Let's take a step back in time. It all re-started at the age of 21, on May 15th, 1999. After a difficult period due to a road accident that paralyzed him from waist down, Danilo Ragona begins his rehabilitation with great determination and positive energy.

Despite the accident forcing him to use a wheelchair to move, Danilo did not lose heart and turned his life into a creative laboratory.

From the outset he was able to turn a great difficulty into a source of multiple opportunities. Danilo Ragona decided to graduate as a designer because he intended to design a new life dynamic to redesign his future.

The objective had become “to transform the medical wheelchair into a design product, beautiful and personalized”.

In 2006, he founded Able to Enjoy in order to start the production of the wheelchair he designed and patented. In 2011, he received the honorable mention from the Compasso d’oro Award (a prestigious industrial design prize) and many other international awards.

In 2012, he collaborated with Lapo Elkann's Italia Independent studio, bringing a wheelchair into the fashion scene for the first time.

In 2015, together with his friend Luca Paiardi, he gave life to the project “Viaggio Italia around the World” (www.viaggioitalia.org), a travel experience to discover one’s own limits, to overcome them or simply recognize them.

The success of the initiative moves from Italy to around the world: Canary Islands, Brazil, India, Kenya, Indonesia and Africa. Danilo and Luca thus become travel documentarists for the National TV program "Kilimanjaro" (Rai Tre) and in 2021 they landed on SKY TV. The aim is to tell how today technology allows us to live experiences that were once precluded for people with disabilities.

In 2017, Danilo and his friend Luca Paiardi founded www.b-free.it, an amateur sports association for social promotion.

Innovation, technology, personalisation, identity, beauty, sustainability, autonomy and social inclusion are some of the values that distinguish Danilo. He has always used design as a key to establishing integration between diversities.

THE FIRST CUSTOM REGENERATION PRODUCT

Having experienced firsthand the difficulties encountered by people with disabilities in countries such as India and Kenya, Danilo considers himself a privileged person and decides to take action on a Circular Economy project, recovering abandoned wheelchairs with the aim of making them available to disabled people in countries in difficulty. 

In 2018, during a documentary trip for the Rai3 TV program Il Kilimangiaro, Danilo delivered the first Custom Regeneration wheelchair to the Spinal Unit in Nairobi, Kenya.

TODAY

Custom Regeneration is no longer just a dream, but a concrete project. In 2022, Danilo founded Custom Regeneration S.r.l. Società Benefit.