After a year and a half hiatus and a lot of worried customers, the adaptive clothing line IZ Adaptive, founded by Canadian designer Izzy Camilleri, will be relaunching in September.
IZ Adaptive, first launched in 2009, built a devoted following among wheelchair users by offering clothing that was both fashionable and designed to be easy to put on and fit right while seated. Though existing customers loved the clothes, the brand had issues with marketing and scaling up its efforts, according to Camilleri.
“In the adaptive world, you end up selling directly to the consumer, so it makes scale very difficult,” says Camilleri. When IZ Adaptive started, she says, “there were absolutely no wholesale opportunities for me. I tried, but for retailers, it was just a category that nobody had ever heard of.”
Instead of wholesaling its clothes to retail chains, the business worked on slowly adding to its customer base, one by one. It built a loyal following, but the business model was costly and difficult to sustain. Camilleri says that when IZ Adaptive shut its doors in 2016, it was never supposed to be permanent, but rather a break to remodel the business for long term sustainability. “We really needed to stop and restructure and take a few steps back … we needed to take it to the next level, and we couldn’t do that in the model we were in,” she says. “Now with the relaunch, I’m able to use everything we learned from before, and so I have a really fantastic starting point.”