Why this exists
I have neuropathy. Reduced feeling and fine control in my hands.
The big things are mostly fine. It's the small ones that catch you out, and the one that got me was the soap pump. It wants a fingertip pinch. One small bit of your hand doing all the work, pushing straight down, usually when your hands are already wet.
Which isn't a problem with my hands. It's a pump built around a grip plenty of people haven't got. Once you've spotted that, you start spotting it in a lot of other places too.
So I made a small part that goes on the one you already own.
What PALM is
A disc that clips over the top of your soap or lotion pump. Wide flat surface instead of a narrow one, so you can press it with your palm. Or your fist, or your forearm. Whatever works that day.
Your dispenser stays where it is. The disc lifts off when you want to refill the bottle and pushes back on after. No tools and nothing to install.
A normal pump head makes you push through the one to two square centimetres of a fingertip. This spreads the same push over roughly twenty.
How it was made
Badly, at first.
I went round shops measuring soap pumps with a 2p coin next to them for scale. You can take dimensions off a screen all day, but the real ones are all slightly different and I wanted to know by how much.
Then nine or so prototypes across three fittings. Print one, try it, adjust it, print another. Eventually it stopped being nearly right.
Three shapes now: Standard and Wide for flat pump tops, Dome for round ones.
They're 3D printed to order in the UK, in a plant-based filament called Bambu Lab PLA Pure that's made from corn and sugarcane rather than crude oil. I don't hold stock. Nothing gets made until somebody orders it.
The packaging costs me more than plastic would. The mailer is certified home compostable to EN 13432, TÜV OK compost HOME, licence S1362, and the wrap, band and labels are paper. There is no plastic in it. I would rather pay that than post a small plastic part inside a bigger plastic bag.
What I claim, and what I don't
PALM is a daily-living aid — a better-designed everyday object, and that is the whole of the claim. It is not a medical device, and I'm not claiming it treats or helps any condition.
One review, from a confirmed order. Every one is published here as it was written, and the rule that decides which of them the rating covers leaves out good reviews exactly as readily as bad ones. Nothing is offered in return for a review and nothing is invented. Read them.
It's also been designed around one set of hands, which are mine, and that's a narrow test. If you get one and it doesn't work for you, I'd rather hear about it than not.
Who you're dealing with
handl is a trading name of Kareem Chouiki, a sole trader in London.
I answer the emails and I run the printer. If your order goes wrong, you're talking to the person who made it.
152 Tillermans Court, Grenan Square, Greenford, London UB6 0FS
hello@gethandl.co.uk