Pre-episode Intro Tricia: It was really purposeful to name my company “Blind Girl Designs,” because I wanted to announce to my peers in the fashion industry, to my family, to my friends, to everyone, that I’m blind, and that’s who I am. Chris: This is the Penny Forward podcast, a show about blind people building bright futures one penny at a time. I’m Chris Peterson, … Liz: I’m Liz Bottner, … MOe: I’m MOe Carpenter, … Chris: And today, we are here with Tricia Waechter from Blind Girl Designs. Tricia has twenty years of experience in the fashion industry, but when she started to lose more of her vision, she decided to go off on her own and start her own company, and she has a bunch of blindness themed clothing and accessories that seems like it’s very, very popular. At least judging from the, uh, recent, uh, ACB convention where we met her. So, we decided to have her on to tell us her story. Tricia, thanks for being here. Tricia: Thanks, Chris. It’s nice to be here. Chris: Tell us about yourself, would you? Tricia: Sure. My name is Tricia Waechter, as you said. My company is Blind Girl Designs. I have retinitis pigmentosa, and that’s probably the most focused in regard to what we’re talking about today. Liz: Related to you having RP, when did you find out that you first had that? And what was that like for you in hearing about that diagnosis and, what was your response to that? Tricia: It was officially diagnosed in 1996. And prior to that, they knew that there was something wrong with my eyes, but at the time, they didn’t, I think, have the adequate technology to understand. And at that time, they were able to, you know, shoot Lazers in my eyes and do all sorts of stuff like that. And in fact, when they made the diagnosis, the eye doctor who did it, the retinal specialist, um, refused to come out and tell me that I had RP. Because there’s no cure. It’s progressive. And there’s no treatment. And so I had to go to his secretary and ask where he went. Because I knew I had a progressive disease. At that time, I couldn’t see at night, and I was aware that my vision was different than other people’s. I was … I just wanted to know exactly what it was. So, he told me, and then, I started doing research about my eye disease. Subsequently, found out two of my sisters have retinitis pigmentosa, and now one of my nieces also have retinitis pigmentosa. In terms of impacting my life, you know, at that time, I could still drive, and I had difficulty driving at night. I memorized routes, you know, from work, and to home, and I created, you know, accommodations for myself so that I could be mobile at night. I started using a white cane around 2010, and I used the white cane not at work in bright light, but in going to the theater, going into any theater, any movie theater, or a Broadway show, or any place where there’s a light to dark. I started using my white cane, at that time. And so I’ve been a white cane user, now I’m a full time white cane user. How it affected me, you know, the thing about retinitis pigmentosa, for me, because I’ve discovered that there are some people who have immediate loss of vision. My doctors call my RP a classic RP, where it’s just a steady march of loss of depth perception, needing massive amounts of light to see, and then, you know, the degradation of all my peripheral vision. So, and that continues today. Even, between last year and this year, last year, before, uh, ACB national convention, I printed all one thousand prints of garments that we sold. And this year, I printed maybe a hundred or a hundred fifty. Because I can no longer perceive black. Even if I feel the edges of a garment, it’s not good enough to be able to put a print on it in print. So my assistant designer, I’ve trained her. I’ll do a simple print, and then she’ll actually do the bulk print. ’cause she has really good vision, and she can do that. So, I, it has informed how I structure my company. Because this is a, uh, progressive disease. MOe: I’d like to take a little step back and, Chris mentioned you had twenty years in the fashion industry. Tricia: Mhm. MOe: Could you tell us a little bit about that? Tricia: Sure. I have a degree in English, drama, and speech, and my plan was to get an MFA in directing, and I decided once I got accepted into the program that it would be, the whole bally Wack would be about ten years, before I could get my own theater. And that seemed excruciatingly daunting with not very much financial recompense at the end. You know? So instead, I got a job as a sales clerk at a carriage trade store. I got married after college, and we were poor, and young, and starving, so, I got a job as a sales clerk, and, I just, they came down one day and asked me if I wanted to be an assistant buyer. I had no idea what that was, but I asked them if it paid more than what I was doing. They said “yes,” and that’s actually how my career in fashion started. The interesting thing is that it turns out that fashion is very similar to theater. You know, I had taken costume design, I had to be able to know how to cut and sew fabrics, know all about textiles, proportion and dimension color, all of that is … I’ve been trained my whole life in arts. And I had never thought about going into fashion. Because I was such a theater girl. So, that’s how I started my career. Once I got into that job, I discovered you had to have good math acumen, which, up until that point, I would say, I would have told you I didn’t have, but it turns out it’s pretty simple mathematics. It’s pretty logical, and it’s usually using the same repetitive formulas, and forecasting and projecting. So I was able to do that without any problem learning that aspect of my job. And that made it easy for me to continue to progress. I always wanted to be successful in my career, so I just kept moving up the food chain in terms of jobs. I would look and see what the next job was, and how you made more money, and I would model myself after whoever the smartest person in the room was, and I did that consistently throughout my career, and as an entrepreneur, I still do that. I find that to be very, very effective in achieving goals. Chris: When did your vision start to play a factor in how your career was proceeding? Tricia: Mm. About … six or seven years ago. I realized I was having a much higher rate of vision loss than I had previously had. And I started having to count my steps from my desk to get to the bathroom at my office in New York. And, because it was dark, once I turned the corner, it was dark in that area. And there … I couldn’t see. And when I was traveling frequently, internationally, and eventually, over a period of two years, at the end of my being able to work in a corporate environment, or as a chief merchandizing officer, I would … I was Shopping in London every month, and then I would go to Shang High, or every few months, and I was in London in the store, and holding a black sweater, and I could not see the sweater. And I brought it to the window, and I still couldn’t see the sweater, and I put my flashlight up to it, and I still could not see the sweater. And so I realized that this wasn’t so much about my visual field decline, but my light perception decline. And I soldiered through. I worked like three or four extra hours a day to compensate. The show room has extraordinarily bright lights, which was a gift to me, so I was able to continue, but it turned out that that company got bought out by another company, and I lost my job. And after that, we moved to Houston, which we thought was gonna be a short term thing, but once we got to Houston, and I wasn’t in New York, or airports, or places that I had just normally been for the last couple decades, I realized I … the amount of stuff I couldn’t see was staggering. So, that was how my career ended. My office in New York was completely white. All the tables were white, the walls were white, the side theme was white, and I had them put the highest, brightest lights in above that were available. So it was like walking into a stadium. And my office, I told everyone” it was, you know, because there were so many designers coming in, and so much product for me to review, that it needed to, in addition to having an entire wall of windows, by the way, that I just needed to be able to have, you know, clarity, and not have eye strain. And nobody ever questioned it. And then the successive jobs that I had, I did the same thing. I just created my own accommodations by making sure that there was ridiculously bright light. I was able to, you know, make it pretty far before I couldn’t do it anymore. And then, you know, pretty much immediately after that, when I saw my eye guy, I, you know, I had … and this was of no surprise to me, right? Crossed the line from low vision into blindness. So, that’s pretty much how that all kind of tapered off. So just so you know, I didn’t voluntarily start Blind Girl Designs. I … I started Blind Girl Designs to save my soul. Because I had so much more to do and so much more to offer. And I grieved terribly after the loss of this career where I was traveling all over the world and projecting trends, you know, a year in advance and making a lot of money, to not being able to use my eyes. And it was uh, devastating. But, you know, eventually, within about a two-year period, I just got up and said, “Okay. I’m gonna start my own company. This is not okay that people won’t hire me, or that I can’t use my white cane in appointments, or anything that indicates I’m blind, it’s not okay. Because the eyes are not fully intact. Right? The rest of the brain is A okay. And I want to use it. And I can have a company. And that’s how it started. Liz: In starting Blind Girl Designs, what were some challenges you had to overcome, and along those same lines, were there any small successes that made you feel like, “Oh my gosh, this is exactly what I need to be doing right now.” Tricia: The challenges, there’s a huge amount of challenges if you’re going to be an entrepreneur. First of all, I have a really, really extensive production, planning, financial, you know, design background. In my field, I have done everything. Climbed to factories in China, been all over Asia, done P and L statement, so I have a really great background to be an entrepreneur. So, there’s a huge amount of challenges. The biggest thing was, you know, starting my company, on January first 2021, and then getting a web designer to get a web page set up, and then calculating how much inventory I would need to be able to populate the pages, and, you know, the cost of doing that, maintaining the web design, there’s, there’s like … at least a million things you have to do to launch a company. Simultaneously. So, that’s a huge challenge. So the big thing is, for me, to get up every day, and do a p– you know, make a list, get up every day, do a piece of it, until we started in January, and the website was operational in April. And, we had cut and sewn product, and hats on the website. In terms of small wins, I would, you know, like to thank my family, (chuckle.) And friends. From when I posted all of this on Facebook, incredible amount of support, and my first orders came from family and friends. Who didn’t necessarily need to buy Blind Girl Designs products, but did to support me. And eventually, that rolled over to the blind community supporting me, and suggesting that maybe there was other product that I would do. And I really have to give a nod to Laura Legendary who saw my images on Facebook, and on, uh, Instagram, and asked me to be in her Let’s Go Shopping event that November of my first year. And in order to have something Christmasy or Holiday-like, because of course I listened to her previous podcasts to see what the other venders said, we designed our first T-shirt. Which is six white canes crossing to form a giant snowflake, made of white canes. And that actually launched the entire part of my business, which is blind themed prints. Either with white canes or braille in them. So that’s the, uh, that, those were the great things, and, and, the great thing is, is that the good things keep happening to me in regard to people giving me ideas, or support, or, I have a blind … I have a “I love my guide dog” T-shirt, and now, people are saying, “Oh I had that. That’s great. When’s your next one coming out?” You know, so, because the community is so vocal, I already know what, you know, guidance, to do. I added an “I love my cat” T-shirt, with a white cane in the middle of it, because so many people asked me for a cat T-shirt. So, I added it into the line. So it’s wonderful, it’s wonderfully organic, the growth, and the, and the community supporting it. MOe: I just wanted to say that, not only can you get the “I love my cat” in a T-shirt, but you can get a tote bag, ’cause I got that from Tricia at the ACB convention. And it did come in. So I’m so happy. Tricia: That’s true. MOe: And that is such a great, great move for the, the crafters of us, um, in, in this community. Uh, but, speaking of which, with, could you kind of describe your design process as a blind individual? Tricia: We are very fancy. The kitchen table is my design area, and my kitchen is painted … has woodwork on the bottom, but has a gigantic window in it with no window covering, and the walls and the ceiling are painted optic white, and there are very, very bright, florescent lights on the side, and right behind my shoulder is a garage light. That’s meant to light up a workman’s bench in an entire garage. I have it on a pole, and it’s right behind my shoulder. So, I have adequate light to be able to sketch. So, the design process is, I discover a need, or we talk about a hole or, that we have to have, like, right now I’m working on a new Christmas tree. That’s puff ink, that’s made completely of white canes. And the process is just getting the idea first, gathering the information, thinking about it, letting it mull over, from a creative standpoint, and then usually, I’ll sketch it on just anything that happens to be in my way, and see what the outlook looks like in the sketch. And, you know, initially, usually, it’s pretty … not okay. So, eventually, that evolves and gets refined, and usually then, I sketch it on, uh, 12 by 12 paper, with the light behind me. And then use sharpies, which are quite big and vibrant, to color it. And there’s usually multiple versions of the art before I get it refined, and my biggest critics, my son and my husband, sign off on it as, that it’s, you know, done, that it’s pretty cool, and that it’s actually salable, and if I feel like I need some additional commentary, I have a crew of people that I send the art out to, who are sighted, and, um, they look at it as well. So, that’s the actual creative process, and then, after it’s designed and laid out, then I send it to a graphic designer to put it into Illustrator, which is a vector format, in order to prepare it for the ink guys, who print the ink for me. And then I get the ink, and then I have a heat transfer machine, and I print the ink on the, I or my assistant, prints the ink on to the garments or the tote bag, and in several cases, I have braille on, I’ll have, I might have, two different kinds of ink on the, the garment, so, for instance, a vinal ink that’s flat and slightly tactile, and then braille, which is 3 D. And then, that’s actually cutting the two pieces of ink together and then printing it together. So that’s the process. And I … and it’s not something that you could just randomly do. Again, I have been, you know, in the field, where design is part of it, for my whole career, so there’s a whole lot of things you need to know about being able to do this, or execute it, or what the limitations of the ink are, or, in the case of my T-shirts and sweatshirts and, uh, you know. I had to test all that for shrinkage, torquing, crocking, … there’s a whole bunch of, kind of unspoken things that you have to do, in order for the output of a product to be high quality, and comparable to anybody else’s that’s competing with you. That has nothing to do with blindness, just other people in the marketplace. Chris: So you talked a little bit about that you’re still losing vision even now, and that you have structured your company to accommodate for that. Tricia: Mhm. Chris: Can you talk more about that, and, and uh, you started to talk about who helps you. Tricia: Mhm. Chris: I gather that that’s a part of this structuring, so, uh, tell us about the, the structure of your company and how you’re thinking forward. Tricia: So, let’s say, about, eight or nine months ago, I was actually talking to my therapist, and I was crying about the fact that I couldn’t print on black T-shirts anymore. And she said, “Okay. You have RP. You know, you’re gonna continue to lose vision. We know where this can end. You know, light and shadows. So, you have this company that is vibrant, and you have all these great ideas. So, structure it so that you accommodate the fact that you know that you’re gonna lose more vision.” Which is why I started training my assistant designer to print. So, so … for me, as I structured the company, the, the … foremost thought is, “How do I really grow this company, and accommodate the fact that I will likely not be sighted as this company continues to grow?” So it’s one, it’s just one, one of those things that you think about. Like a lot of people think about, “Okay. I’m not gonna do this company unless I make seventy-five percent mark-up.” Or whatever parameters any business person puts on it, mine are, “Okay, this company has to be able to run with … somebody else’s eyes.” In my case, I have, uh, a husband and son who are both sighted, who help me all the time. My son, My husband takes everything to UPS and the post office and handles all that stuff. My son carries all the big boxes, and, reviews my designs. This is an interesting part, I think. My son has been traveling internationally with me since he was six months old. And, it’s very difficult to get a passport when somebody’s six months old because their heads flop over. But anyway, and so he’s been traveling his entire life all over the world, and been in ridiculous amounts of design meetings, every museum in the world, seeing every color show that there was. And I had no idea, it never occurred to me, that he might actually have a talent in this field. Which, in retrospect, is kind of silly because he is genetically my child. And it turns out my son has a great eye. He has a great color eye, great eye for balance, he, unlike me, is really pragmatic, so, it just turns out, again, organically, that my son has a really great sense, and understanding, of what the brand is. Because he lives with me. And he’s around blind people. This is … this is his life. So, I would say the first thing is, is that I already have this person inside my company who I trust, who I know, as I continue to lose more sight, will be able to make sure that the art, and the outlook, is consistent with our mission and our brand. And in addition to my husband and my son, we have a graphic designer, we have a person who does our web, I have an assistant designer, so we have a whole team of people who work to do this. I have a manufacturer in Houston, a really good friend of mine, that I have known since around 2000, who has a small factory in China Town, and who manufactures my garments for me. So, we have a quite, quite a lot of people that are touching this. It’s not something that you can do singularly, and it’s really important to identify what rolls people need to do. Because each person has a different skill set, and everyone has a different set of gifts. So it’s really important to recognize that, and utilize that, in order to grow the company. Chris: When you were talking to me on the phone about this interview, you were telling me something about your relationship with your assistant designer that I thought was really neat. Uh, you want to tell the folks about that? (Tricia chuckles.) Tricia: My assistant designer is deaf. And my, my friend David, who I just mentioned, who has the factory, is the one who referred her to me when I was looking for an assistant designer, and he said, kind of generic, just kind of like offhandedly, “I think she has a hearing problem or something.” And we met at Starbucks. And when we met, right off the bat, she told me she was deaf. And I started laughing, really, because my friend David is kind of just a, you know. Was just kind of a generic, kind of like, “Oh, I think she has a hearing problem.” So I told her that and we were both laughing. And so she’s, uh, she, so she reads my lips, and when, sometimes when we have a difficult design situation, we just text to each other. So I voice to text, and then she texts. Because she’s sighted. So, and then, actually, last week, she came into the kitchen to tell me that her hearing aid is discharging. And I said, “Can you read my lips?” And she said, “No.” Because the stuff we were talking about was too complex. And I’m like, “Okay.” And so then, we just went into, you know, full on text mode. So, it’s great, because she has a design degree, and there’s a lot of stuff that’s intuitive. She has a great eye, and she’s got a great sense of humor. She modeled when she was younger, so we shoot a ton of our product on her. She’s like, amazing. Amazing partner to have. She’s become, more she works with me, the more she becomes aware of what blindness is. And that I will walk past her if she’s taking a break, you know, sitting down, taking a break, I of course will have no idea she’s there. And when it first happened, she couldn’t believe it. She just … couldn’t believe it. Because she’s part of the deaf community. And now, she gets it. She’ll touch me, she’ll move in front of me, she’ll purposely stand in front of me to talk so she can read my lips, so it’s all … it’s great. So it’s wonderful for her, it’s wonderful for me, it’s like a gigantic win. Really a gigantic win. Liz: That is awesome. Thank you for sharing that. Tricia: Thank you. Chris: I noticed that you include the term “blind” in your company name. “Blind Girl Designs.” And I also know that for a lot of people with vision loss, the word “blind” is very difficult to say. At least at first. Can you talk a little bit about how your journey was, and, and, accepting your vision loss, and when you decided to incorporate the word “blind” into your company name? Tricia: Yes. I was working with my friend Dave, the one that does my production, and he requested that I do not use my white cane when we were interviewing, working with accounts. And I did this, several times, and I realized that it was going to destroy me, to not acknowledge that I was blind. That it wasn’t okay. It wasn’t okay for me. I wasn’t going to magically become less blind. And so when I did Blind Girl Designs, it was really purposeful to name my company “Blind Girl Designs.” Because I wanted to announce to my peers in the fashion industry, to my family, to my friends, to everyone, that I’m blind. And that’s who I am. That is something that is a core part of how I live my life. So it was very, very purposeful to say “Blind Girl Designs.” Because you know what, I am a very, very rabid and avid white cane user, and I have tremendous pride in myself and my company, and I think making sure that everybody knows I’m blind takes a lot of confusion out about whether I’m being rude because I’m not talking to you, or what exactly is going on with my vision, it’s out there. Everybody knows. As soon as I put that out there, I didn’t get any more calls from head hunters on LinkedIn. Nobody wanted, you know, to contact me. A okay. I launched my business. It’s okay. I just think it’s really important to, and so, as part of the essays that I write, and the posts that I write, particularly on LinkedIn, is about my blindness, and about running a company as an entrepreneur. And, and just images of a white cane. Because a lot of people don’t even know what that is. And so I feel that, you know, it’s part of my mission to educate people around me, who necessarily have not been in contact with a blind person, what it is, or what it looks like, or, you know, how you could be helpful. So that’s, uh, a really big deal. That is very, very purposeful for me. It’s very, very important to be acknowledged, and allow people to understand, and ask questions. And not make them be afraid of it. They see it’s Blind Girl Designs, and the question is, “Well, tell me about that.” It’s great. Another person who didn’t know about blindness now knows something. So, very, very purposeful. Liz: And what is next for you? In terms of new products, appearances at conventions, on podcasts, in the media, potential other adventures, what are you willing to share with us, and our listeners? Tricia: So many other adventures. First of all, last year, at the national convention, a lot of people came up and asked me if I would do group orders. Or big orders. Bigger orders. And I said “no.” Because I didn’t have the capacity to do that at that time. So we already have now done group orders, and I had mentioned in my ACB Audio catalog that we are doing group orders, so I have a number of group orders that are in the works going forward, in various stages of development or production. So that’s like a big part of growing my company. And the, the more that the word gets out about, you know, within the community that there’s somebody who will design product that have white canes or braille in them, and has a sensitivity to our community, the more people call me. And ask me to develop prints for them. So, to me, that’s like a really big expansion of my business. The other, uh, thing that’s actually in the works is something that’s not a profit part of my business, which is, uh, something that I call “Blind Ardison’s guild.” Which is that since I started this company, I realized that there are quite a lot of blind knitters. And a lot of them have knitted themselves out of friends and family, in terms of, they don’t have anybody else to give it to. And, so, I have, uh, samples, that, uh, several blind knitters have sent to me, and my concept is to be able to sell it to sighted people. And give the profits to the knitters themselves. And I feel like there’s probably this massively vast reservoir of product, and enthusiasm for knitting, that could create a whole nother, separate part of my business that can support directly knitters within our community. So, those are the two big things that are up and coming on the fall side of the business. Of course, there’ll be new prints for holiday, and continued line expansions. In terms of conventions, we have, uh, Texas in August, then Tennessee, and then Colorado, and then Oklahoma, then Colorado again, and we’ll go to New York, so we have, uh, quite a lot of conventions, and there are likely several more, in there, on the fall side, that people have asked me to, but they don’t have their registrations out for. It’s really important for me to go to conventions because generally, the, the … social media is not really a way to reach this community. And being present in front of people, and letting them touch and feel the T-shirts, and meet me, and understand our company, and what it is and what we do, to me, is the, is the … key, to the success of our business. So there’ll be lots more. And my son is now trained, and we also have his friend Ulis, who are both trained, they were both at the national convention, and my niece Molly, who is our web designer. All of them are trained to, to sell. And set up, and break down. So that’s part of the other part of the blindness thing, right? Making sure that people are cross trained, and making sure that if I can’t be at a convention, they’re trained, and know to manage the convention, and how to use a square, and to handle the financial part, how to set up and break down, so, those are all the things that are happening. So it’s really pretty big. There’s just a lot of things happening. For the company. MOe: I had no idea about your, uh, knitting venture, so, we will be more in touch in the future. (Chuckle.) But, speaking of that, how can others get a hold of you? Tricia: We have a website, which is blind, girl, designs, dot com. That is designs with an S. Our phone number is 862-448-1011. Frequently, people will go on the website, and read the audio descripts, or if they have partial vision, or if they’re sighted, will look at the images, and then, uh, on my website, you just have to tap the front page, it has our phone number on it, and it will just ring right directly through to us, and we have a lot of people just call and say, tell me what they picked, and then, uh, then we do the orders from there. That happens very frequently. So we want to be really accessible to everyone. I just want to mention this, this is not the question, but, on our sizing, we carry small through 5 XL. And I am really adamant about that. Because again, that’s part of Accessibility. In my point of view. So I want to make sure everybody knows, everybody is welcome. And we want Blind Girl Designs to fit everybody. Liz: Is there anything that we didn’t ask you that you’d like to share with us? Tricia: There’s so much more. I think that the, you know, the one thing that I’ve learned is that we are so much more than our blindness. That is just one aspect of who we are. And when, for me personally, when I focus on all of the many gifts that I have, and skills that I have, and really working on them, improving them, and having gratitude for them, the more I can continue to grow and develop personally, and the more that my company grows automatically. And I just feel like that point of view, or that attitude, is the thing that really uplifts me and allows me to move forward. Chris: Well Tricia, we’re running out of time, but I want to thank you for being here, and I also want to let you know that my sighted twelve-year-old daughter went off to a birthday party this afternoon, wearing a Blind Girl Designs sweatshirt. That she borrowed from her mom. (Tricia laughs.) MOe: Cool. Tricia: That’s awesome. That’s great. That’s wonderful. Chris: So, uh, the, the designs are really great, the products are really great, and I am excited to announce that Penny Forward is working with Blind Girl Designs, … Tricia: Yup. Chris: To produce a Penny Forward print for T-shirts and sweatshirts and hoodies and tote bags. So, stay tuned for news about that. And I hope that you will, uh, help support us, and support her, by purchasing those when they come out. The Penny Forward podcast is produced by Chris Peterson and Liz Bottner with assistance from MOe Carpenter. Audio editing and post production is provided by Brynn Lee at superblink.org Transcription is provided by Anne Verduin, and the music is composed and performed by Andre Louis. Penny Forward is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help blind people navigate the complicated landscape of personal finance through education, mentoring, and mutual support. We offer self-paced online courses, weekly members only group chats, and discounted access to one on one financial counseling provided by blind financial counselors, and you can find out more about all of that through our website, pennyforward.com and through the new Penny Forward app, available on IOS and Android. Please go and check those out. Now, for all of us in the Penny Forward community, I’m Chris Peterson, … Liz: I’m Liz Bottner, … MOe: I’m MOe Carpenter, … Chris: And thank you for listening, and have a great week.