![]() ![]() We did it for two weeks in 2017 as a Black Friday idea. So we created this “mystery box” concept, where people shopped on our website, not knowing at all what they would receive-they’d have to trust us. Truthfully, when you are blind or visually impaired, trust is so important: you have to trust that the guy who’s crossing the street can see the streetlight and isn’t just walking in traffic, that a cashier is giving you the right change, and that the waiter is giving you a good recommendation. Who gets credit for the Shop Blind Challenge?īryan: This is going to break my heart. That’s when we invested in adding more people, upgrading the production, and hiring a team to help us build a proper ecommerce website. We had no employees, other than a part-time assistant. By the end of January, we had six months of back orders. That led to a windfall of press coverage, including NBC Nightly News two weeks later. We were invited to be on The Ellen DeGeneres Show on January 4, 2017. We suddenly saw some traction and started to get a few local news inquiries. A friend who was a part-time videographer did a video on our story, which we put on social media. It was “Let’s do something nice for the Foundation Fighting Blindness” while making shirts that we would like to wear.īrad: When we launched in May 2016 at a Foundation Fighting Blindness event, we had a website and products to sell to that community. It didn’t start with a big business aspiration. When we realized we’d bought the exact same shirt, we thought that making such shopping experiences easier could be a fun way for us to make this research field tangible. If you are visually impaired or blind, shopping can be a pain if you can’t see the sizes, labels, prices, or colors. We went into a clothing store and lost track of each other. And we’d always been close to the Foundation Fighting Blindness, which had funded some of that trial’s early research. Yannick was one of the first patients treated in a gene therapy clinical trial, and it reversed his condition. In 2016, Bryan and I were walking around New York talking about a kid named Yannick Duwe, who had a rare eye condition called Leber congenital amaurosis, which usually causes complete blindness. Where did the Two Blind Brothers idea come from?īrad: It was a serendipitous moment. Now, running a business, a lot of those same skills are necessary: being your own advocate, trying everything you can, working around problems, and adapting to bad situations. Their effort was really important to our development at that age. Our mom also said they would try to guide us into activities and friendships without telling us what we could or couldn’t do. But they kept the ship even-keeled throughout the storm. They knew that we were going to pick up on whatever cues they put out, so they told us that, yes, it would be a challenge, but we’d figure it out-secretly, though, they were devastated. We attribute a lot of who we are today to them.īryan: As we’ve gotten older, we’ve been able to talk to our parents more candidly about that time. We’re lucky that our parents never made us feel like we were going to be less capable. I got diagnosed five years after Brad.īrad: I have a vague memory of when Bryan was diagnosed part of me was secretly happy to have a companion in this. Were you diagnosed with Stargardt disease at the same time? How did your parents respond?īryan: We were both diagnosed at age seven. I moved to Boston and then New York, doing sales for big data companies. Brad did investment banking and private equity work in New York. ![]() ![]() What did you do before Two Blind Brothers?īryan: We grew up in Virginia and both graduated from UVA. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |