Tommy Hilfiger’s Adaptive Clothing Line: Making Fashion Inclusive

BRIAN KENNY: For most people, the hardest thing about getting dressed in the morning is deciding what to wear. Putting on the clothes is pretty much an afterthought, but anyone who’s broken an arm or even a finger can tell you that getting dressed becomes a much bigger challenge when you try to button a shirt or buckle a belt. Just imagine how difficult it would be from the seat of a wheelchair or without fine motor control. Yet, that is a challenge faced by millions of people with physical disabilities each and every day. What we wear affects our psychological state as well as our performance. The journal ScienceDirect introduced the term enclothed cognition to describe this phenomenon. And for those with physical disabilities, it’s a problem that until very recently was in search of a solution. Today on Cold Call, we’ve invited Professor Elizabeth Keenan to discuss her case titled, “Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive: Fashion For All.” I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR Podcast Network. Liz, thanks for joining me today.

LIZ KEENAN: Thank you for having me.

BRIAN KENNY: Great to have you back. A repeat customer here on Cold Call. It’s been a little while since we’ve had you in the hot seat, but this case was great. I think everybody probably is familiar with Tommy Hilfiger. Many people are probably not aware that they have this line of clothing that’s specially designed to be adaptive. So, why don’t we just dive right in. I’ll ask you to tell us what the central issue is in the case, and what’s your cold call is to start the discussion on the classroom?

LIZ KEENAN: I ask students whether Tommy Hilfiger should go global with their Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive line. And what this involves is a debate about whether they’re ready to expand internationally or not. The line was launched in 2017 at the time of the case, in late 2019, they’re now considering this global launch, and really what we’re trying to get at is for the students to consider what’s going well and what may not be going so well, and whether or not this expansion is premature. The adaptive line has been seeing measures of success, but the awareness is still extremely low and there’s a lot more work to be done.

BRIAN KENNY: Okay. How did you hear about this? Why did you decide to write the case?

LIZ KEENAN: The reasons were many, but selfishly, I just wanted to learn more, I was very interested. But as soon as I had learned that they created this line of fashion apparel with the intention of making dressing easier for people with disabilities, I thought, “Oh, right, of course.” And it hits you then when you realize the line exists, that’s the first time it dawns on you, I think most people, that is a line of fashion that you don’t often see in places that you shop. You don’t even think about it-

BRIAN KENNY: Of course.

LIZ KEENAN: … and you realize what an issue it is. And so I was inspired to learn more. I was really impressed by the thoughtfulness and the innovation that was involved in the development of this adaptive line. And I was really motivated to tell the story because I realized that there’s such a large percentage of society that has been overlooked in the space of fashion for far too long. Roughly one in four people identify as having a disability, and historically they have rarely been represented equally in mainstream media or even in the workplace. And people with disabilities are just often unseen, unheard, and forgotten.

BRIAN KENNY: Tommy Hilfiger’s an interesting person and the case gives a little bit of insight into his background, which as we get further into discussion, I think people will see why he feels like this is such the right thing for his company to do. Can you talk a little bit about his background?

LIZ KEENAN: Tommy Hilfiger, he grew up in Elmira, New York, and he had many, many different types of interests, but one of those was fashion. And he says that his interest in fashion was inspired by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. And he was so interested in fashion that he would actually drive to New York City on the weekends. I think it was about a five-hour drive-

BRIAN KENNY: Wow.

LIZ KEENAN: … to purchase clothes for himself, and eventually he was then purchasing it for friends as well because they noticed and liked what he was wearing. This eventually led to the start of his first clothing boutique called People’s Place, and then eventually he spent time as a designer for other brands, and then finally he launched the Tommy Hilfiger brand.

BRIAN KENNY: How was he able to grow that brand the way he did?

LIZ KEENAN: It resonated with people. It was a very popular brand and it was widely worn among many different parts of society. Today the Tommy Hilfiger brand is really known for its classic American cool style with a preppy twist is how they like to describe it.

BRIAN KENNY: That sounded like an ad right there. That was pretty good.

LIZ KEENAN: According to Tommy Hilfiger himself, he has always wanted the brand to really stand out as one that models great values, morals and missions. People’s Place, the boutique, was a place for the people, and I think he brought that ethos with him to the Tommy Hilfiger brand. It has always stood for inclusivity, diversity, sustainability, and many of the initiatives that they have reflect these values. And so, to Tommy Hilfiger creating this line of adaptive clothing under the Tommy Hilfiger brand to him was a match made in heaven.

BRIAN KENNY: So, we’ve talked a little bit about Tommy’s background and how he grew this brand into a global powerhouse. Can you talk about what inspired the Adaptive line in particular, what motivated him and what was the vision for it?

LIZ KEENAN: The creation of the Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive line was inspired by a couple of women, Mindy Scheier and Maura Horton, whose interest in work on adaptive apparel was personally inspired by family members with disabilities. Together, they approached Tommy Hilfiger, the brand, and pitched a line of adaptive clothing for children. As it turned out, there were not many clothing options, especially fashionable ones for people with disabilities or really anyone who is having challenges with dressing. And the former CEO of Tommy Hilfiger America’s Gary Scheinbaum, he was immediately on board having been struck by this importance of this need and the fact that nobody in the fashion industry had addressed this issue to this point. For Tommy Hilfiger himself, the clothing line really resonated both personally and professionally. Three of his children have autism and he understood the daily challenge of getting dressed.

BRIAN KENNY: And I guess, that’s not unusual. So often we hear about these things where there’s a personal connection back to the cause or the reason, and it sounds like that was the case here.

LIZ KEENAN: And what’s interesting about that point too, is that when you think about the customer, we always think about their target customer, which is a person who has dressing challenges. But if there are one in four people with a disability, it’s very likely that all of us know somebody who has a disability, and so we may be shopping not just for ourselves, but also for them.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about the clothing then. Can you describe what some of the adaptive products are?

LIZ KEENAN: The Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive clothing line is very innovative. It’s constantly evolving. It was originally adapted from the mainstream Tommy Hilfiger lines to include several adaptations, and these types of adaptations were things like magnets sewn in behind decorative buttons, hook and loop closures. We also know this as Velcro instead of zippers, and adjustable fit for different types of body shapes, so you can adjust the pant or the sleeve length and even the waistbands. And finally, they thought about alternative ways to put on and take off clothing, such as opening in the back instead of at the front.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. So just innovations on the apparel that we see every day, because I think what was most important about this was that it looked like the regular Tommy Hilfiger clothes that everybody’s wearing.

LIZ KEENAN: Absolutely. Because one of the things they learned from this customer is, “We want to look like we’re wearing the clothing that everybody else is wearing. We want access to the same type of fashion that people wear,” and so it was important to keep the same theme of clothing similar to what Tommy has sold, and they just made these adaptations to their existing lines, which people love.

BRIAN KENNY: How big is the market for these kinds of products?

LIZ KEENAN: Well, as I said earlier, nearly one in four people identify as having a disability, and data suggests that as many as 14 million Americans alone report having difficulties with daily activities such as getting dressed. These numbers ended up equating to nearly $13 trillion in global spending power, here in the US being around $8.4 trillion.

BRIAN KENNY: Wow. So that’s a huge market.

LIZ KEENAN: Massive.

BRIAN KENNY: Okay. And that hadn’t really been addressed to this point in this way?

LIZ KEENAN: Correct.

BRIAN KENNY: Let’s talk a little bit about how they landed on the designs that they did. What was their process, their discovery process? How did they gain insights about what would be the best way to approach this?

LIZ KEENAN: This is a great question. It’s also very interesting to think about how they went about it. So Tommy Hilfiger is fortunate to have in-house design and technical design teams as well as marketing teams to really help make the Tommy Hilfiger adaptive products a reality. So understanding that they were not experts in adaptive design, what they did is they sought input directly from the community of people with disabilities. So, through interviews, in-home discussions, life logging, focus groups, quantitative studies, what they learned was that everyone has a different need. Something that might work for one might not work for another, so they thoughtfully included two to three adaptations into one garment, making it multipurpose. So the garments themselves ended up being inclusive.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Anybody who’s ever worked in a manufacturing environment knows that it’s a big deal to change anything on a product line. It doesn’t happen easily, it doesn’t happen quickly. What we’re talking about here sounds like a massive change to the way the clothes are produced. So I’m wondering what was the impact on the way that they went about producing this line?

LIZ KEENAN: To make the designs, the factories needed to modify the machines and processes, and as you say, this is not a simple change. And so, with some of the modifications being more difficult than others. So, the magnets, for example, would stick to the machines that are made of iron or metal, and until they could make more permanent changes, what they did initially was placed cardboard underneath the fabric so that the magnets wouldn’t stick to the machine plates. In addition, the way magnets work is connecting a negative charged pole to a positively charged pole, and so if they are sewn into the fabric in the wrong orientation, it won’t work. And so they also needed to think about color coding to be able to help the manufacturers put the magnets in the correct orientation so the poles would stick together. And eventually after some trial and error, factories adjusted to making adaptive clothing. And all of this, as you might imagine, not only is hard to do, but it also costs more money to include these adaptations in clothing, and it costs upwards of 25 to 30 percent more to produce these adaptive products. But it was really important to the Tommy Hilfiger team to price the Adaptive line similarly to the other products, but that meant that the margins were going to be smaller. They did get duty free status on these types of products. It provided some margin support, but it certainly didn’t fully cover the cost of these adaptations.

BRIAN KENNY: Let me ask a question that may sound crass, but it’s not intended to. Business is in the business of making money and profit margins matter, particularly in large public companies. What’s in it for Tommy Hilfiger to do this?

LIZ KEENAN: Any business would be happy to be turning a profit on product lines, but I think that the motivation behind this one was to provide something that was a need and to do it well and do it the right way, and if the money followed, it will. But for now, they were persisting in providing a good product to people.

BRIAN KENNY: It doesn’t appear as though the company was trying to use this as a brand enhancement thing. They did work some of it into their advertising. Can you talk about some of the ways that they approached marketing? Because I feel like this is one of those situations where you could get it wrong pretty quickly, and if you get it wrong, then that seems to really do a whole lot more harm than it does good.

LIZ KEENAN: As with the design, the Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive team went straight to the community that they were trying to reach to ask how best to market the adaptive clothing line to them. There wasn’t an existing benchmark for how to market to adaptive customers because this hadn’t been done at scale before, and so they really needed to create the marketing strategy from the ground up, similar to how they had to do this with the adaptations themselves and the clothing. While it might seem that the best way to reach a customer could be through a targeted message, targeting based on somebody having a disability is problematic. On the one hand it may seem insensitive to target based on somebody having a disability, but on the other hand, by ignoring a disability, one in four people may not receive the communication that’s intended for them. There is some guidance for ad targeting such as the National Advertising Initiative Code of Conduct, but much of this is actually left up to marketers to decide what is appropriate. What they did learn in their marketing research was that their target customer did not want their disability to define them or be treated differently. There are ways to target on lifestyle, but people with disabilities, it’s not a culturally defined customer set.

BRIAN KENNY: Can you talk a little bit about the customer journey and what the shopping experience is like and the amount of thought that they put into that?

LIZ KEENAN: Getting products into customer’s hands was another challenge, similar to the creation of the products themselves and also even reaching the customer. Shopping in a store is not always feasible, and depending on the customer, they may also have challenges understanding what the fabric feels like or what it might look like. And so, they chose to start selling the Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive products online and through their wholesale partners first. And they made it such that people could shop by category of clothing or even the innovation type, and then once they received the product, they made sure it was an easy to open package and very easy to return if needed. The other thing they did is they highlighted customer care contact information in as many places as possible to ensure easy access to customer support. What was clear however, was that language about disabilities does matter. There’s not perfect alignment on language, but something that’s relatively accepted is leading with “people-first” language, so speaking about people with disabilities rather than disabled people. And they knew they weren’t always going to get it right. And so, what they did is they really prepared for feedback, including extensive training for the customer service team. And so, each month they would actually get together and share insights that they learned from customers who called in and spoke to them. They would consolidate their learnings, send it out more broadly to the team, and implement these changes in real time. They’re always learning.

BRIAN KENNY: It sounds like they took a really thoughtful approach, which we know not all brands have done, and it’s very easy to get yourself in trouble when you’re trying to do something like this. I mentioned a little earlier that it didn’t appear that they were using this as a brand enhancing thing, but I’m wondering, and this is maybe a broader more general question, we know that millennials, that young people care a lot about the products they buy. They want to make sure they’re buying from companies that are responsible in a whole bunch of different ways. They like to be associated with those firms, so they’d rather work for companies that they feel are doing something that’s got a purpose behind it. So I would have to imagine that this was in some ways really brand enhancing from a recruiting talent standpoint for Tommy Hilfiger.

LIZ KEENAN: Millennials want to work for companies that are doing good things and they themselves want to feel like they’re having an impact when they go to work. What I did hear from the Tommy Hilfiger team was that the customer service team loved working on this. They loved talking to the customer. In fact, most of the calls that they were getting were calls to say, “Thank you.” Can you imagine if you’re working in customer service and that the calls coming to you are happy, positive feedback?

BRIAN KENNY: That’s not what you expect when you’re in customer service.

LIZ KEENAN: That’s not what you expect, and they felt like they were really truly making a difference. You couldn’t talk to the team without seeing misty eyes in the room and people… It was clear that everybody felt like they were having an impact in a way that felt so good and it was the right thing to do.

BRIAN KENNY: Wow. The other area where they were really thoughtful about was partnerships. They didn’t set out to do this entirely on their own. They were able to establish some relationships in ways that really enhanced what they were doing. Can you talk a little bit about that?

LIZ KEENAN: Definitely. So, Tommy Hilfiger developed many partnerships such as with Special Olympics, Champions Place, and Runway of Dreams with the hope of leveraging these partnerships to expand their reach. They were in this to create a movement, and according to Tommy Hilfiger, the more, the merrier. They believed that there was a large and available market and the inclusion of the competitors would be beneficial to everybody, including for people with disabilities. And while Tommy Hilfiger was one of the first, there are a growing number of brands that now offer adaptive clothing, including Kohl’s, Zappos, and even Target.

BRIAN KENNY: And I would imagine that can only be good for the people who buy these products because there’ll be more innovation. There’ll be that competitive sense of trying to make the product better and more affordable, so a rising tide lifts boats, I guess.

LIZ KEENAN: Absolutely. Some folks would question whether Tommy Hilfiger was the right brand to start this movement because it’s a specific type of style and not everybody would purchase that brand nor be able to afford it. But again, they are the catalyst to start this movement and then others get on board and suddenly expand not just the options and types of clothing, but the price points as well.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Let’s delve into that a little bit though. You mentioned that not everybody thought they were the right brand. So I would imagine they had some people out there that were critical of what they were trying to do. No good deed goes unpunished, you know that when you’re a brand manager. Can you talk a little bit about some of the challenges that they faced in that regard?

LIZ KEENAN: Brands that take a stand on social issues often will invite criticism. They become moral and ethical targets almost immediately, and their motives will always be questioned. Tommy Hilfiger in this case is no different. And the fact that they were serving a customer with disabilities drew attention, not just from customers who may not have a disability, but the customer themselves. Their target customer was asking them, “Why are you doing this?” Are you in it for the right reasons? And what they really believed was that if they could demonstrate through action their genuine wish to make fashion available to all, that they could eventually turn these customers into advocates who would then spread the message of inclusive fashion and then eventually contribute to this overall mission of making fashion available for everyone.

BRIAN KENNY: And they would have to make really good products to make that happen.

LIZ KEENAN: Truly. In every case when there’s a purpose-driven product, if it’s not a high quality product that you can stand behind, the entire domino structure falls apart, and so it’s important that it is a strong, good product.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Liz, this has been a great conversation as I knew it would be. I’ll give you the last word here. If there’s one thing you want listeners to remember about the Tommy Hilfiger case, and I’m proud of myself, by the way, of not tripping over his name more than a couple of times because it’s a difficult name to say, what would that one thing be?

LIZ KEENAN: The one thing that I would love listeners to remember about this case is probably a broader lesson. I think it’s important to remember that business is not always about making money, and sometimes we need to do the right thing and do that right thing well. And in the case of Tommy Hilfiger and the Adaptive line, I believe they’re a really good example of this.

BRIAN KENNY: Liz, thanks for joining me.

LIZ KEENAN: Thank you for having me.

BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts, After Hours, Climate Rising, Deep Purpose, Idea Cast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, and Women at Work. Find them on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and if you could take a minute to rate and review us, we’d be grateful. If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, we want to hear from you. Email us at coldcall@hbs.edu. Thanks again for joining us. I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.