Interviews

Back in 2013, I joined MarketKey and I was tasked with getting the first ever PI Apparel event finished and ready for go-time. I was introduced to this charismatic, larger than life man; I remember his wickedly addictive laugh, his amazing sense of style and his nails perfectly manicured and coated with an army green polish. That man was Craig Crawford. A decade later, and here I am helping to get Seamless going and it seemed only fitting that I called up my old friend, Craig, and got the scoop on his new and inspiring venture, Differently Enabled. I hope you enjoy!

Let’s start with who you are Craig, and where your love of Fashion and Technology began.

Gosh, that’ll take up the whole interview! In a nutshell, I am a Creative and Digital Transformation enthusiast with nearly 30 years of experience working within global Fashion brands and with technology in some form or another.

The longer version…I went to the University of Virginia and thought I was going to grow up to be a Reporter. They had a daily newspaper on campus, and it was through contributing to that, that I started out with computers. Right after graduating, I moved to New York when the newspaper sector was becoming computerised (‘digital’ didn’t exist back then). My first job was backing up a mainframe computer, alongside other work as a model, a stylist, in retail and working for a young NY designer.

All of these experiences led to me joining The Gap as a Designer. We were coming out of the flashiness of the 80s and into the minimalism of the 90s, and The Gap was a super trendy place to work!

At that time, FIT was only turning out about 6 students who understood Computer Aided Design, and the computers were as big as a half a dining table! It wasn’t at all easy but I had gathered skills here and there that meant I was qualified. 

I was at The Gap for 5 years and was one of just 6 people that helped start up Old Navy. Many people questioned why I wanted to work on a cheaper product line, but I knew I would have the opportunity at Old Navy to be in charge of all of the technology which I did. It was here that my love affair with Fashion Tech began.

After The Gap, I was hired by Liz Claiborne to specifically oversee the adoption of systems used to help design Product, and so left Design behind and moved into PDM and CAD. As the company grew and acquired other brands, my team and I would assess the tech infrastructure they had, and update it to mirror that of the parent company. We moved from PDM to PLM. In fact, we helped create and evolve PLM! 

After 10 years, I started my own consultancy and landed Tori Burch as a client when she was just starting out. I helped her get their systems and processes in order. I then landed Burberry as a client, where I led their digital transformation when the rest of the world was unsure if they should be doing things digitally or if digital was just a fad? 

At Burberry, we knew that the next generation of luxury consumers across emerging markets was going to be 12 to 25 years younger than their western counterparts, and we needed to be ready. Our gambit certainly paid off!

And lastly, I launched CrawfordIT in 2014, and have been going into big global brands ever since, helping them with their digital transformation end-to-end, across the value chain or as they’ve needed it.

Wow – yes that is quite the journey. I’ve known you for 10 years and I’m not sure I even knew all of that! So where then does Differently Enabled fit into this story?

Well, as we all know, in early 2020, the World Health Organization declared Coronavirus a pandemic, and that March, before anyone really knew what it was, I contracted it. And it struck me down tremendously; I ended up in hospital after 9 days of self isolation, was put into a medically induced coma and onto a ventilator. I was in that coma for 21 days and in the hospital for 48 days. All they kept saying was that I was likely going to die.

But I didn’t die! I wasn’t ready to go!

Every other day they would come in and remove different tubes, medical equipment I was connected to, etc., so I knew I was getting better.  When I left intensive care I started Occupational Therapy. My Occupational Therapist (a man named Michael Burke) said to me, ‘As soon as we get you out of this hospital gown and into your own clothes, the faster your trajectory of healing will be!’

It made sense; when we get up and we put on something that’s made for us and that fits us, we feel confident. We stand taller. We have more presence. Fashion allows us to express ourselves, but also makes us feel good, and when we feel good, we’re gonna go out and be our best. 

But I couldn’t get dressed, or in and out of my clothes easily, and I was told ‘oh this is perfectly normal’. But it wasn’t! My condition had meant conventional clothing didn’t work for me. Something that I am truly passionate about had become a barrier to my own recovery and wellbeing!

I’ve worked in this industry for a long time, and Brands can be very arrogant, you know? ‘If you don’t fit in our clothes, lose some weight’, or ‘if you can’t afford our clothes, stop buying so much other stuff; save your money and buy ours instead.’ It’s always somehow been the consumer’s fault.  

Ultimately, everyone should have the opportunity to feel good about themselves through Fashion and so, with that in mind, I figured why not leverage my experiences and my network to launch a brand that can bring co-created, good quality and bespoke adaptive clothing to this underserved community.  

And so Differently Enabled was born. We live by our mantra of ‘look good, feel good, do good!’ We’re here to make Fashion inclusive for everyone, whether that be for atypical body morphology, different sizes, different proportions, neurodiversity needs etc. I was in a great position to reach out to my network of brilliant minds and say, ‘I’m starting this journey. Do you want to join me looking at the technologies available and figure out how to do this in a meaningful and properly customer centric way?’ 

And so here we are!

Hats off to you – I mean it’s an incredibly touching and inspiring story, and also very exciting! So tell me a little bit more as to how Differently Enabled operates, and how that differs from traditional brands?

We don’t just design a collection and put it out there; we are closer to an on-demand tailoring business. 

We start with the interview, which we call ‘getting to know you’. Before we start to design, we want and need to understand the person: what fabrics, materials and silhouettes do they like? What are their functional needs? And of equal importance, what is the language they want used to describe their disability. How we communicate with them is just as important as what we co-create with them. It’s an ongoing journey of self-reflection and education. 

Then we move onto ‘let’s play dress up’ where we begin to co-create. We want to see what sparks joy for them and what elements make a meaningful impact on how they look and feel.

We then take the information from the first two stages and that’s when the formal design work starts. We move into R&D mode, testing and playing with what would and wouldn’t work, before presenting our ideas back to our customer for feedback. It is at this stage that we also enter the ‘scan and go’ phase; taking all of the customer’s measurements (which currently is a mixed bag of manual and tech-based) so we can move into pattern making. And finally: good old 3D! 

The customer comes back so we can show them everything accurately in 3D. We review look and fit, which may be one session or maybe more, and when everything is a go, it’s off to the manufacturer to get it made!

There are loads of challenges and learning curves with this process but I bet you’re going to ask me about those, right?

Absolutely and thanks for that segue! Yes, you’ve made it seem relatively simple but I assume this model comes with its unique set of challenges?

Yes, a fair few!

First up, is pricing and time. We want to be sustainable in all that we do and part of that is trying to manufacture locally, in the region. I jokingly say, ‘I can get 10,000 kaftans out of China in 10 weeks for pennies on the pound, but I can’t get one out of Leicester in 10 months!’

I’m sorry to say that here in the UK, much like in the US, it’s a very expensive place to manufacture something. There are plenty of manufacturers here that boast how they can make 1 or 1000 of something, but the reality is they make their money by doing high volumes for brands. Their business model has very much grown to mirror the way the wider industry works, which is of course, mass-production/mass-consumption.

So while we aim and want to produce locally, it’s expensive. A lot of people living with disability have a cap on their income and  can’t afford higher prices.  We are now looking at a pricing model where when someone buys from our higher bespoke range, a percentage of the price subsidises purchases for those people who don’t have the higher income but still should be able to have custom clothes available to them! It’s a work in progress, and my priority is to not let the commercial side override the purpose. 

Then there is the scanning technology challenge. We have tried dozens of scanning tools, and none of them have been perfect, which is why we have to take manual measurements too. Most of the problem is that these technologies assume all people are symmetrical and have typical body morphology. The tech often takes measurements of half the body and then mirrors that, but of course for those with disabilities, this doesn’t necessarily work. 

Part of this process is trying and failing. We are working with many technology providers and giving them feedback, and together we’re working to correct these issues. The ultimate goal is for anyone to take a photograph of themselves, in whatever pose they want, and have technology extract accurate measurements with an understanding of movement, to create a perfect pattern. We are seeing some successes, slowly but surely! And there is another looming challenge we will soon need to overcome, raw materials. When we start to design currently, we use excess raw materials that we’ve been able to procure from a UK luxury brand. This has been great, but now that digital textile passports are on the horizon, we know that this is going to be a challenge moving forward. We are trying to bake sustainability into what we do, and so why make more fabric when there already is so much excess? But again, incoming legislation could cause us to struggle a little bit with this repurposing of raw materials, so it is something we are already talking a lot about.

As a fashion tech aficionado, I’d love to hear how your experience has shaped how you’ve approached setting up DE’s backend operation.

Well first off, it’s not just me. We are a team of Laboratory Engineers, Scientists, Designers and more, coming together to make this work. On the whole, the technology just isn’t there yet and is not plug and play. We hit dead ends all the time, and that’s when we say ‘okay, that’s where we need to start doing more development with the tech and for the time being, I guess we have to be manual.’

I laugh all the time with the team because whenever a system gets too arduous to use, what does everybody do? We fall back on a spreadsheet! I laugh because I’ve made a living helping big giant corporations not run their businesses on spreadsheets, but here we are now doing the same thing. It’s not easy and never will be!

We’re really, really lucky to have a lot of technology partners who have provided us with a handful of licenses for their tools. We’re not having to pay a lot of money for these because our technology partners believe in the mission that we’re on. They are learning from us on how to adapt their tech. They also know that when we really do start to scale, we will be able to invest more with them.

Our ecosystem is a patchwork quilt of tech, and that’s the way it needs to be because not any one provider can do it all. We have talked about this a lot at PI in the past. We are lucky to be small and nimble so we can adapt fast. We have deployed tech, to some degree, at every single level. I just don’t know how we would manage any other way!

We have created this ecosystem where there is a need for a lot of interoperability. Vizoo helps us scan our fabrics. swatchbook has provided us with digital fabric representations. We use a combination of avatar creation tools including CLO and Browzwear for 3D. We use Pttrns.ai Flair Studio for renderings. We use BeProduct as our one source of truth for all product data. We use Kornit Digital for on-demand printing. And we use Proximity Insight as our clienteling tool

It’s already a big ecosystem for something that is still small, but I know first-hand that it is the foundation that determines whether something is going to work or not, and allow for scalability.

Those are some great tech partners you listed there who we of course know well. I’d love to understand a little more about the immediate DE team: how big is it and what kinds of skill sets have you found to be important?

There are 18 of us and we have much the same setup as a larger brand would have, just on a much smaller scale: creative folks, men’s and womenswear designers, textile engineers, marketeers, social media managers,supply chain experts, digital infrastructure specialists, pattern makers, product engineers, brand and licensing development, finance, and legal.

But I’d say perhaps the main area where we do differ is we have medical advisors and healthcare experts, from both a physical and mental standpoint, also heavily involved as they bring a very important perspective to the table. 

It’s also important to note that no one is doing this as a full-time job, though there is no denying we put in the time! We are all doing this as a passion project on the side of other duties. We all pour everything into DE because it’s a mission and movement we can all get behind! The plan is that as we grow, Differently Enabled will become something that sustains us all as a standalone!

You’ve mentioned themes such as inclusivity and education; how do you hope your work with DE will encourage wider change?

It’s conversations like these because the more we talk about this, the more we’ll all collectively learn! I really appreciate you taking the time to tell our story!

I’m fortunately on the stage quite a lot doing talks, and my priority right now is to just create awareness and advocate for a community that doesn’t always have a voice. The community of people living with disabilities is not relatively small; it never ceases to amaze me how most people I speak to are connected in some way to someone within the community. Depending upon where you are in the world, 1 in 4 to 1 in 6 are living with a disability! 

I like to think our work is going to have a huge impact! Our work embraces the concept of ‘universal design’. Have you heard of the ‘curb cut effect’? It’s the phenomenon of disability-friendly features being used and appreciated by a larger group than the people they were initially designed for. For example, adding a curb ramp for wheelchair users, in turn benefits the UPS delivery person, the mom with a pram, the elderly woman pulling a shopping trolley, and so on and so forth. Or did you know that the electric toothbrush was originally created for people living with disability? And I don’t need to tell you how widely that has been adopted!

So rather than have this mindset of ‘we’re designing something for this specific community’, no, we’re designing something they can use and everyone can use too. I feel very strongly that this ecosystem that we’re building, and the way we are helping improve technology, will benefit everyone! Why wouldn’t everyone want to be able to take a simple picture that translates into an accurate pattern to have something custom made for them that looks good and fits well?

The traditional apparel industry model isn’t working anymore. Why does there have to be inventory? Why do we have to have all these warehouses? Why are we so hungry to have everything sent out with next day delivery?

I believe we are embodying all of the things that any individual consumer wants, and we are doing it in a way that is transparent, sustainable and customer-centric.

I’ve had critics laugh at me and say, ‘gosh, you’re wedging everything into here, aren’t you?!’, and I’m like, ‘well, why wouldn’t we?!’ We’re starting up, and we don’t have to follow the same rules. We don’t have to produce a collection every Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. We don’t have to have a runway show (we did, but we didn’t have to!). We don’t have to make a lot of inventory. We don’t have to be available at wholesale and expect people to come in to us. 

We, as a collective, can and should look at a different model, and I believe that is what we are doing at Differently Enabled. And I think it becomes a different model for the many and not just for the few!

Well said – you’ve got me all pumped up and ready to kick some doors down Craig! I would love to hear more about your customers: who are they and how have they responded to DE?

Our customers are also our collaborators and co-creators! I have always been a curious extrovert, and I cannot tell you how much I am learning everyday from our customer interactions. 

I will never tire of presenting a finished product to someone and seeing how happy and delighted they are with the thing that they’ve contributed to and helped bring to life. I say all the time, ‘if Grandpa wants to look like Hello Kitty and Grandma wants to look like a Hells Angels rider, we don’t care and more power to them!’ We’re not trying to make people conform to what Differently Enabled looks like, but instead invite our customers to bring their aesthetic and passion to the table to create something unique and new!

I want to mention our Brand Champions, because they are not only customers but people that we are learning the most from. This might be because of their body morphology, or their neurodiversity and/or their passion for the project. We don’t charge our champions for clothing because there is much more at play there, and anyone can apply to be one, and we try to be as accommodating as possible!

For example, I love talking about Sam and Katherine Goodyear who I met through Sam’s sister and an industry colleague of mine. They have both always appreciated fashion but clothes off the rack are not designed for people with Down’s Syndrome, and so proportions were always off and needed tailoring. The Goodyears are also ballroom dance champions, and they wanted clothes that were comfortable, functional and also showed off their own sense of style!

Sam had always wanted a motorcycle jacket and we worked with him to bring that dream to life. As it turns out, Sam is a 3D designer himself, proficient in Clo3D, so he was great to work with! We presented the finished jacket to him during London Fashion Week and he was like a kid in a candy store! His family have since said they can barely get it off of him at night. He loves it so much!

And we worked with Katherine to bring something to life that was a little more subtle and to her taste: a date dress, something she can easily dress up or down depending on the occasion, which she also loves!

I could talk all day about the people we have met and worked with but the main takeaway here is that the industry as a whole has become so impersonal, focussed only on convenience and money. We dedicate time and effort getting to know our customers and together, we are creating something new and impactful!

That’s amazing Craig. I know you have more stories like that on your website too if our readers wanted to know more. What is next for DE and should any of our readers want to learn more or get more involved, how can they do that?

Well, we do have some very exciting news. We have received what’s called ‘advanced assurance’ from the UK government for the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) which is designed to encourage high net worth individuals to invest in startups, like us. And so we are in the current fundraising round of just a quarter of a million (which is all we can raise under that), but is a great start! There are all sorts of tax relief benefits and so on that I won’t go into but if any of your readers are interested in investing in us, please reach out to me.

I’m equally thrilled to report that we’ve also received advance assurance from the UK for the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) which will soon follow and under which we can raise up to 13 million! This will be transformative!

And finally, I’m delighted to say we are now on the cusp of launching 2 different collections, both of which have been co-designed with people living with disability, one with Down’s Syndrome and the other who’s a wheelchair user with neurodiversity. They’ve been wonderful projects and we’ve learned a huge amount!

As far as your readers go and them getting involved, we are always up for collaboration! No customer buys from one brand so if any brand or designer reading this wants to participate, please get in touch and we’re happy to talk about what that could look like! 

I will end with this: in a world of fear, the future is bright!