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Werable founder Claudia Poh talks adaptive clothing, growing a business and the future of fashion

Russell Marino Soh
Russell Marino Soh • 10 min read
Werable founder Claudia Poh talks adaptive clothing, growing a business and the future of fashion
Claudia Poh founded Werable in 2019, after completing her education in London, Paris and New York (Pictures: Werable, Claudia Poh)
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For many, when it comes to fashion, says homegrown designer Claudia Poh, “you change your body to fit the clothes, not the other way around”.

That relationship gets infinitely more complex for people with disabilities, with details we might not always notice — such as straps and buttons — posing challenges with the seemingly simple task of getting dressed.

Poh is hoping to change the way we see and approach fashion with her label, Werable.

Founded in 2019, Werable specialises in adaptive clothing, designed to meet the needs of people with disabilities. The idea, Poh tells Options, is to forge a more inclusive fashion environment. Rather than being something specially for people with disabilities, she is on a mission to make adaptivity second nature in the clothes we wear.

New approach, different mindset

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Among the creations Werable has put out are dresses that require just one arm to put on, wrap shirts with magnets instead of buttons, and a bolero that turns into an arm sling. The brand also offers alteration services, so clients can make their favourite garments work better for them, as well as a bespoke tailoring service. 

Poh points out that the individual features she has incorporated into her designs — D-rings and magnetic closures, for instance — have actually been on the market for some time. “I’m trying to apply them to as many of our products as possible,” she says. Rather than coming up with entirely new features with customised specifications, it’s faster and more effective for Werable, as a young business, to use these existing solutions. 

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“I always come from the lens of: How long am I going to ask clients to wait, before I give them a solution that works? Do I have the time and resources to innovate every single thing myself?”

But even while she makes the most of what’s available on the market, scaling designs that are meant to fit individual needs remains a challenge. “It’s kind of ironic, if you look at universal design with a one-size-fits-all approach,” says Poh. After all, each person has their own strengths and limitations, with constraints that differ across the board.

Poh says she therefore takes an agnostic approach towards specific diagnoses, instead focusing on wearers’ needs. “I look more at if they are able to raise one hand, if they’re able to use their fingers,” she shares. “It’s not so much about how we label disabilities or life stages, but it’s about the nuances of our bodies and how we move.”

This mode of thinking means Poh is able to create garments with a wider audience. “Those descriptors are way more effective in helping me to design products that can help as many people as possible,” she says. For example, a design she had made for a stroke survivor turned out to be useful also for national swimmer Yip Pin Xiu.

An early start

As she speaks about her journey in the industry, Poh displays a relaxed assuredness well beyond her years. Asked how she got her start in fashion, the 28-year-old cheekily replies: “How far back do you want me to go?” 

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She explains that she’d first gained an interest in the arts from her co-curricular activities in primary school. “I realised that I really did like working with my hands,” she says. It was here, in these early days, that Poh started her first forays into fashion design, even cutting up her mother’s pyjamas to make clothes for her dolls. “She didn’t understand why, until she saw me dressing my dolls.”

While they were not in the arts themselves, Poh’s parents encouraged her to pursue her passion, backing her in any way they could. “They said, ‘we can’t help you in terms of expertise, but we will drive you to Art Friend, we will go to every competition that you attend’,” Poh recalls.

That support led her to the School of the Arts (Sota), but she quickly found that she simply did not have the right resources there to get a steady foot in the door of the fashion industry. “Sota didn’t offer a specialisation in fashion,” she says. “I would have graduated without the portfolio I wanted and needed to get to the places that I wanted to go.”

So she opted to move to London at just 16 years old, to pursue fashion studies at Central Saint Martins. She then moved to France, where she enrolled in Parsons Paris, and later to New York, where she rounded off her education at the Parsons School of Design.

A meeting with Christina Mallon — who has motor neuron disease, a condition that has left her arms paralysed — in Poh’s third year at Parsons solidified her desire to create adaptive clothing. “It was the first time I’d ever designed with a person with a disability,” she recounts. After going through Mallon’s old clothes, the duo came up with the idea of using straps and inflatable structures so she could get dressed more easily.

Building a business

Inspired by this experience, and with an investment from Potato Productions — a venture builder with a portfolio spanning design, technology and education, among others — Poh began to lay the foundations for Werable.

But starting a brand around the start of the Covid-19 pandemic complicated things for Poh, who was also coming off of an extended stint studying overseas. “I didn’t know any people, and I felt even more alone,” she recalls.

Support from the local design community helped buoy her through the initial hurdles. Werable’s first collection in 2020 was developed as part of the Good Design Research programme, an initiative by the DesignSingapore Council (Dsg). A year later, Poh took part in The Bridge Fashion Incubator (TBFI), a programme run by the Singapore Fashion Council that supports young start-ups in the fashion and lifestyle sector.

Werable has since found success, particularly in working with corporates on inclusivity campaigns. The brand recently collaborated with Toyota on the Start Your Impossible Hero Project. Sixteen looks — created by Poh with national swimmer Toh Wei Soong, who also served as creative director of the project — were put up for auction, with proceeds going to the Society for the Physically Disabled.

Poh is also furthering her impact by raising awareness within the design sector through other platforms. In 2024, during Singapore Design Week, she spoke at the Design Futures Forum, presenting a piece of “wearable tech”.

“It was crazy,” says Poh of the red gown, which was worn on stage during her segment by Tamsin Greulich-Smith, director of Dsg’s learning platform School of X, on stage. The concept came about as they considered “the most impossible scenarios”, from the garment hugging its wearer when they were stressed, to changing lengths throughout the day.

Though she acknowledges that these features are not expected in the adaptive fashion of today, Poh says the gown was meant to “paint a possible scenario of what clothing might be able to do”. Projects like this, she adds, give her faith in Werable as a brand. “It made me take a step back and go: ‘Oh, Dsg believes in us, and Tamsin believes in us, to want to make this come alive’.”

Friends in the game

Building a strong network of friends has also helped Poh with developing Werable as a business. “Along the way, I’ve met people who believed in me,” she says. Despite her many achievements, she is quick to credit those around for her success today. “If you don’t have people advocating for the same things alongside you, it can be rather lonely.”

Poh was introduced to Yip through a mutual friend during Werable’s early days. “We just sat down in a Starbucks and chatted,” she recalls of her first time meeting the six-time Paralympic gold medallist. “She’s so empathetic — she put herself in my shoes, and thought about how my business could grow.”

The two would later go on to collaborate on a collection together. That experience reinforced in Poh the idea that Werable would have to balance both sides of her work, with adaptive functions coming together with fashion. “She taught us that it’s important to make things that she would want to wear.”

Such connections have also allowed Poh to develop new products for Werable. A recent conversation with Toh, for instance, led to the creation of a new bag. “When he shifted from his wheelchair to crutches, his sling bag would catch and slide to his front,” says Poh. 

This led them to start working with prototypes of something that would stay in place when he moved around. The result of this experimentation is a bag with a Y-strap which lays closer to the body; a racer-back detail was also added as a reference to Toh’s swimming career.

Noting that people using crutches need at least one arm to hold themselves up while standing, Poh added a magnetic closure, making the bag easier to open and close with one hand.

While the bag has yet to be launched for sale, sign-ups for a waitlist have been opened on Werable’s website. “My father also wants one,” Poh quips, adding that the bag had originally been scheduled for a launch in 2024, before the collaboration with Toyota materialised.

Growing into her own

Keeping up with the fast-paced world that fashion has become is one challenge Poh continues to deal with. Werable’s team today comprises just two full-timers, including her, though she is hoping to bring someone on board to help with business development.

But taking a longer path need not be a drawback, she says, especially as a young person starting out in the industry. “There’s no shame in being a slow, mindful and iterating SME … Because I went slowly, the repercussions that might have come from my mistakes — for lack of a better word — did not cripple me.”

As Poh looks to continue growing Werable, she sees the brand’s role as one that is aimed at supporting people with disabilities, rather than swooping in with a product that may not be relevant for the market. “I’m not going in to tell people what they want; they are there to tell me what they need.”

For now, Poh is focusing on Werable’s business-to-business operations, working with organisations such as hospitals to bring her products into a segment that sorely needs adaptive clothing. “They need someone to come in with design services,” she says. “Now, the goal is to be able to iterate on products within the space and [become] a design expert in healthcare.”

With the knowledge and experience gained from this, she adds, she will be better equipped to roll things out on a greater scale at the consumer level. She is also in talks with Dsg on potentially bringing Werable to other markets, including North America.

As our conversation comes to a close, we can’t help but admire Poh’s steadfastness in her mission, and her humility through it all. “I wouldn’t say starting Werable has been hard,” she concludes. “I know it’s a bold thing to say, but I just think about all the people who pushed me up and all the people who made this happen. We are so lucky to have gotten all this support.”  

 

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