I got an exciting opportunity earlier this week to connect with Mindy Scheier and talk to her about Kekalove. She shared some helpful tips and suggestions with us which I think is important for everyone involved with adaptive fashion to know. In this blog entry, I’m sharing with you what she shared with me!
Mindy is the founder of Runway of Dreams Foundation, a pioneer designer in adaptive fashion, and a TED speaker. She got started with adaptive fashion when she wanted to create adaptive jeans for her son and over the past years, she worked with Tommy Hilfiger, Kohl’s, Target, and Zappos to create mainstream adaptive clothing lines.
In our conversation, Mindy highlighted some very important things for those of us who are now getting started with our brands and products.
1) Research, research, and research
- Mindy says she spent over one year before she spoke to anyone in the fashion industry about her designs. It’s important to figure out what exactly your products are and how exactly they’re helping persons with disabilities.
2) Be specific - we’ve all probably already heard that no two disabilities are alike. People have different challenges and it affects them individually. This is more true when we’re talking about different types of disabilities. Brands and collections cannot be everything for everybody and cover all different types of disabilities. Being specific to one segment is okay and oftentimes, important.
3) Involve persons with disabilities at every step - this is by far the most important thing about adaptive fashion and a helpful tip for all of us. It’s obvious, persons with disabilities know it better than anyone what designs help them and which ones don’t. It’s a long process and through focus groups, fit testings and etc., persons with disabilities MUST be involved with this process.
I want to thank Mindy Scheier for this very interesting and helpful meeting. I definitely took away some highly important notes for our brand Kekalove and coming from an industry professional such as her, it’s extremely valuable for us.