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Safehinge Primera on why investing in your business is essential

Glasgow start-up Safehinge Primera designs and produces revolutionary safety products for use in education and mental health settings. Find out why investing its hard-earned capital has helped the company to expand its product range and grow.

16 January 2025 | 6 minute read

It’s fair to say that most of us don’t tend to think much – if at all – about the details in doors. From hinges to handles, if it opens and closes, that’s all that matters most of the time.

But these seemingly simple apertures can hold hidden dangers. An estimated 51% of suicides within inpatient mental health environments occur using the door or door hardware.

The creation of a safe environment for people to recover in comfort shouldn’t come at the cost of privacy or dignity. Removing the door, while eliminating the risk, would be dehumanising and discouraging. Instead, a solution that provides safety without compromise is required.

This is where Safehinge Primera – a company that designs the details that most of us wouldn’t think of – has helped to quietly revolutionise these environments.

Safehinge Primera's story

Started from a kitchen table in 2009 by product design engineering graduates and friends Philip Ross and Martin Izod, Safehinge began with a simple idea: making doors safer. From jamming fingers to more serious injury risk, the pair wanted to design out the challenges in challenging environments – and they did.

From the test centre in Philip’s parent’s garage, the two created Safehinge’s debut product: the integral finger guard.      

This product uses a rounded heel to remove the gap between the door and the frame, protecting the fingers of children and adults alike.  

Safehinge joined forces with Primera in 2016, bringing together two companies with award-winning design and engineering teams to continue creating safety-focused innovations.

In the years since, the company has developed over a dozen more products and established working relationships with many public and private sector clients, including the NHS, the Department for Education, children’s hospices and even restaurants.

Investing for growth

To get to where it is today, Safehinge Primera (SP) did what many companies have reservations about doing: investing hard-earned capital back into itself. Here are just a few ways it did this to help with growth.

Space

The company received its first funding during the credit crunch of 2009, totalling £180,000. It used this to continue developing its products, experimenting with prototypes and materials, and finding a space outside of the garage.

The founders got an office in Glasgow’s Skypark, as well as a testing space in the basement of the building. They shortly increased the testing space but eventually outgrew it. At this point, it invested in a fully dedicated workshop, complete with testing rigs.

Investing in its professional and development space allowed SP to begin building its team, as well as expanding its product range and increasing its testing capabilities.

In 2021, the company moved from its original home in Skypark to a new office in Spiers Wharf to better accommodate its much bigger team.

Team

Speaking of which, this is another aspect of its business that SP put plenty of capital into. Finding the right people to support the business as it grew was essential for SP – from engineers to directors, it spared no expense for its people.

With this ethos, SP has gone from just the two founders in 2009, to over 80 employees in 2024, all working in alignment with the company’s core mission: designing for good, to help protect people at vulnerable times.

Demos

Once SP had a suite of unique and potentially life-saving products, it needed to find a way to reach its market.

One of the enabling investments for successful market launch was attending key exhibitions and trade events in the mental health space and demonstrating its products.

“It’s a big investment to exhibit at such events, but the potential for making connections, capturing insights at scale and getting your name out there is enormous. And for SP, it was more than worth it. Scottish Enterprise have really helped support us in this area” said CEO of Safehinge Primera, Philip Ross.

Mobile showroom

Having had great success at exhibitions, SP invested in a mobile showroom. Playfully named Doora (the explorer), the product training and mobile display bus toured the UK and Ireland. Not only did it give potential clients the chance to see and interact with products, but it also allowed SP to provide training on suicide prevention without disrupting these sensitive care environments, improving the focus staff can give to the learning.     

International markets

After establishing itself in the UK, SP set its sights across the pond. Investing in transatlantic trips to better understand the mental healthcare system in the United States, and how its products could play a part.

In doing this, SP discovered that there was a significant demand for its safer, non-institutional products designed with patients and clinical staff in mind.

It exhibited at the Healthcare Design Expo in New Orleans in November 2019 to great excitement of attendees.    

This was a particular area where we, with assistance from our international branch Scottish Development International, were able to offer support SP.

Support from Scottish Enterprise

We’ve had a relationship with SP since near the beginning. We established this in 2011 and have worked with it since across several aspects of its business and operations.

This has included support in leadership and product development, as well as assisting the company to break into new markets. Over the last few years, we’ve provided funding and contacts from our networks in both the USA and Australia to facilitate SP to begin exporting to these international markets.

Most recently, we have been supporting the company in its work to gain ISO 9001 and 27001 accreditations, which it now has. The process for getting these can be complex and hard to navigate if you’re not familiar, but our team leveraged its experience to support SP to provide everything required to get the certification. 

Safehinge Primera's next big project

Gaining the ISO 9001 and 27001 certification was a key part of Safehinge Primera’s ‘Project X’. This is a soon-to-be launched technology product that the company believe will be a game-changer in the mental health space.

Project X is a groundbreaking product innovation that redefines patient safety and dignity in mental healthcare settings. The product is a Non-Visual Patient Safety Aid (NVPSA) that addresses the critical need for privacy-preserving life safety solutions in inpatient care and significantly reduces restrictive practice for clinical teams.

Since the certification, we’ve  been continuing to support Safehinge Primera with additional funding and development support as it prepares to launch Project X.

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