Going up: Stannah and Uplifts elevating home accessibility

The Manufacturer’s Molly Cooper visited Stannah’s headquarters in Andover and spoke with Nick Stannah, CEO of Stannah Home Accessibility and Sam Stannah, CEO of Uplifts, about a new venture for the business and what the future holds for helping people stay in their homes longer.

Stannah is a 158-year-old, wholly family-owned business and is currently managed by fourth, fifth and sixth generation members. The company’s head office is in Andover and is synonymous with home accessibility. It manufactures stairlifts and exports them worldwide to nearly 50 countries. It has a lift distribution and services business in the UK and provides maintenance, service and repairs on lifts all over the country including to Network Rail, retail, education and the Elizabeth Tower within The Palace of Westminster.

The company has also recently launched Uplifts, a home lift branch of the company, offering futureproofing in the home, and providing another option for people to get up and down the stairs. And finally, within its supply chain, the company also has upholstery and other manufacturing businesses.

Uplift-ing ideas

Two years ago, Sam Stannah had been working for the business for several years in a variety of roles. By his own admission, being a young person within a large business, he became frustrated. He had a lot of fresh ideas but was struggling to compete for internal resources in order to explore them.
“My grandfather and great uncle introduced the stairlift in 1975 and grew the business from a £3m to £50m global organisation. It made me think: ‘what am I going to do?’ How am I going to make my mark?” said Sam. So, he took to the board the exciting idea of creating a fast-growing manufacturing company for a brand-new product that could strengthen and broaden the portfolio of products that Stannah could offer to its customers. He was given the funding he needed for this new entity, and thus Uplifts was born.
“Uplifts complements the current flagship product, the home stairlift. Actually, 50 years ago, we did sell home lifts, but they were hard to install, expensive, technically quite difficult and took up a lot of space. So when the stairlift was introduced the home lifts took a back seat.
“However, as a product portfolio they fit together very well. And now, technology has seen huge advancements in the last 20 years, which means they can be installed in a day and the cost has come down to the point where they are much closer to stairlifts – this means we’ve seen an explosion in the market,” he explained. By adding these lifts to the Stannah range, it will help build the company into a total multiple solution accessibility provider.

Expanding the portfolio

After two years of behind the scenes work, Uplifts launched its through-the-floor home lift in October 2024. This means the lift does not have a shaft and can move from one f loor to another seamlessly. “One of the driving forces behind Uplifts was the fact a stigma still exists around having a stairlift installed, whereas an in-home lift would almost be seen as more of a luxury,” said Sam.
From Sam’s experience, around 70% of the people who would benefit from having a stairlift in their home completely disengage with the conversation as soon as the word ‘stairlift’ is mentioned. Some customers have even called ahead of an installation to ask whether the company’s branding would be on the vans parked outside, as they were reluctant for neighbours to discover they were having a stairlift fitted.

Moving past the competition

In the home stairlift category, Stannah knows it has some competitors. “As an emerging product category, its consistently a loved product that changes the lives of people who use it. However, it’s not as much of a total mobility solution as the home lift. We are also seeing people who are younger opting for the home lift product, whereas the stairlift tends to be a later in life purchase,” explained Sam. The home lift enables people to take items, pets and even a wheelchair in the lift with them.

There is also competition in the home lift market, but being new, this has had its advantages for Uplifts. “Our competitors have typically adapted commercial lift products and made them fit in a customer’s home, but the Uplifts team began the process from scratch. We are the first home lift manufacturer that has been built from the ground-up for residential properties,” said Sam.

However, the traditional stairlift product is not being forgotten. This year marks 50 years since the stairlift was introduced to the market by Sam’s grandfather and great uncle yet the business is continuously looking at ways to innovate it. “We have some exciting products coming out this year, so watch this space!”

Rising trends

For anyone in manufacturing, the last five years have been a bit of a rollercoaster, particularly with the challenges around supply chains and logistics. After 2020, many businesses were looking at their supply chains and how to bring parts in-house. “At Stannah, we’ve made some big investments. We have a new 90,000 sq. ft. facility in Andover, with room to expand and grow. We’ve put in two new paint plants, one in Newcastle and one in Brno in the Czechia,” said Nick.

As a British manufacturing company, Stannah predominately manufactures in the UK, but with an ageing population and the stigma for accepting help at home declining, the business is seeing growth across the world.

In the future, Uplifts will look to partner with British fabricators to work on its products. “It’s the comfort of knowing that two hours away is a business that can make a core component of your product when needed.” But right now, Uplifts has all its fabrication within the supply chain. “We have chosen to do that because we’ve typically needed speed to market scalability. During new product development, we are not afraid to look for manufacturing processes that don’t currently exist within Stannah in order to give us dynamism. Later down the line, we will look to bring those capabilities in-house,” explained Sam.

The talent ladder

When faced with the job market, employer brands are important and a company like Stannah has 158 years of history to fall back on. In the company’s headquarters in Andover there is a wall recongising the long service of its employees which ranges from 25 to 65 years! Stannah currently has 50 apprentices in the UK, half of those being lift apprentices, and others across various areas of the business. “It’s important to us that we invest in training the next generation of talent. We have recently insourced all our recruitment which has helped with this – we now have a dedicated internal team that knows the business, its values and what we offer when looking for candidates,” said Nick.

It’s not every day that you see a start up within the elevator space and for Sam this has been a great help in hiring the top talent. “We have this great journey that people are eager to join and be part of. We are a start-up, we’re new and we’re trying to achieve something exciting. This opportunity doesn’t come along very often in the elevator space,” Sam said.

LinkedIn has been a great source for Sam when looking for talent, and he often posts about the progress and achievements Uplifts is making and has often hired people from direct messaging. “Manufacturing talent in the UK is sparser than in other countries and we have to be able to motivate and retain our staff, which all comes back to our employer brand,” Sam added.

Stepping up to net zero

Net zero is incredibly important to Stannah, like all businesses right now. The company has recently appointed a Group Head of Sustainability to educate all business units around the world about what they need to be doing to reach set targets.

The Stannah site in Andover has solar panels on the roof, uses recycled rainwater and a third of the company’s car fleet is now EVs. “We are also upgrading all our energy meters to smart meters, because we need to have a better understanding of our usage. Only through that measuring and monitoring can we find areas for improvement,” said Nick. “At Uplifts we have designed our vans so that the sub-components of the product can be loaded directly into the van with no packaging. This means that two home lifts can fit into one van, reducing the number of journeys for an installer, the volume of vehicles on the road as well as cutting down on fuel,” Sam added.

Growing over six generations

The company has changed dramatically since it was first established by Joseph Stannah in 1867. Back then, the company was making parts for cranes to lift containers onto the River Thames and were just beginning to introduce new types of industrial lifts. However, its values have stayed the same. “For us, we’ve got to keep moving forward, adding legs to our table which only gives us more strength and stability as we grow,” said Nick.

As a supplier to numerous local authorities, Stannah has always supported the UK government in bringing solutions and products to market that allow people to ‘Age in Place’. This means that as people get older, they stay in the home they love, where they may well have a lifetime of memories, surrounded by a community they know. “Not only does this make the later years of life more enjoyable, it also allows us to help prevent further burden on the healthcare system in the UK and countries around the world,” said Sam.

He added: “The ambition for Uplifts is to help transform Stannah into the largest home lift business in the world. To achieve this our through-the-floor home lift will just be the beginning. We will build Uplifts as a start-up company, get it to a stable level and then reintegrate it back into the group.

“We will then look to roll out that same playbook for multiple product categories again and again, and use that as a dynamic way to broaden our portfolio, while creating focus on the core parts of the group. The ethos is about broadening the capabilities of Stannah by creating young companies that can be dynamic and faster to market. Once they establish themselves they can then be absorbed by the broader business where they can see the benefits and the economies of scale of a larger organisation.”

Stannah and Uplifts are always on the lookout for talent. Make sure to follow the company on LinkedIn and connect with Sam Stannah for job opportunities.