To celebrate the end of the week we are excited to share our third Founder Story featuring Penny Weber, Founder of Recovawear and Wearable and Co!
Throughout Penny’s time participating in our #RA21 accelerator program, she launched Wearable & Co (which is the sister company to Recovawear) an inclusive and adaptive everyday clothing range, designed for all abilities to enable everyone the opportunity to feel their best selves.
Learn more about this innovative startup by watching Penny’s story below…
Penny Weber [00:00:02]
I love starting businesses and I love taking them to fruition. My first business was in the music industry. This is my first product based business, which is really exciting. My name’s Penny Weber. I’m founder and CEO of Recovawear and Wearable and Co. We do adaptive clothing design to help everyone within their mobility. Recovawear came from a personal experience. I was in a situation myself where I couldn’t dress. The accident was in The Age and it was on the radio. So it was, it was a fairly significant one. It was with my mum. We were hit by a car, as a pedestrian. So it was very life changing. I went from working in the music industry to, you know, not being able to stay awake past nine o’clock. I was given the, the prospect of having to go to rehab facility, for physio at the end of the hallway by the end of the week, and I was still only in a hospital gown. I was like sitting there trying to work out how I could do that. Like, how do how do people get up out of a hospital bed, in a hospital gown and go to rehab? And there was no answer. No one could give me one. So I thought through the night and I came up with how to change things in order to be able to wear clothes, and they ended up being first prototypes we launched in 2018. Since then, we’ve been in Melbourne Fashion Week. We won a Good Design award for medical and scientific and social impact. We were also in the finals for the Premier’s Design Award for Fashion Design and Product Design in 2019. I found the most amazing thing of Remarkable so far has been the coaching. So just having someone by your side, being a cheerleader, making sure that you’re connecting and making sure that you’re doing the right things. It’s awesome. I would love to have another range of clothing in development that is specifically for wheelchair users. If you’re gifted with something like the rest of your life. What do you do with it? How do you make an impact? How do you make things better? How can you, you know, take the lessons that you’ve learnt and help other people? It’s, it’s a gift.
[00:02:28]
