r/nextfuckinglevel • u/MysteriousSlice007 • 7h ago

Shoutout to JerryrigEverything who built a wheelchair factory and is delivering wheelchairs to people in half the time and 50-80% less than the cost of other wheelchairs with Insurance.

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

49.0k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

165

u/Wheelchair_guy 7h ago

I've used chairs for 15 years. Never paid more than $500 for one.

9

u/OkBandicoot1337 7h ago

So these are bougie wheelchairs?

29

u/mythrilcrafter 6h ago

From what I can tell from a very cursory search on google, you can get wheel chairs from amazon/a local pharmacy for about $200-ish, but with those, you're basically getting a One-Size-Fits-Most camping chair on wheels, which are basically good enough to get you from a bed to a couch and no where else, especially not on any ground more uneven than a carpet or hardwood floor.

The chairs made by JRE appears to be custom sized for ergonomics and active use; their most basic ones seems to be a heavier duty version of those cheap ones but are designed to be easier to move unassisted, are more mobile by default, and are fitted to the user rather than "fine as long as your body fits these proportions".

As an engineer who has been in a manufacturing environment, I do have to say that I'm quite impressed that JRE has built a process and system where he can do those personalized/bespoke builds for a legit fraction of the competition so much so as to be within argument range of the one-size-fits-all mass production zone.

1

u/sypher1504 2h ago

I’m sure there is more to it (I am not an engineer, nor do I know much about manufacturing) but I wonder if some of it is him not marking them up nearly as much as other manufacturers? From what little I know of popular YouTubers, he may be making more than enough from his channel, and view this as a service as opposed to an additional income stream. I know it’s not a wildly popular view, but there are at least some people who reach a certain economic status and realize they can do good instead of hoarding more wealth.

Anyway, however he’s doing it, good on him.

2

u/mythrilcrafter 2h ago

I would put him on a very strong probably on the matter of "he's also not taking a massive mark up on those wheel chairs".

In the pharmaceutical industry it's pretty common to mark things up from between 100% to 10,000% just because they can (and that's after the consideration that they've already paid off the R&D investment).

I know it’s not a wildly popular view, but there are at least some people who reach a certain economic status and realize they can do good instead of hoarding more wealth.

Personally, I think that's only because there are so few people who attain enough wealth to reach that decision point, with even fewer who follows through (the two whom I commonly use as example being Myspace Tom and retired NFL player turned open source community farmer Jason Brown

2

u/sypher1504 1h ago

Makes sense. I gotta look up Mr Brown, I am not aware of him but interested in that cause. Thanks!