Chris Peterson, Top End’s founder and designer, is driven to continuously enhance our products. By doing so, Team Invacare athletes have won countless medals using Top End wheelchairs at the 1992, 1996, 2000 and 2004 Paralympics. These athletes along with Chris plan to “raise the bar” once again at the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing. Here is our story.

Chris Peterson got interested in sport wheelchairs while first working for a provider in New York that sold home care products and a few wheelchairs. He became the company's technical expert in the lighter sport models in 1983 and started attending wheelchair-sporting events all over the world. Peterson moved to Florida in 1985 to work for a small company where he could create his own sport chairs. He started Top End the next year with his partner George Murray designing and manufacturing racing wheelchairs.

By 1988, Top End added custom everyday and basketball chairs to it’s product line. These were followed shortly by ruby chairs. In 1990 Peterson wanted to help his customers to stay fit and was inspired by his own experience as a competitive cyclist so he designed and began to manufacture handcycles. Then, in 1992, Peterson produced the first sport specific tennis chair earning multiple patents with his pioneering 3 wheel design. Since then, many of the product innovations and enhancements come from athlete and consumer input which Peterson incorporates into functional designs. This consumer driven product enhancement put Top End on top and has kept it there since.

In 1993, Top End became a part of Invacare Corporation of Elyria, OH, the world's leading manufacturer and distributor of medical products which promote recovery and active lifestyles for people requiring home and other non-acute health care. This partnership helped fill a niche for Invacare by giving them a sports and recreation product line and engineering collaboration. This joint effort between Invacare's Custom Manual design engineers and Chris Peterson has contributed to the success of both Top End and Custom Manual everyday chairs. Invacare's support with product testing, engineering, documentation and production has helped Top End to manufacture the best possible products in the world.

As you can see since its beginning in 1986, Top End has produced medal-winning, performance wheelchairs for the best athletes in the world- so let us build one for you!