaround time of weeks, rather than the monthslong slog that it typically takes from order to delivery.

When I first heard about this, it sounded awesome and a bit far-fetched. It’s hard to find a pair of quality wheelchair wheels for less than $500. Same with a rigid backrest. How were they going to offer both, plus a custom wheelchair frame without compromising on quality? I drove to their headquarters in Utah to find out.

When you turn into the neighborhood where Not a Wheelchair’s manufacturing facility is, you’re greeted by about a dozen cows chewing grass in a smallish, triangular field. There’s a busy road to one side and brand new, multistory apartment complexes on the other two sides. There’s no indication of how the cows got there — as if a city suddenly sprung up around them. Past the cows and the apartments are rows of warehouses. Then you turn the corner and the buildings go from huge to enormous. Not a Wheelchair is housed in one of the largest buildings I’ve ever seen.

I roll inside and am greeted by Nelson and Green. Nelson looks familiar because he’s exactly as he appears on YouTube — tall, muscular and shiny bald, with a soft, measured voice. The office space is still spartan — just a row of computers and a kitchen. “None of this was here even a few weeks ago,” Green says. “We took over an empty building about five weeks ago, and it’s been non-stop ever since.”

The Not a Wheelchair name started to differentiate The Rig — an electric offroad vehicle capable of going places that a wheelchair could not. Nelson is famous for building and modifying all sorts of things — from converting a Humvee to electric power to digging an enormous bunker in the couple’s backyard, but Not a Wheelchair has quickly taken on an identity of its own. “We’ve always seen ourselves as an outdoor mobility company,” says Nelson. “We want to make it easier for people to move around outside and in their communities.” Now though, Nelson finds himself about to release a manual wheelchair under the Not a Wheelchair name. “We started calling it The Paradox Project,” he says. “But if you have a better idea for a name, we’re open to suggestions.”

When I roll out to the manufacturing floor, there are huge machines scattered across the 26,000-square-foot space. There’s an apartment-sized laser cutter that looks like it should be stationed on a spaceship, a computer-controlled tubing bender, a welding station, powder coating and curing cabinets, an assembly area and a half dozen other prototyping and testing machines scattered along the perimeter. The machines are set up as a series of production pods that snake in a sequential line from start (cutting tubes) to the end (assembly) of the wheelchair-making process.

“The culture I grew up in in terms of my career was very much around process improvement,” says Green, who’s worked with semi-conductors at Intel, missiles at Raytheon and medical devices at a smaller consulting firm. He first connected with Nelson after watching a YouTube video about The Rig and thinking it was a cool project. He cold-emailed Nelson, volunteering his engineering services for anything Nelson needed help with. Just a year or so later, Nelson convinced Green to move to Utah and work full time with Not a Wheelchair. Green has been working on the manual wheelchair project for almost two years and for him, having a good design is only the first stage in the process. Turning that design into a quality product, quickly, inexpensively and consistently takes a dozen interdependent steps.

The first step in the manufacturing process is to cut the frame tubing, and you can’t move to the next step without removing those annoying aluminum plugs. Green says they’ve been messing with the settings on the cutter to get more of the plugs to release on their own. It might only save a minute per chair — but when you’re trying to change the wheelchair industry, every minute counts.

At the next stage of the process — bending — Nelson is watching the process as a tech slowly puts the machine through its process at about 10% of its capability. “Are we running at 100%? Why is this so slow?” Nelson asks. “Come on, let’s get it moving. We can go faster than this.”

Speed is part of the culture at Not a Wheelchair. “The whole goal is to get from idea to drawing to actual physical product that we can test as fast as possible,” Nelson says. With their current setup, the team can build an entire chair in a few hours, and that time is coming down quickly as the company’s 15 employees get more comfortable with the process.

Everybody I talked to was on the same page. Why go fast? Because it matters how long it takes for someone to get a new wheelchair. “The time it takes means that somebody is being impacted by not being able to get that chair sooner,” says Green. “If they’re waiting six, eight, 12 months for a chair, that’s six, eight, 12 months that they’re going without. They’re having to make do with what they have, whether it’s something that doesn’t fit them, it’s broken, or some other issue. I don’t want to make anybody wait that long for something that’s an important part of their life.”

If you’re looking at the reasons that Not a Wheelchair is able to make a $1,000 wheelchair, hyper-efficient manufacturing techniques and state-of-the-art equipment are near the top of the list. But factories and enormous fancy machines cost a lot of money, and in any normal business model, those costs are passed on to the consumer. But what if the owners aren’t dependent on — or even interested in — making money from the business? Meet Zack and Cambry, YouTube stars.

Nelson started his YouTube channel 12 years ago. He was in college and had no career path. He just knew he wanted to be his own boss. He had a jeep with a busted gear inside the transfer case. “Instead of taking it to the shop and fixing it for $1,000, I followed this YouTube video and fixed it for like 60 bucks instead,” he says. “So I emailed the guy who made the video and I was like, ‘Why did you make this video for people? It’s such a nice thing to do.’ He said, ‘To decrease world suck, to make the world a better place, and also I make money for the ads that appear when the videos are playing.’ That was an epiphany for me, like, ‘Oh, I could be my own boss. I could do the projects that I’m already doing anyway, film them and make money on the internet.’ That satisfied every little box I was looking for in a career.”

Nelson started with videos of himself repairing his jeep and quickly moved onto durability and repair videos for smart phones, which turned into the bread and butter of his growing YouTube presence. Nelson didn’t have any knowledge of mobility products, or any personal experience with disability, until he met Cambry.

Cambry is slight and blond. She got hurt doing equestrian vaulting — basically gymnastics on horseback and yes, it’s as wild as it sounds. Zack and Cambry met via an online dating app and Cambry was upfront about her disability. “Before our first date, Zack asked me if there was anything he needed to do to pick me up,” Cambry says. “I really wanted to make up a big story about how he would have to go to DMV to get a special license to be able to take me anywhere, but I chickened out and told him, ‘You know, usually I just meet someone at a restaurant.’”

Like all wheelchair users on a first date, Cambry was worried Zack was going to be weird about her disability. “But his first disability-related question was to ask if I’d done any cool upgrades to my wheelchair.” She had not. But this was someone she could hang out with.

Not long after they started dating, Nelson surprised her with a DIY off-road wheelchair — two electric bikes with a welded seat in the middle, “chariot-style” as Nelson puts it in the video where Cambry tries it out for the first time. That video was also Cambry’s first appearance on the YouTube channel. She’s clearly nervous about being on camera and freezes for a second when Zack asks her a question. Once she’s on the bike, she quickly settles in, blasting around grassy fields and almost flipping herself as she climbs a curb at full speed.

That video has 11 million views and counting. A year later, when Zack and Cambry released a video debuting The Rig, Cambry looks like a pro. Zack and Cambry got married in 2019 and now have two kids. Cambry remains a regular presence on the YouTube channel. She explains the challenges of living with a disability in a straightforward, relatable way and is fun and adventurous when trying out the new gear. It’s a hard needle to thread when you’re living off YouTube views, but Cambry passes the realness test and does a good job of normalizing disability for the channel’s audience, the vast majority of whom aren’t disabled.

Videos with Cambry and accessibility projects consistently get millions of views. “The internet loves Cambry,” Zack says. “I’ve tested videos where I’ll do two versions of the exact same video, one with a photo of me as the thumbnail and the other with Cambry, and the one with Cambry will get like twice as many views.”

In the world of YouTube, putting out multimillion-view videos translates to millions in revenue in the form of ads, partnerships and affiliate sales. It’s that income stream that has allowed the Nelsons to fund a wheelchair production factory, along with the staff to go along with it, without incurring massive amounts of debt.

While I’m rolling around the Not a Wheelchair facility, marveling at the scale of it, I can’t help but wonder why they decided to do it. I mean, it’s one thing to build cool, one-off mobility devices. It’s another thing entirely to self-fund and spend years developing the capacity to mass produce affordable wheelchairs. For Zack and Cambry, it was pretty simple: There is clearly a need. And with Zack’s background and connections, combined with the income from JerryRigEverything, they were in a unique position to do something about it.

“Jumping through many levels worth of hoops just to get a wheelchair was incredibly frustrating for me,” says Cambry. “I got engaged to Zack in 2019 and wanted to buy a new wheelchair before my wedding, which was six months away at the time, and my new chair almost didn’t even arrive in time for our wedding day. It was stressful knowing that my current wheelchair could break at any time and leave me stranded for weeks or months. I know I’m not the only one who had that stress in the back of my mind. So hopefully, now with our own wheelchair factory, we are able to fix some of those problems.”

Once the company opens to the public, Not a Wheelchair expects to have a custom, manual wheelchair shipped four weeks after you hit the order button. Ramped up to full speed, they hope to have that time down to two weeks. Compared to the typical wheelchair buying process, that is — to borrow a phrase from Space Balls — ludicrous speed. Not a Wheelchair aims to do it not only by automating as much of the process as possible, but also by eliminating the middlemen. That means no seating clinic, no insurance company, no DME supplier. This has pros and cons.

Let’s start with the seating clinic. The main purpose of the seating clinic or a physical therapist wheelchair evaluation is to provide you with expert advice about what equipment — from wheelchair type to components and wheelchair measurements — is best for your body and for your needs, and to make sure, using pressure mapping, that the equipment you ordered fits you properly and protects you from pressure sores. I’ll let you judge how often that process results in perfectly fitting equipment. Not a Wheelchair is making consumers supply their own measurements. That can be from the chair you’re already sitting in, from a seating clinic or conjured up after comparing specs from your friends at happy hour. That gives you the power to order what you want. But it also means that if the chair doesn’t fit, it’s on you.

Next up, insurance companies. They’re supposed to pay for your equipment. But they also require you to use other middlemen, which increases costs. In today’s broken system of U.S. healthcare, most insurance, even private, will pay a bare minimum for manual wheelchairs and components. Copays for that basic equipment often cost more than $1,000. For wheelchair users with specific needs (most of us) who go through the runaround of denials, only to be “approved” and still owe four figures, it can feel like a shell game.

Lastly, DME suppliers. Two helpful services that DME suppliers are supposed to provide are wheelchair setup and repair. In Not a Wheelchair’s model, you do the adjustment and repair yourself, get a friend or family member to help, or find a local bike shop willing to work on your chair.

“The whole point of my YouTube channel is durability and repairability. I’ve been preaching that for 12 years, so we’re bringing that into the chair as well. We’re using standard hardware, and we’re consolidating as many of the bolts as possible to as few sizes as possible so that there are fewer tools needed. We want to be able to make it simple enough that people can do the adjustments and the repairs by themselves, and if they need a caster replaced, something binds up or the bearing inside the caster seizes, they can pop the caster off and put a new one on and we’ll sell those replacement parts. Or, if they’re under warranty, we’ll just give them those replacement parts.”

Nelson says that they’re pitching the chair as a secondary option for wheelchairs users, something to have around for traveling or getting dirty or as a backup chair. For $1,000, that seems reasonable. But for that price and ease of ordering, it’s reasonable to assume that no matter how the chairs are being pitched, a lot of wheelchair users will choose to order one as their primary chair. How the easy order process and results will work at scale is a big unknown. Another big question: How exactly are they going to make a profit charging that little for a wheelchair?

They’re not. Same as with The Rig and any other products they develop, Zack and Cambry won’t be taking any profit from Not a Wheelchair, and they aren’t taking any salary from the company, which operates separately from the YouTube channel. “It’s a passion project for us,” says Nelson. To be clear, Not a Wheelchair isn’t a nonprofit — it’s currently licensed as a benefit company, a newer designation of a for-profit company that provides a public service. “Once it’s established, it’s going to become an employee-owned company. I want my employees to be extremely well taken care of, but as owners, we have other ways of making money,” says Nelson.

Second, they’re offering the base model chair at low margins. If you order a chair with no upgrades from Not a Wheelchair, your costs won’t be much more than it costs the company to get it to you. Margins are higher for upgrades — things like a carbon fiber seat pan, wooden handrims and more complicated frame bends. “As people change the options on their wheelchair and get a more premium version, we make more profit on that,” says Nelson. “We’ll happily take money from people who want to upgrade their machines, but we don’t want to take money from people who just need the basics.”

So how does Not a Wheelchair’s base model chair stack up to other options on the market? I hate to sound like a preacher, but … it’s totally reasonable! It hits the mark of being at least as good, if not better, than the majority of insurance-approved wheelchairs in the U.S.

Not a Wheelchair made me a base model chair to try for this article. They didn’t ask me to write good things about it, and they’re not paying for advertising. (The other benefit of having a huge YouTube channel, is you also have a built-in marketing channel with a worldwide reach.) The chair they gave me is basic. I’ve been using it on and off for a couple of weeks since I visited the factory. It rolls straight and smooth. It doesn’t weigh that much more than my fully-fixed, titanium-framed chair. Its backrest is comfortable and angle-adjustable. The rear seat height is adjustable, along with the front caster height and angle, and the center of gravity. It feels solid, not all janky and rattly, like old-school adjustable chairs did.

The wheels, which Not a Wheelchair commissioned from Vapors Wheels, are great. I liked them so much that I stole them to replace the $900, fiber-spoked wheels that keep going out of true on my titanium chair. I put the old wheels with some fatter tires on the Not a Wheelchair and lowered the rear seat height so I could use it as an off-road chair for pushing around the dirt and grass around my house. I’ll keep pushing my titanium chair for everyday life because I like how titanium rides, and my chair is fitted with ergo seating and other frame customizations that Not a Wheelchair isn’t yet offering.

But the Not a Wheelchair won’t sit in my garage getting dusty. It’ll be getting dirty in the summer and snowy in the winter. And if my other chair breaks, I know I have a comfy, perfectly acceptable option to use while I’m fixing it. And that’s kind of the point: Wheelchairs shouldn’t be so expensive that you can’t afford to have a backup or one with an alternate seating position for specific activities. Not a Wheelchair might finally be the company with the means and the will to change that.

Touring the factory, I saw other prototypes scattered all around the facility. There’s a beefier, four-wheel drive version of The Rig that the company just launched. There’s a track wheelchair that’s still in development. It’s clear that Not a Wheelchair doesn’t intend to stop at a simple, manual wheelchair. Inexpensive components, more advanced electric off-road devices, power assist, it’s all on the table. “We’re just really excited to see where this leads,” says Green.

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