SUCCESS STORY

Growing market share through sustainable product design: Medicus Caps

Medicus Caps designs and manufactures reusable, made-to-order surgical caps. NHS Trusts are major clients. Medicus Caps needed to develop a product that met the medical and sustainability needs of the NHS and stay competitive with disposable, Chinese-manufactured caps.

Impact at a glance

• Secured contracts with over 50 NHS sites by offering reusable, lower-waste alternatives to disposable caps
• Built a growing, profitable business by combining sustainability with performance and cost competitiveness

The business

Medicus Caps was set up by a husband and wife who both worked in the NHS and had become frustrated by the huge volume of single use plastic surgical caps being thrown away each day. They came up with the idea of reusable cotton caps that fitted properly, could be personalised with names and roles, and didn’t need throwing away after a single use.

Initially making these at home, in 2019 the first premises were acquired and the first employee taken on. Production then moved to Sheffield to enable expansion in 2020, as Covid-related disruption to international supply chains made Medicus Caps’ UK-based manufacturing more attractive to customers.

Today the business continues to expand, offering both a large variety of styles and personalisation options for its caps (eg, Hijab-compatible styles), along with exploring the use of hemp to reduce environmental impacts further and branching out into other medical apparel such as shoe covers.

Sector: Manufacturing

Region: North East

Size: 1-49

How have they made the product sustainable?

The core sustainability element is the reusability of the caps. Hospitals are estimated to get through around 450 disposable caps a year for each surgical staff member, equating to 2kg of embedded carbon and a large amount of plastic waste. UK manufacturing and ‘production-to-order’ (which minimises cotton wastage) have minimised the embedded carbon in the product.

What difference it made

Medicus Caps have focused on assessing and certifying the carbon footprint of their own caps which enables NHS customers with net zero targets to incorporate purchases into their decarbonisation plans. At the same time, the firm has ensured that the core infection-control purpose of surgical caps is also met, with reusable caps fitting better and options such as ID bands and RFID tagging being introduced for infection-control tracking.

The result has been a growing, profitable business with over 50 NHS sites now being customers.

How were the changes funded?

The investments were funded from the firms’ own resources.

Lessons for other businesses

Medicus Caps shows how a successful, growing business can be built around a single insight into how to meet the sustainability needs of customers. But it also shows the importance of ensuring that the product is competitive against less sustainable products both in terms of performance (infection control in the case of surgical caps) and price.

Find out more about Medicus Caps