Building For Everyone

CHAPTER 12The Many Shades of Nude: Product Inclusion in Fashion and Retail

Imagine how people of color felt when all the “flesh” colored bandages on the market were light pink. What is this saying to certain consumers? Is their flesh not flesh? Imagine how a person must feel when the XL or plus sizes a store carries are too small. Think how someone in a wheelchair must feel when he goes shopping and cannot reach half the items on the shelves without having to ask for assistance.

If you cannot imagine the frustration an underrepresented consumer may feel in the retail space, think about a situation in which you've gone to a website on your phone and it wasn't optimized for mobile use. The text is too tiny to read, and when you zoom in, you can see only a small portion of the page. You try to rotate the phone, and the page header takes up so much screen space you can't see anything else. Exasperated, you may have given up and left the site or headed off to look for a site with similar content. The experience is certainly different, but the feeling of exclusion and frustration over being denied access to something you need or want is not a positive one.

Consumers who do not conform to the parameters established by the majority of the population are often forced to feel as though they have been condemned to live in a world that was not designed for them. They may be like most of the population in every other way, but due to one dimension of diversity that singles them out, they ...