We all get dressed every day. Usually with ease.

For people with disabilities (PWDs), simple closures like zippers and buttons, and narrow necklines or pant legs make independent dressing torturous, if not impossible.

Despite $8T in spending power and a desire to be marketed to, just like any other consumer group, people with disabilities are ignored by the fashion industry.

Our clients at Tommy Hilfiger were troubled by the realization they were leaving out an entire group of people - counter to their identity as fashion innovators. They established a small task force to investigate the opportunity.

What started as a small passion project quickly became something more complex, and they came to us with a question:

How do we do it?

They wanted to build an adaptive business but were unsure where or how to start.

And they needed an innovative creative partner to make it happen.

The challenge was twofold:

First, we’d need to ‘adapt’ the clothes, so PWDs could wear them. But then we’d need to develop a campaign to build awareness and familiarity. All of our work had to match the Tommy ethos. But it also needed to break through the clutter on a tiny budget.

Being an innovator carried tremendous risk. We were warned that getting an adaptive launch wrong could be worse than not doing it at all. And no one at Tommy wanted a “Pepsi moment.”

When we viewed our marketing challenge through the lens of disability, we saw how much work was ahead of us:

If we redesigned clothes we’d need to fix advertising - so PWDs could see it

If we fixed advertising we’d have to fix site - so PWDs could read it

If we fixed site, we’d have to fix ordering process - so PWDs could buy it

If we fixed ordering process we’d have to fix shipping - so PWDs could open it

If we fixed shipping we’d have to fix customer service - so PWDs could return it

And so on.

Our Tommy clients agreed with our commitment to end-to-end inclusivity and went all in.

From then on, the phrase “Nothing for us without us” became our mantra. We’d have to work with PWDs continuously. We established a proprietary online research platform, with 1500 people globally.

We included more people, and our efforts became more innovative. This is the core principle of inclusive design.

We wanted to celebrate and enable this fundamental human right to self-expression.

We’d also be doing double-duty. While most brands might choose to EITHER develop adaptive products OR include people with disabilities in their advertising, we were going to try both.

We designed the most inclusive campaign in fashion history, starting with James Rath, our blind director, and a crew who brought personal experience with disability to the shoot. We worked through organizations to cast people by passion, not by disability.

Our script was recorded then quickly thrown away, because our cast spoke for themselves better than we ever could speak for them.

Unlike most advertising, all our content is totally accessible via closed captioning and audio descriptions. To help online shoppers, we developed a best-in-class site to reduce risk and add delight. No detail was overlooked, from specially trained customer service to poly-bag packaging for easy delivery and returns.

The feedback loop we built had tremendous impact at every step in the marketing funnel:

Seven new clothing innovations, over $1M sales.

709M press impressions, 20.3M social impressions to date, 2x industry average click through rates.

44% of Adaptive customers cross-shopping (buying both adaptive and non-adaptive items). Most households are entirely new to the Tommy brand.

Increased distribution beyond Tommy.com with Macy’s and Amazon.

The campaign was a commercial success among PWDs.

One-third of calls to customer service were to say, “Thank you.”

What’s more, a recent quant study revealed that two-thirds of non-disabled consumers who saw our work took action within three days of exposure - telling friends, visiting the site, and/or buying clothes.

Tommy Hilfiger has always been driven by optimism and the democratization of fashion. We’ve now found a new purpose for those values, strengthening our commitment to self-expression for all.

About The Tommy Hilfiger Brand:

The Tommy Hilfiger brand is not as strong in the US as it is in the rest of the world. Sales are concentrated in the factory outlet and off-price channels and media spending is low.

About PWD Spending Power:

PWDs are the largest underserved market in the US, with spending power estimated at $65B, similar to the US Hispanic market.

As a point of comparison, the US market for plus-size now estimated at $21B.

BCG has sized the opportunity for adaptive clothing conservatively at $5-7B.

And PWDs represent about 10% of total online spending. Online shopping eliminates some of the challenges faced by individuals with disabilities, but only a few websites are actually accessible. Even behemoths like Amazon have yet to reach the standards we set with our work.