During the Women’s Jewelry Association’s Generating Community Impact breakfast last Friday at JCK Las Vegas, disability rights advocates spoke about how the jewelry industry can be more inclusive when designing products and thinking about representation in both its hiring and advertising.
“Accessible design benefits everyone,” said Tiffany Yu, an entrepreneur and disability rights advocate. She cited electric toothbrushes, curb cuts, and speech-to-text functionality as innovations originally created with disabled people in mind. “The takeaway here is when you focus on designing with different disabilities or accessibility in mind, you open up your product to so many others.”
Yu, whose right arm was paralyzed in a car accident when she was 9 years old, gave the example of a company that makes a wristwatch for blind people. “Someone who’s blind is able to wear the watch and tell the time, but I still can’t put it on,” she said. “What is inclusive and adaptive for one person may not be for another. We talk about universal design, accessible for everyone. I’m a big fan of inclusive design.”
Molly Kettle, COO of Gamut Management, a talent management company that represents people with disabilities, said making a business inclusive starts with understanding the needs of employees, partners, and customers.
“Are you creating a safe and secure culture where people can disclose they have a particular disability?” Kettle said.
She referred to a recent conversation in which a woman with a disability told her that she didn’t see herself in a jewelry company’s advertising and assumed the product “was not for me.”
“There’s a whole new customer base you can reach by providing products they might need or targeting them in a different way,” Kettle said.
Both speakers underscored the business case for disability inclusivity. “We, as disabled people, control about $21 billion of discretionary income,” Yu said. “We’ve got some money and we want to spend it.”
Top: Molly Kettle, Tiffany Yu, and WJA executive director Jennifer Markas (photograph by Camilla Sjodin)
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