Page 10 - Mobility Management, July 2018

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Therafin Turns 50
A Veteran of the CRT Industry Keeps Innovation at Its Core
An early rendition of Therafin Corp. head- quarters, soon after the company’s birth.
As it celebrates 50 years in business, Therafin Corp. has, in a way, also started over.
There will be an official golden anniversary celebration this summer, with elected officials, ATPs, consumers and its hometown of Frankfort, Ill., invited.
“I think my dad sort of latched onto that and picked
it up,” Todd said. “He bought a house in the early ’60s in Champaign, Ill., and he converted it to be accessible. That kind of thing wasn’t happening at that time. He then rented it out to people in wheelchairs.”
Eventually, Gibb began selling wheelchairs, and as he did, “he saw so many needs,” Todd said. Gibb began
to wonder if he could meet more of those consumers’ needs by creating products himself, based on what he was hearing from those wheelchair users.
“He started Therafin with a handful of ideas in 1968 in the garage in California, where we lived at the time,” Todd said. “He just started with six products, and it continued to grow. It
started with very simple
ADL [Activities of Daily
Living] products, and then
it progressed to wheel-
chair trays and innovative
attaching hardware.”
Todd, who was 8 at
the time his dad started Therafin Corp., still remem- bers sitting on the floor of that Southern California garage and counting nuts and bolts for his dad.
Gilbert “Gibb” Fink, Therafin Corp. founder, in a tradeshow booth in the company’s earlier years, when its name included a slash.
But last year, as the seating and positioning manufac- turer was completing its 50th year in business, Therafin also launched a new company. And that new entity is very much based on Therafin’s original ideals of listening to consumers and creating — from scratch and to custom specifications, when necessary — the assistive technology that end users are calling for.
Starting in a Garage
Todd Fink is Therafin’s second-generation president. He said his father, Gilbert “Gibb” Fink, always had a creative mind. But as Gibb entered college, he had no strong inclinations toward any particular profession.
“He took one of those tests that says what your interests are,” Todd said of his dad, “and it told him to be an OT [occupational therapist]. So he became an OT at the University of Illinois in the 1960s.”
At the University of Illinois, Gibb Fink was mentored in the school’s rehabilitation department by Tim Nugent, the “Father of Accessibility” who, among other achieve- ments, founded the National Wheelchair Basketball Association.
8 JULY 2018 | MOBILITY MANAGEMENT
Gibb named the new
company Thera/fin, orig-
inally with a slash in the
center. “Thera” stood for
“therapeutic adaptives,”
while “fin” represented the family name.
Seating & Positioning Expansion
In later years, the company dropped the slash to become simply “Therafin.” The company that started in a garage first moved to the Illinois city of Crete, then to Steger, then to Mokena. In 2011, Therafin moved to its current location in Frankfort, Ill.
“We have plenty of room here,” Todd said. “We have six acres to grow, if we want to.”
Todd went to school and became a chemical engi- neer, “but all the while, I was working for Therafin, doing all the technical work.” In 1991, his father asked him to
Gibb Fink works his “country store” tradeshow booth. Thera/fin was well known for its themed booths.
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THERAFIN IMAGES: COURTESY THERAFIN CORP. BOCCIA RAMP IMAGE BY LAURIE WATANABE