Everyone meet Jayne!
“Before February of this year I had never really considered or heard much about adaptive clothing, like many people I take ease of dressing and my choice of clothing for granted as the high street and online shops cater well for me.”
“ I entered the co-founders programme set up by Catalyst Belfast that aimed to pair up people with ideas or solutions to problems and pair with people with skills in business and technology in the hope they could work together and make some of the ideas a reality.”
“I was lucky to meet Gemma McAllister who had already set up WearMatter an adaptive clothing brand. It was an easy decision to work through the programme together.” 39 teams were formed and through the following months as I met some of Gemma’s user community and learned more about the problem I became more convinced this unmet need required her solution. During the co -founder programme we learned to frame up our problem statement, test and refine our ideas and start to prototype how we could offer our solution to our customers.
We pitched our idea and solutions through different milestones and as the teams were whittled down from 39 to 19 we dared to hope that we might get down to the last 5 teams who would each receive a £10,000 Techstart grant to get us moving.
On Monday 3rd June the remaining 19 teams gathered in the MAC in Belfast for our final pitch night.
Gemma and I wore our WearMatter T shirts and I got ready to deliver our final pitch. It was in alphabetical order so we were last in the running order so you can imagine that tension was high as we gathered on the steps and balcony at the MAC to hear the result. When they announced WearMatter as the 1st winner we were so overjoyed.
The photographer captured a great action shot (below) of the moment we heard the news!
We are so excited to share with you in the coming weeks and months how we will use this funding to bring adaptive clothing to you our fabulous community. You MATTER so much to us, If you would like to be involved in the brand get in touch we would love to hear from you!
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