My Story

inspired Kyla to create this brand was a touching story from a close friend about her grandmother. Overall, her friend’s great grandmother used to love fashion and had an amazing style, but was diagnosed with an eye disease that later took away her eyesight. Because of the grandmother’s condition she could not determine or put on what she wanted to wear. Listening to the grandmother’s story and tough experience, Kyla was inspired and decided she was going to make a change.

Kyla has always enjoyed bringing people together in any way possible, especially when it consisted of mutual interests. Over time she noticed a great way to do that was through fashion. Having the brief opportunity to personally encounter someone who had a vision disability, Kyla decided she was going to base her senior project on a clothing brand for people of different communities. The idea of using embroidered braille in apparel design was to unite people and create a better understanding of what someone that cannot see goes through. It also serves the purpose of both communities being stylish and comfortable while supporting

“HOW OFTEN DO YOU INTERACT WITH DISABLED INDIVIDUALS, MORE SPECIFICALLY, THE BLIND?” blind awareness. Fifteen percent of each purchase goes to research for blind foundations. In going through the process of starting this brand, Kyla had to follow many important steps to further develop her concept. She researched many statistics about blind individuals, foundations for the blind, inspirations, and interviewed several people of different demographics. Her interviews consisted of in person interviews and virtual interviews such as, Google surveys, FaceTime, and over the phone. She had the opportunity to have thirty-five interviewees, which consisted of the target audiences, professionals, friends, and family members. A few questions were, “how capable are you in interacting with a blind/ disabled individual?” and “how often do you interact with a blind/disabled individual?” As well as, “how do you determine what clothes to buy?” These various interviews and surveys helped Kyla shape and develop the brand by creating audience statistics. Kyla educated herself on the brand’s possible competition, as it was essential to know what has already been done. This is important because every brand different and in order to have a successful clothing

brand she would need to think about what makes her line better than the rest. Kyla’s concept forced her to become more knowledgeable with the braille alphabet, numbers, and the blind community. She also created digital prototypes of the products and a branding toolkit. Essentially, digging deeper into the concept and brand identity caused Kyla’s senior project to evolve into a more complex brand. Visual artist, Kyla, wishes to achieve a more comforting common ground between the blind and non-visually impaired communities.