Firm Finds Strength in Boomers’ Weaknesses

Baby boomers are a physically active generation, even as they age. But their driven commitment to sports has led to an awful lot of sore shoulders, bum knees and aching ankles.

Recognizing this, Greg Nelson, himself a baby boomer, may have hit upon the formula for capitalizing on those aches and pains.

Nelson, 43, is one of the founders and now president of DonJoy, a Carlsbad-based manufacturer of orthopedic braces.

The target audience is baby boomers, who, as weekend warriors on tennis courts, ski runs and softball fields, are bumping, bruising and spraining their way to making Nelson a very rich man and DonJoy a very successful company.

From a humble beginning 14 years ago in a friend’s garage, DonJoy today sells more than $50 million a year in braces to more than 50 countries worldwide. DonJoy controls 40% of the worldwide knee brace market.

In the years since Nelson and two friends who liked to shoot hoops together started the business, it has grown into an international concern with 300 employees and a sales force of 140.

Business can only get better, Nelson reasons, as the boomers get older and their muscles get a little sorer, their knees a little weaker, their elbows a little stiffer. All of which translates into an increased need for braces, he says. DonJoy had $10 million in annual sales before being acquired by Smith & Nephew in 1987. Smith & Nephew, based in London, is a major health care products manufacturer and distributor.

The lobby of DonJoy’s year-old, 90,000-square-foot facility in Carlsbad is decorated with 4-foot-high photos of athletes. There’s a woman poised delicately on a balance beam, Charles Barkley ready to make a jump shot on the basketball court, and Alain Gautier skippering his solo around-the-world sail. They all have one thing in common: They’re wearing DonJoy knee braces.

Although bracing athletic celebrities is always nice for the publicity shots it yields, DonJoy’s bread and butter comes from the weekend athletes and others who injure themselves.

That ever-growing market, coupled with a heightened awareness of escalating health care costs, have started doctors looking at bracing as a less expensive alternative to surgery. Surgery can disable a worker for weeks or even months, but using a brace alone will often enable the employee to return to work much sooner. Braces are also being used for more aggressive rehabilitation.

“A construction worker pulls something on the basketball court on Saturday--well, he still needs to get to work on Monday,” Nelson said.

DonJoy markets its 200-plus brace line directly to the medical community--doctors and rehabilitation therapists. The company manufactures rigid and soft supports for ankles, backs, wrists, elbows and knees. The braces are regularly prescribed in treatment by orthopedic surgeons, sports medicine specialists and other physicians.

DonJoy’s braces, which cost from $10 to $500, come in an assortment of 25 colors and can be coordinated to match ski suits or team uniforms.

DonJoy maintains a biomechanical research laboratory on its premises that Nelson says is the most technologically sophisticated of its kind. When researching their products, DonJoy clinicians use both human and artificial limbs to test the strength of joints and limbs. The company holds a patent on a surrogate knee it developed.

Nelson is proud of the relationship his company has with the medical community.

Nelson has opened his research laboratory to doctors and other researchers and has built a specially equipped classroom so conferences can be held on the premises. Twenty-three orthopedic surgeons from Italy are scheduled to use the facility next month.

Heightened concern about AIDS has caused many hotels that previously allowed medical conferences to use human specimens in their meeting rooms to change that policy. DonJoy has state permission for cadavers to be used in its research rooms.

DonJoy spends more money on research and development than it does on advertising and marketing, Nelson says.

DonJoy places a high premium on service. Orders are filled and shipped out the same day they are received. In fact, DonJoy is the largest Federal Express shipper in San Diego County in terms of packages sent on a regular basis, the company said.

There’s even been some talk about installing a strobe light that starts flashing as soon as a customer is put on hold.

All of this, Nelson said with his arms spread wide, is the result of a friendly little basketball game 14 years ago with friends.

Nelson, who was a social worker at the time, and friends Ken Reed, a lawyer, and Mark Nordquist, a former offensive guard for the Philadelphia Eagles, were playing recreational basketball. (They still play together on a team called “Older Than Dirt.”) One day, Nordquist showed up with a piece of inner tube rubber wrapped around a sore knee. Reed was also having knee problems and stole Nordquist’s makeshift brace.

“It helped his knee, too, and we just all sort of looked at each other and wondered if we were on to something,” Nelson said.

The next step involved cutting apart old wet suits and testing different designs.

The lawyer and the football player put up the money and named the company after their wives, Donna and Joy. Nelson, the social worker, became the sales force. Within the first year, Nelson bought out Nordquist. Today, the former partners are both real estate developers and Nelson sits alone at the helm.

DonJoy’s first product, “knee sleeves,” were constructed from old wet suits, which eventually were replaced by neoprene, the material that is still used in the soft knee supports DonJoy makes today. Soft knee bracing was followed by the rigid knee brace, a graphite knee stabilizer and other state-of-the-art braces.

Nelson says his employee team, particularly those in research and development, is his greatest recession-buster.

“With people like this, they will always find ways for us to be competitive,” he said.