Jan Beltman had spent thirty years making office work healthier. Then a friend in foot care told him what his own working day was doing to him.
Jan Beltman has spent more than thirty years working on healthy, ergonomic ways of working. With his previous company the focus was the office: desks, chairs, posture, the daily habits that quietly decide how your body feels at fifty. Foot care was not on his radar at all.
That changed through a friend who worked in the profession. Years of bending, kneeling and crouching at floor level had left him with serious back problems, and there was nothing in his practice designed to prevent it. The posture was simply accepted as part of the job.
Jan is the kind of person who cannot leave a problem alone once he has seen it. He started building something for his friend: a way to bring the client up to working height, so the specialist could stay upright. The effect was immediate. What had been an unavoidable part of the working day was suddenly gone.
That reaction is what turned a favour into a company. If one specialist felt that difference, thousands more were working the same way, with the same complaints, and with no idea it could be otherwise. Ergonomix B.V. was founded to build it properly, and the Orthostand became its only product.
Five years, one product, and a growing number of specialists who no longer end their day with a sore back.
Jan Beltman establishes Ergonomix B.V. in Driebergen, Netherlands, with a single focus: the ergonomics of foot and lower-limb care.
The first Orthostands go into daily use in Dutch practices, and the product makes its international debut at the Orthopädie Schuh Technik fair in Cologne. Several specialists who now use it every day first saw it there.
German and Nordic practices join. Wittepoel in Rotterdam adds its first Orthostand and has added one every year since.
Foot Power in Sydney becomes the first Australian practice to work with the Orthostand. Karl-Heinz Schott, one of pedorthics' most recognised voices, puts it into daily clinical use.
At OST Cologne we unveil the Orthostand M30: 50 cm of electric lift, rotating Stand Supports, an 18.5 cm step-in, and a modular frame built to carry accessories still to come.
More than 100 Orthostands are in daily use across 10+ countries. Trøndelag Ortopediske Verksted in Trondheim becomes the first Norwegian practice to work with the Orthostand. At OTWorld in Leipzig, practitioners raise a client to their own working height and feel the difference in ten seconds.
The Orthostand is a modular system, and it is not finished. Foot supports, scanning accessories and mounting options are in development, each one shaped by what specialists tell us they still work around. Same principle every time: the practitioner stays upright.
