Hamilton Beach Brands, Inc’s Strategic Partnership with HealthBeacon Limited

Hamilton Beach Brands, Inc, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hamilton Beach Brands Holding Company, has entered into a strategic partnership with HealthBeacon Limited, a leading developer of smart tools for managing injectable medications at home. The partnership intends to launch a smart Injection Care Management System (ICMS) in the US and Canada under the new brand name Hamilton Beach® Health in the fourth quarter of 2021.

The ICMS will include a new Smart Sharps™ Bin from Hamilton Beach® Health powered by HealthBeacon. The system, together with its companion app, provides medication management reminders, tracks adherence, and facilitates the safe and convenient disposal of used sharps through the US Postal Service’s approved mail-back program. Hamilton Beach Brands will be the exclusive marketer and distributor to the retail and direct-to-consumer channels in the US and Canada, in addition to providing the brand identity. HealthBeacon will manufacture, activate the technology, manage data and security, and collect and replace disposal bins.

Philip Lee, led by John Given and Ronan Dunne, advised HealthBeacon on the partnership.

An Interview With John Given & Ronan Dunne at Philip Lee

What expert knowledge did your team bring to this deal?

Philip Lee has specialist expertise in the areas of life sciences, medtech, international trade, and regulation and compliance. In addition, we have a first class commercial contracts unit.

Working closely with the HealthBeacon team, we were also able to liaise collaboratively with our US-based colleagues to ensure a timely, seamless and expert output within a very ambitious time frame.

What could potentially go wrong when negotiating partnerships like this? How do you prevent this from happening?

It is very important that the commercial principles underpinning deals such as this are agreed upfront and comprehensively. Once this is done, the legals should not pose any problems or present any surprises, but it is also important to make sure that the principals are aware of the many ‘second order’ issues that are likely to arise within the legal process which had not previously arisen in the commercial forum. Once there is a high level of coherence and good communication between the various stakeholders, problems will certainly be avoided.

There is always the risk that cross-border commercial deals, particularly within regulated areas and with a good deal of complexity, can get bogged down in irrelevant minutiae and process. A key role for the lead advisors, again working closely with the project owners, is to project-manage the transaction so that these types of issues do not arise.

Did you encounter any significant challenges while working on this partnership? If so, how did you work around them?

The key challenges were all related to ensuring that the commercial intent of the parties could be achieved within the respective legal and regulatory frameworks of both the US and Ireland. We were pleased that, due in no small part to the high level of collaboration and communication between all stakeholders in the project, these challenges were identified and navigated successfully and without difficulty.