The Shoe Fits

A space dedicated to bridging fashion and inclusivity.

Role

Brand & Experience Designer, UX Researcher

Industry

Inclusive Brand Marketing

Duration

4 weeks

Overview

Accessible fashion is becoming more common, but it is rarely marketed as stylish, sexy, or expressive. The Shoe Fits challenges the idea that adaptive clothing's only definition should be function. This campaign reframes inclusivity as self-expressive and fashion-forward, using a branded website, podcast identity, and poster campaign to advocate for representation that feels fun rather than minimal.

Discovery

Problem

More and more brands have been developing accessible fashion, but it often lacks the boldness, style, and expressive identity present in mainstream fashion.

Research & Insights

“The goal is to create mass-produced products. Disabled people aren’t a significant enough market for folks to pay attention to.”
- Bruce Darling, president of the Center for Disability Rights

Pain Points

Limited size ranges including height and width restrictions, inaccurate size charts, lack of exposure for smaller inclusive brands, limited options for people with mobility issues

User Stories

After speaking with people with fashion accessibility issues, the best solution was to be create platform to share brands, recommendations, and hacks, which would include a user forum, and a weekly podcast. This way, users could get their own space to hear from others in their community.

Structural & Visual Analysis (with Skims Adaptive)

A comparison between Skims’ standard bra search and adaptive search reveals small but important differences in scale and presentation. While the adaptive search result only yields 4 results, the search 'bra' yields 129.

Looking at the results visually, the non-accessible results show very editorial styling, with models' faces in glamorous makeup, hair done, and sensual expressions; The accessible search reveals a stark contrast of faceless models in wheelchairs, primarily to show the function of the garments.

This contrast highlights a key opportunity: accessible fashion can exist with the same stylistic energy and cultural presence as the main collections.

Discovery

Problem

More and more brands have been developing accessible fashion, but it often lacks the boldness, style, and expressive identity present in mainstream fashion.

Research & Insights

“The goal is to create mass-produced products. Disabled people aren’t a significant enough market for folks to pay attention to.”
- Bruce Darling, president of the Center for Disability Rights

Pain Points

Limited size ranges including height and width restrictions, inaccurate size charts, lack of exposure for smaller inclusive brands, limited options for people with mobility issues

User Stories

Structural & Visual Analysis (with Skims Adaptive)

This contrast highlights a key opportunity: accessible fashion can exist with the same stylistic energy and cultural presence as the main collections.

Define

Target Audience

This campaign was designed for:

People who require adaptive or accessible clothing and want more expressive options.
Fashion-conscious consumers who value inclusive brands.
Younger audiences who expect representation and authenticity in brand messaging.

Campaign Strategy

This campaign needed to feel cohesive and interactive. Instead of a single advertisement, I developed a well-rounded system that could help spread the campaign to multiple types of platforms, including:

A branded website
A podcast concept centered on inclusive fashion conversations
A bold poster campaign
A cohesive, trendy social media campaign

User Journey

Defining the user journey was vital to this project in order to emphasize and understand how they might go through the process of finding an adaptive or accessible fashion item.

Develop

Brand Identity

The visual identity of The Shoe Fits embraces confidence through each design decision.

Design Decisions:

Modern, editorial feeling typography
Strong visual hierarchy to emphasize messaging
High-contrast color palette, with deep red serving as the primary color
Confident, assertive language

The brand tone is direct, celebratory, and fun!

Website & Podcast Mockup

The website functions as the central campaign hub.

Key Features:

Visual storytelling that blends fashion editorial aesthetics with inclusivity
Podcast integration to extend the campaign into conversation
Clear calls to action encouraging engagement and community

Poster & Social Media Campaign

The advertisement and social media pieces of this campaign were the most important tools to convey the feeling of The Shoe Fits to new audiences.

a cell phone with a yellow rectangular screen

a pair of cell phones on a concrete block

Deliver

Outcomes

By the end of the project, I delivered:

A cohesive campaign identity and messaging direction
Extensive research on my audience's goals, needs, and pain points
Podcast concept + visual system that extends the campaign
A poster & social media design built for quick impact and shareability

Reflection

This project pushed me to think beyond just designing an interface, and taught me how to see the bigger picture in a short amount of time. It gave me the opportunity to try new concepts, especially in a marketing campaign-style project format, allowing me to see how I might be able to shift my perspective on designing as a service. I also felt that this project let me go from wanting to make something accessible, to asking myself if it felt stylish, empowering, and relevant to real wants and needs of disabled shoppers.

As this was one of my first projects where I really got to interact with accessibility as my main focus, going forward I would want to expand this concept into a bigger, testable experience, and doing some user testing to help validate messaging and design choices with users.