Tools of the Therapy Trade

ARK Therapeutic

‘Find your niche’ is a common refrain when it comes to building a successful business, and for good reason! (For example, MiniCards helped get MOO off the ground way back when.) But if your niche is especially unique, it can make it difficult to explain what you do to other people.

That was ARK Therapeutic's dilemma when it came to describing their one-of-a-kind oral motor therapy tools, used for treating speech and feeding issues that were often under-represented in the medical tool industry. But with a little help from Printfinity, they were able to get information across to prospective clients quickly, and market their wide range of tools at the same time.

Family Ties

15 years ago, Founder Debra Lowsky had been working in oral motor therapy at a clinic in South Carolina when she began to get frustrated at the limited availability of tools specific to her field. She knew that something needed to be done, and luckily for her, she had married an engineer who could help her do it – it was a perfect match!

What started as a husband-wife team eventually grew into a full family-operated business, with both their son and daughter joining shortly after graduation.

Through working with her real kids and her ‘work kids’ (aka her young clients), Debra and her husband John went on to develop nearly 75 products for oral motor issues.

Printfinity in action

With MOO’s Printfinity technology, ARK Therapeutic could better exemplify their business by printing a picture of a different tool on the back of every card – with Debra’s own therapy clients demonstrating their use.

“Our products are hard to explain to people,” said Debra’s daughter Rebecca, “With our old business cards, we used to hand them out and people still had blank stares. They didn’t quite understand what we did. We’d have to pull up our website on our phones to try and show them. Now we can simply lay out our cards and show them up to 50 different tools at once. Once they can visualize it, it’s like magic – they understand.”

One event that stood out to Rebecca was the annual American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA) event, where they printed a special version of their MOO cards. “Instead of a name on the details side, we put a special discount for our website. A lot of the occupational therapists will go through the convention gathering 20lb catalogues. By the time they got to us, it was nice having something really small to hand them, but also informational.”

They also hand over cards that are specific to the person they’re talking to. “For example, if I’m talking with a teacher, I know they’re going to have questions about handwriting so I’ll give them a tool that’s motor-specific to their needs.”

ARK Therapeutic clearly came up with some very clever ways to use their cards – and we love how they used actual therapy clients to demonstrate their colorful tools! If you want to do something similar for your business, have a look at our Business Cards and see how Printfinity might work for you.

Written on:

09 Oct 2014

Categories:

MOO for Business Ideas