The Circulo Development Journey: The Story Behind Our New Loan Store Chair

Every chair in our range starts out as a solution to a problem that couldn’t be solved by existing market offerings, and the Circulo is no exception. It started with a phone call from Newcastle City Council about operational issues with their existing chairs, and ended with a chair that was completely different to anything else in our range.

The Circulo is our new chair range for community equipment loan stores being launched at the annual NAEP Conference this month, available as rise-only or single/dual motor rise & recline.

This article tells the story of how the Circulo chair range came about –  why a council loan store fleet needed a solution, why we couldn’t just adapt an existing model to get there, and how two years of learning from our HiBack and Lento ranges allowed us to pivot from brief to a production-ready chair range in a very short timescale!

Jump straight to…

• • • The Brief: A No-Frills Rise-Only Chair
    • How The Circulo Seating Range Took Shape
      • Why We Couldn’t Just Bolt a Riser onto the HiBack
      • Starting From the Opposite Direction
      • Building Out the Chair
      • From Prototype to Production in a Few Months
      • Learnings from the Lento Range
    • Conclusion

The Brief: A No-Frills Rise-Only Chair

Newcastle City Council (NCC) came to us in September 2025 on the back of operational problems they were having with their loan store seating.

They were using riser recliners as their standard loan chair for service users that had been discharged from hospital and needed to continue their rehabilitation at home. Riser recliners have been the default loan store chair for a long time, for obvious reasons. But NCC were finding a recurring problem that was creating extra operational headaches and increased costs.

Users getting stuck in the reclined position meant that NCC had to commit to an out-of-hours callout service for as long as they had the chair, since someone had to go out and rescue them if they get stuck. On top of this, there was a growing trend of users hanging on to their recliners and settling down into them rather than getting mobile, which contradicted the whole purpose of the chair.

For high-turnover community equipment provision, this was slowing down chair rotation and creating extra operational headaches and costs for NCC.

Their brief to us was a no-frills rise-only chair, which would get loan store users back on their feet quicker and get the chair back into circulation stock faster, hence the name ‘Circulo’!

As the Circulo chair range took shape, we ended up building something quite extraordinary, a ground-up rethink of what a loan store chair should be, built on two years of lessons learned from our HiBack and Lento ranges. Here’s how it came together, and how a simple brief turned into a very interesting R&D project!

How The Circulo Seating Range Took Shape

Why We Couldn’t Just Bolt a Riser onto the HiBack

Our first instinct was to see whether we could add a rise-only mechanism to our existing HiBack Bedside Chair. The HiBack had already solved a lot of problems around durability, infection control, and easy-clean construction, so adding a simple rise mechanism seemed to make sense initially.

HiBack Bedside Chair

But it didn’t take our R&D team long to establish that this wouldn’t work. The HiBack was designed as a static bedside chair, not a chair that supported someone safely through a full rise cycle, with the postural control and weight distribution that needed.

Retrofitting a rise mechanism onto the HiBack chair would mean a compromise on seating geometry and postural support which of course wasn’t an option, so we went back to first principles and asked a different question.

Starting From the Opposite Direction

Instead of starting with a static chair and adding rise, we started from the riser recliner standpoint and took the recline out of it.

This changed the design process entirely. A riser recliner is already engineered to manage the mechanics of getting someone safely from seated to standing, with the postural support, weight transfer, and stability that requires. Stripping the recline mechanism out of that gave us the mechanics we needed.

From there, we took everything we’d learned when building the HiBack about construction, materials, and infection control, and applied it to our new chair mechanism.

Building Out the Chair

One of the big decisions we made early on was to do away with the traditional frame-plus-upholstery construction entirely.

Most chairs, including most riser recliners, are built around a wooden or metal frame that’s then wrapped in upholstery and fabric. It works, but for high-turnover community use this is where a lot of ongoing cost is created, with fabric tears and damage to the internal frame of the chair.

The Circulo uses a solid propolymer frame instead (same as the HiBack) with internal panels added on to the wing and arm sections. There’s no wood anywhere in the construction, and no fabric on the surfaces that take the most wear. The panels that make up the wings and arms are wipe-clean, chemical-resistant, and antimicrobial right through the material rather than just surface-treated. If a panel does get damaged, it can be swapped out on its own rather than needing reupholstery.

Removable Panels

The backrest detaches from the seat base, which makes the chair compact and light enough for one person to deliver and collect, rather than needing a two-person team. For a loan store handling a high volume of deliveries, that contributes to a direct reduction in transport cost and staff time.

Removable Backrest

The overriding benefit of this construction for loan stores is that the only parts that ever need replacing are the armrests, side panels and cushions. No specialist contractor for is needed to clean the fabric between issues, as the seat wrap removes in one piece and the rest of the chair can be wiped down. And there is no downtime while waiting for bespoke replacement panels, as all stocked parts are modular across the range, and no engineer visits are required to fix damaged frames or fabrics.

Circulo Stripped For Cleaning

From Prototype to Production in a Few Months

The short product development timeline was largely down to the groundwork we had already done when developing the HiBack Bedside Chair and Lento seating range.

We had a working prototype ready within a few months of starting the development. The main refinement needed was in the armrests, which went through a couple of rounds of adjustment before we arrived at the final geometry of the chair, balancing comfort, durability, and the need for the arms to come apart easily for servicing and replacement. Once that was settled, the chair was ready for production.

Removable and Height Adjustable Armrest

This was a direct payoff of having already done the hard yards on materials and construction during the HiBack programme. We didn’t need to test frame materials from scratch or trial different mechanisms, because we already knew which materials would work best.

Learnings from the Lento Range

The materials and construction for the Circulo came from the HiBack, and the adjustability came out of the Lento range.

Our Lento seating range had already taught us two things that turned out to be just as relevant to a loan store chair as they were to a care chair.

The first was the importance of adjustable arm height for posture. Getting the right armrest for each user helps them support and maintain an upright, centralised sitting posture. This makes a measurable difference to comfort and positioning, and it’s something OTs prescribe for.

The second was the importance of modularity and interchangeable parts between chairs, part of our seating standardisation philosophy. You can read more about how this thinking has shaped our Lento range.

Both of those learnings were integral to the Circulo’s design. The armrests are height-adjustable as standard, and they’re built with three different width settings on each side, modular across the whole range. As a result, a loan store running Circulo Small, Medium, and Bariatric variants side by side just needs one set of arm parts, not three.

Circulo chair

Conclusion

What helped us fast-track the Circulo development programme for NCC was the learning curve we had already experienced through developing the Lento and HiBack ranges.

The HiBack had forced us to solve the hard problems around polymer construction, infection control, and easy cleaning, and the Lento range helped us to refine our approach around adjustability and modular, serviceable parts.

The Circulo is a hybrid chair built from the ground up, combining tried and trusted features of the HiBack and Lento chairs into one modular chair range built for the demands of high-turnover community loan stores.

The Circulo range is being launched at the NAEP conference, 29 June – 1 July. If you’d like to see it in person or talk through how it fits your loan store, get in touch with our team.

Tel: 01423 799960

Email: [email protected]

Web: www.vivid.care