Serial entrepreneur
Kyle Weatherly has launched
Alta Medical, a medical equipment startup that specializes in compression garments, with the help of his mother
Kathy Weatherly, a former occupational therapist with decades of experience.
Alta Medical isn’t the Weatherly family’s first venture into the compression garment industry. Kathy founded her first company,
Solaris, in 2000 during her work as a clinical occupational therapist. A passionate advocate for her edema patients, Kathy began making her own compression garments in the spare bedroom of her home on Alta Louise Parkway. Edema causes swelling throughout the body, typically on a patient’s arms or legs.
Kyle ended up joining Solaris right out of graduate school as the vice president of operations. He was looking for real world experience in running a company but ended up discovering his love for building a business and creating new products. Together, Kathy and Kyle grew Solaris from five employees to 70. They sold Solaris to Lohmann & Rauscher International GmbH & Co. in 2014.
“She did the hard part, which was literally starting the business,” said Kyle. “Then I came along, with not as much know-how, but certainly a lot of ambition, and we grew it (Solaris) a lot. My mom is the all-American success story.”
Kyle stayed on with Solaris, eventually leaving in January 2016. From there, he started Milwaukee-based short-term apartment rental startup
Frontdesk in January 2017. He exited the company in September 2022. While he initially felt some relief from the stress of running a startup, Kyle said he began to feel boredom after he left the realm of entrepreneurship.
“I need to do something to keep my brain working,” he said. “I started looking at my old industry and I was like, ‘Oh my God, nothing has changed.’ The websites are the same, the products are the same, the packaging is the same.”
From there, he called Kathy to ask her if she’d been keeping up with the compression garment industry. While she hadn’t been paying too much attention in the years following the sale of Solaris, both she and Kyle quickly found themselves in a familiar rhythm.
Kathy re-immersed herself in product design while Kyle began working on a business plan.
“I knew I needed something to keep me busy,” he said. “I don’t think she did. She didn’t know how happy this would make her and neither did I. That’s the serendipity of it.”
Alta Medical’s flagship product is the SiennaWrap, which was uniquely designed with edema patients in mind. Features like finger loops allow for easier accessibility while straps allow a patient to better fit the garment to their body.
Alta Medical sells its garments directly to physical therapists and durable medical equipment stores. The products are also available online. In the coming months, Alta Medical plans to add two more compression garments to its current lineup of four pieces.
Right now, Kyle said he and his mother are purely focused on scaling up the business, which has been completely bootstrapped, in an intentional way.
“This is so different than my first two companies because we’re self-funded and because we’re more focused,” said Kyle. “We truly want to introduce great products and build relationships with therapists and patients. We’re doing this because we love doing it, not because we’re looking to grow some extraordinary level or make some huge some of money.”
