The Business of Universal Design: Jimmy Zollo Reveals How Joe & Bella Destigmatize Adaptive Clothing
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: technology isn’t just about the digital gadgets, it’s about rigorous research and development that create better products for everyday lives. For a long time, “adaptive clothing” was synonymous with “clinical” or – let’s be honest – just plain ugly. But as the AgeTech ecosystem accelerates, we are seeing a massive shift toward universal design that doesn’t force older adults to sacrifice their identity for functionality. In this episode, I’m chatting with Jimmy Zollo, the CEO and co-founder of Joe & Bella. Jimmy has an incredible story about how a life-changing caregiving experience with his grandparents led him to build one of the most exciting apparel brands in the space today. We’re diving deep into the “Four Fs” of their design process, the surprising data on how different genders shop for clothing, and why making things beautiful is actually a strategic business move. Get ready to rethink everything you know about adaptive wear.
Catch the full conversation on Youtube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or scroll down for the transcript (auto-generated, so pardon any oddities – the bots are still learning!)
Keren Etkin: Jimmy, welcome to the show.
Jimmy Zollo: Thanks Keren. I’m excited to be here.
Keren Etkin: Thank you so much for joining. So could you tell us a little bit about the origin story of Joe and Bella?
Jimmy Zollo: Yeah, absolutely. So the background is I was helping to care for my grandparents. My grandfather had Parkinsonian dementia. My grandmother was a wheelchair user. She was living with progressed cognitive change, and she was living in a memory care community. During the pandemic here in the United States, we got locked out of her commer care community like. Like everyone did at the time, which was just a horrible experience. And we tried every way to effectively communicate with her from standing outside her window to trying to add a tablet in her room and a bunch of things in between. And nothing really worked right. So our best bet was to FaceTime a nurse, hope the nurse would pick up and be able to run on into my grandmother’s room. one of these. Days, I got to see what it was like for my grandmother to get dressed in the morning. So the COVID and the lockdowns brought a lot of challenges and interesting thing about it though is it gave us a lens into her life that we otherwise would not have seen in this case. I gotta see how big the struggle getting dressed was.
Start to finish. It took 20 minutes for her to get dressed. She was crying. She was screaming in praying pain, just from trying to stretch her arm back into her sleeve. I called the nurse afterwards, who, by the way, did everything right. She was kind, she was gentle, she was patient. Clothes were not designed for someone living with the mobility changes that my grandmother was living with. I asked the nurse, Hey, does this happen often when my grandmother gets dressed? And the nurse kinda laughed. She said, yeah, this, this happens every single time your grandmother gets dressed. And by the way, she’s about average for what it is like to live in a memory care community. And we have a lot of folks who are a lot more challenging to get dressed in the morning. So. there had to be some pretty obvious solutions that existed out there. I went online, searched around and found a clothing brand that promised to make dressing less painful for, for older adults. I was a little concerned when I saw what their clothes looked like, but I figured, Hey, this is better than nothing. a few items, sent them to my grandmother, and when the clothing arrived, I FaceTimed her again so I could see her reaction. when she opened the box and looked at the clothes she just said, these are too ugly and I’m not gonna wear ’em. So that was the genesis of Joe and Bella. Our goal is to make dressing faster, safer, and easier, more dignified for older adults, but not do so in a way that would sacrifice a person’s personal identity and sacrifice a way the way in which they look and the way in which they feel about themselves.
Keren Etkin: It’s such a fascinating origin story and I totally get what motivated you to start the company now, why is it, is it a huge challenge to make clothing for people with certain mobility challenges that would also look nice? Why and why? Why aren’t why didn’t the company that you ordered these clothes for your grandma from, I mean, why didn’t they meet her expectations?
Jimmy Zollo: Yeah, it, it’s really hard both from a functional perspective then a quality perspective. And, and, and I think a lot of times other brands are in conflict with those two goals of, Hey, can we execute something that’s gonna make dressing easier, but also can we make it look better? And I
The
biggest challenge
biggest challenge.
is. Who are we trying to help and what, how big of a bucket is there in, in our, there are certain design choices that are made that help some people, but not everybody. so
So
to do early on was essentially form three groups of people that we could come to pro, come to with product ideas, with prototypes, with challenges, and say,
challenges, and
work?
Does this not work? And so the
so the first group was older adults.
living at home, who have the cognitive ability to dress independently. Have physical changes that are limiting their ability to do so. So folks living with early onset Parkinson’s, or maybe they just have extreme arthritis, or maybe they had a stroke, they’re still at
They’re still involved in one investigation.
Need a little bit of help. The second
Second are.
of individuals that are living with. At home and are responsible for helping their loved one get dressed responsible for helping their loved one go to the bathroom. And then the final
The final is,
caregivers or
caregiving
nursing senior care communities across the country who dress their patients, their residents. Fully help their,
helpful with
patients get, go to the bathroom. And, and so
so.
would have solutions that maybe would work for one group or another, or maybe like one and a half groups, but getting something that checked all three boxes was that big challenge then to make it look good. There’s a lot that goes into it.
For, for me, I think I was really fortunate that I found a designer who. Could solve that for us. Who, she came from Lululemon. She designed for figs, just amazing apparel and fashion mind, and was really
Which
about the process of making sure that it looked good. So we studied a lot of different styles.
We spent months and months and months trying to find the right fabric that could look and feel premium, but still
still provide
Unique benefits that
benefits.
to develop functional adaptive clothing.
Keren Etkin: That is really an area that I have no idea in.but it makes, it makes total sense, and you articulated it. So wonderfully, like why it’s so challenging.
So now that you are sort of an established brand in this area, what would you say are sort of the, the most important lessons you’ve learned from the day you launched until this day? We’re having this conversation in late 2025.
Jimmy Zollo: Oh my goodness. There, there, there are so many. And I, I would say the first thing is that we learn how different. Older men are from older women when it comes to what their preferences are. And I’ll give you an
I’ll give you an example. So, so what about.
Age Tech collaborative. Probably about a year ago we ran a survey with them amongst older men and women over the age of 75. And we asked all of them, Hey, go look in your closet and tell us about the last clothing purchase that you made, and. The number one reason, the number two reason, the number three reason why you would make that purchase. And overall, we
Overall, we got.
different reasons from these groups of people of why they purchased something in their closet. Men. The number one reason why they would want something was comfort functionality. Then after that it was price. And, and, and eventually you get down the line is, is how it looks. on the other hand, the last thing they care about was the function the comfort was not much higher on the list. And so for us, when
Surpris.
Function and comfort and usability how we talk about our products to, to men and women, we, we needed to totally reassess our messaging. And, and now how we think about designing these products for women moving forward is very different about how we’re gonna think about designing these products for men moving forward.
To the extent that we’re looking to bring in. A full-time person on our team, specifically focused on developing our, our, our women’s line, because it, it is that different from the
Different.
Are creating for, for men. So that, that’s the first thing that we learned. I, I think the second is that. If we de design the clothes the right way meaning high quality looks good good fabric, good trims, good zippers, magnitudes, you name it. These are clothes that work for everyone. So, so far in Q4 are men’s shirts. Over 40% of them have been sold to men below the age of 35. And for us that is this sort of wild statistic to look at.
’cause that’s not at all who we’re marketing to. That’s not at all who we’re targeting in any way. But,
But,
men who are able bodied who are younger adults, see our products and
your bodies go, oh, that just.
to put on. Or I could put this on in a Zoom and I could rip off the button down after the Zoom.
Or I’ve got a bunch of kids
There,
out to get them to daycare that I’m running to the office. It just faster. It saves me time. So why wouldn’t I want to wear that? So for
so
forward, I think we’re really conscious of, hey, can we, can we design these products universally and make sure that not only is it perfect and helpful for someone living with a wide range of different dressing needs, but also for
also.
who wants to put on a shirt or take off a shirt a little bit faster than they currently are.
Keren Etkin: How do these younger able-bodied men find you? I mean, I bet they’re not going on Google looking for adaptive clothing.
Jimmy Zollo: There. They’re definitely not. A really good question. I think some, some of our social content goes viral, so I think that helps part of it. but also I think, someone sees our clothes the first time, that word of mouth starts to, to pick up. And, and I’ll give an example. It’s, it’s, it’s the holiday season and I know there’s a lot of gifting going on.
And we had someone who purchased what,
Coaches, but what I thought, so
order where they got the same color shirt in a bunch of different sizes and they’re like, oh, this is a person who’s purchasing our shirts
their shirts
is, no idea what size she’s gifting to and is gonna return like three or four of them. Well, it turns out
it turned out.
a mom with three sons and she and, and a dad. And the dad is living with, pretty progressed Parkinson’s at this stage in his life. And she has three sons two in college, one in high school. And she knew, or she thought that her dad would not wear these clothes on his own because he didn’t wanna feel stigmatized in any way, but she thought, Hey, if I get these for my sons, they’re gonna see these and they’re gonna be like, oh, this is really cool and they’re gonna have fun with it.
And when the grandfather sees that, that would then want him that will make him want to wear these clothes and not feel that same level of stigma. And we’ve seen that happen several different times in, in, in different ways. And so then all of a sudden there are younger adults out there wearing our clothes. Which leads to that word of mouth and other folks going out and proactively searching for us and finding our apparel where wherever we happen to be selling it,
Keren Etkin: Wonderful. Speaking of stigma, how do you sort of market or produce ads for adaptive clothing? Without introducing stigma into like what people see?
Jimmy Zollo: it is. It’s something that we think about constantly, so. Start with the
Start with.
We, we use what’s known as people first language. We, we actually consultant with a professor who works at university in California. and so we’ll never say that someone is confined to our wheelchair or they are living challenged living in, we’re saying no.
They, they, they’re living in. We won’t the way we talk, we won’t use elderly. There there are just a number of words that we’ll always avoid, but for us, the, the, the one interesting one is actually adaptive. And adaptive is what people
was what people,
as, which is totally fine, but I think there
but I
stigma that comes with the word adaptive
note.
Makes it that the clothes are inherently different. when you’re older and what you’re able to do is changing and maybe you. Just had to move into a memory care community and you had to leave your house that you’ve been living at for 30, 40, 50 years. Saying now you have to wear clothes that aren’t yours and they’re adaptive, comes with a stigma. It, it, it, it’s, it’s this sort of emotional inflection point that on top of every other emotional change that are going on throughout people’s lives. So
So
want to say, now these, these are really great shirts or these are really great pants, and by the way, they happen to be cool and have some different. Change that will make dressing faster or safer, easier for you. So how we think about the
we.
is that we want to do everything that we can to normalize and not stigmatize. And now that’s starting
Now I started
over to our photography and, and how we show and represent the product. So
products.
wanna focus on that functionality there, but we wanna show a, a range of adults wearing their clothes from. adults living with physical and cognitive changes to younger, fully able bodied individuals who look great wearing our clothes as well.
It’s the, the goal is to be universal and we think that the more universal adoption that occurs, the more that we can help those older adults who would most benefit from our apparel.
Keren Etkin: Absolutely, and I mean, it’s really a no brainer, I think for people who prioritize comfort. If you like, if they find you and they like the designs, it’s really a no brainer to just get their clothes from your online store. I mean, they’re gonna get clothes anyway, so why not? Why not get something that’s faster?
Before we hit record, you told me about this really cool. Zip up hoodie that I, I honestly would love to get my hands on. So can you tell us a little bit about, about that one?
Jimmy Zollo: Yeah, the absolutely, so has been a passion product, of mine for, for a while. So my, my grandfather, he wore a hoodie. Every single day. Was all he would wear. It was a, it was his black hoodie and jeans and, and I still remember
To.
he had to stop wearing his normal hoodie and move to a zip up. And even that was, hard. He was living with Parkinsonian dementia and as he ages, tremors progressed more and more and he was no longer able to then the zipper. But. He would end up just wearing it open and when we’d see him, we’d zip it up for him so he could stay warm. So I always wanted to make a hoodie and sort of make it in his honor.
And, and, and that’s what we’ve done. So we have a zip up hoodie that is wrapping up a Kickstarter. Now, by the time this airs, it will be available on Joe and Bella and probably on Amazon as well. And. What we’ve done is the zipper itself, that the latch on the zipper is magnetized. So you can actually latch the zipper with no hands.
If your hands are in your pocket, you just sort of push them close together. It latches on its own. And then there’s a big pull loop, so you can put one finger on in there, in, in zip on up. So someone living with Parkinsonian dementia like my grandfather or someone with arthritis, can put on a hoodie independently now a whole lot faster.
And we might even come out with kids versions at
Versions at some point.
But we, we sort of. Went all out for this product. So it’s ultra premium, soft, comfortable, warm fabric that that’s stretchy. We, we played around with the fit a lot. I was obsessed with the size and the shape of the hood so that it sort of nicely rounds around your head so it won’t sort of pull back
And I go back
too
and not two pieces of
Of time on this product and I’m really, really proud of it and I’m excited to bring it to market and I am just excited
Saturday.
it’s something that my grandfather would’ve worn every day. And it, it’s, it’s an owed to him and the first time we’ve really gotta do something in this way for him.
Keren Etkin: I really can’t wait to try it. I wear hoodies almost every day when it’s winter, and I know how hard it is to just to find the perfect hoodie. It’s, it is no small feat. So how long does it take from, like, from the moment this idea came to mind until it is like. Ready, like you have boxes of it ready in, in your warehouse, and it’s ready to ship.
Jimmy Zollo: So the absolute best case scenario, the fastest we’ve ever developed at a product has been nine months. have other products that we’ve been working on for over two years that close to being ready because we’re not happy about where they’re at. So it kind of kind depends. But our process is this.
We start with first, with, quantitative
Quantit of data.
Us, meaning we will. Follow Google search trends, we’ll follow Amazon search data. We will, we will look at what larger apparel brands specifically targeting older adults are, are making what’s working there and see, hey, is there something in our line that is really obvious that maybe people are searching for right now that yet did, that does not yet exist on the market or that we can just. Have a better mouse trap for when that answer is, then yes, we then move to these qualitative groups, these three groups of people that I mentioned before, and, and, and see if the need is there for all of them. And if the answer is yes, we then, then at that point go to our designers. we follow process that we call the four Fs, which stands for fabric fit, function, and Fashion, which is sort of like this 1, 2, 3, 4.
For how we then develop the product. So the first thing we do is finding the right fabric, which also happens often to take the longest to do depending on the specific product, because we need a lot of things that, that work. It’s gotta be something that is antimicrobial. It’s something that maybe is water or stain resistant.
Maybe it’s wrinkle resistant. It’s something that has to be very durable because we’re thinking about clothes that are gonna be thrown into a big industrial wash. It’s things that if we wanna do something that’s a hundred percent content, that we want to see how it does if we pre shrink it the fabric.
So when you get it and you, you wash it yourself, you’re not worried about it shrinking. When we finalize the fabric, we then work on the fit. So we design it specifically for an older adult body. So for something like a shirt. We’ll do what’s known as dropping the arm the shoulders, we’ll enlarge the arm holes.
We’ll have the back of the shirt hang a little bit longer. Then we, once we’re good with the fit, we then start layering on the function which could be magnets or zippers or snaps. And. we go through this and add in the function, we then start creating prototypes. Prototype typically takes about three weeks to make and get to the us. We will wash, test it, we’ll wear test it, we’ll bring it into memory care communities. We’ll bring it into senior housing groups, see how it performs. Get a lot of notes. We’ll do a fit and a size test. we, we get it right early on. Other times we could get to prototype 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and on until we’re, we’re happy with where that product is. And, and once the prototype is approved, we then start deciding, all right, what colors or prints or patterns should we go with? But that’s always that final step is the, the, the actual fashion part of it. But. Equally as important. ’cause if it doesn’t look good, if it doesn’t look like what people want to actually wear or reminds ’em of something that’s in their closet no one’s gonna purchase it.
No one’s gonna want to wear it or feel good about themselves. So we need to sort of check every box until we get there. Okay.
Keren Etkin: That is a really complex and long process. It sounds, and it sort of makes me wonder how long did it take you to have enough inventory? Or enough models for like a legit online store that you could launch and be proud of. And also how did you fund all of this before you launched?
Jimmy Zollo: Yeah, it, it, it, it was really hard and we still, we would love to have so much more. We, we get emails every single day of people saying, Hey, I love your products. My, my husband or my son, my, or I wear these pants every day, or I wear these shirts every day, but can you also have short sleeves or Can you use shorts?
Or you can have a heavier winter weight. And the answer is yes, we want to do all of that, but we need to be able to. successful now and have a positive cash flow now so that the next 12 months we’re able to add to our line and continue to grow and operate efficiently. It’s, it’s tough. The first products, or the first time we officially launched, we actually just launched with one pant and that was it.
And that was sort of the foundation of the business and we slowly started adding products as we went along. I was able to
I
a little bit of capital after we
after we launched,
From a few investors who saw our mission and believed in it, and it was primarily folks connected to senior housing or senior care in some way within the us.
And, really grateful for their support and they’ve been able to get us to, to where we are now. And we still don’t have all of our inventory issues figured out. We we’re selling out, which is great,
which is great
a lot of stuff in
lot.
and we’re pushing to get more inventory in Q1, but we’ve, we’ve got a long way to go and a lot more products that we, we hope to bring to market over these next several years.
Keren Etkin: What was it like for you to really dive deep into this industry because you don’t have a specific in fashion design.
Jimmy Zollo: No, I know,
I.
I, I know still very little about fashion. I know, know a lot about the industry, but coming in, I, I knew nothing. I, my background, I was early on in GrubHub in Chicago, which was an online food delivery startup. And then post GrubHub. I launched my first business, which was Consumer Insights and Data, and we were working with a range of clients from Ford to Reebok to Disney. But our most important client ended up being A A RP. And we are running an annual project with them called Hacking Longevity that looked at the future of caregiving. and aging within the us, amongst the three youngest generational cohorts. And that for me became this massive passion project in some way, a source of deep frustration because a lot of brands in the US outside of a RP just did not care or want to listen to what’s what’s going on in the US and the demographic changes that are occurring here. I knew that I couldn’t do this on my own. So I was fortunate to find a designer who believed in the mission. I actually chased her for several months and she had said no to us a few times. But what ended up happening was she got a present for her grandmother who was in her nineties, and the grandmother couldn’t wear it.
And, and I talked to our designer the next day and she sort of. Understood at that, and she since said that this is the most important work of her life. And she, I am very fortunate, has guided us through what it’s like to work in the fashion space, how to find manufacturers, who to work with, how to work with them, how to test products, bring them to market. Without
That.
we wouldn’t, we wanna be close to where we are. We probably wouldn’t have a product to market yet.
Keren Etkin: It just emphasizes how important it’s to have someone on the, on the founding team with domain expertise. Especially in, in, in an industry that is so complicated like this supply chain. Like I, I can’t even imagine the amount in the number of moving parts.
Jimmy Zollo: Yeah, that’s the least fun part of the business. Track tracking which pallets of inventory are in which boat by which country, and trying to figure out when they’re gonna arrive and how fast they’re gonna clear the ports and what the duties or tariffs are gonna be on the inventory that’s coming in. It is a little bit of a an it, it’s an ongoing challenge and, and for, for us, of course, but, any business that is in this world, it just, it is a constant change because there are new laws, new tariffs, new regulations, how freight works is constantly changing. Where there, there, there are fewer boats now coming to the us than there were 12 months ago. And so freight prices are going up.
So how do we combat that without increasing our own prices so that it is a constant battle too. Get the right amount of inventory here at the right price that we can then sell to our customers who are sort of desperately waiting for more inventory, more product.
Keren Etkin: I think it sounds to me that. Figuring out how to get inventory for your desperately waiting clients is a good problem to have. Is there any advice you can share with founders in the audience for just starting out building their own company to serve the older population?
Jimmy Zollo: And I, I could probably talk about this for a day straight. What, what, what I would say is something that we learned or knew inherently early on was, was, and something that we talk
To.
Is anyone who’s been lucky has had a Joe or Bella in their life, whether that’s a parent, a grandparent, a friend, a neighbor, a cousin. A teacher someone who has deeply impacted their life, who is now going through or had gone through and challenges related to aging. And because of that because pretty much every founder in this space that I’ve ever spoken to has, has a story similar to mine. Be because of that universality of, of the problems we’re trying to solve, it makes it easier to. with folks that can help you, and there are a lot of folks in this space who can help you, but there are also a lot
Are
folks in
different.
never thought about. Aging or the age tech community who care a lot about their parents or care a lot about their grandparents, who, when they hear what you’re building will want to lean in.
Like we’ve seen folks in the fashion world who had never thought about adaptive before, want to lean in and help us or, folks in just totally unrelated, like the sports world even we’re, we’re, we’re actually soon to have our first sponsored athlete, which is gonna be really cool and fun. Who, who have stories to tell. and so that would be my biggest piece of advice is know why you’re getting into it and, and share your story. Because you’ll connect with a lot of different people about that. And you’ll be able to out punch your weight class as a result.
Keren Etkin: It is just fantastic, fantastic advice and I, I, I wanna believe that many founders in this ecosystem are already sort of tapping into the people who just have. A aging, an aging loved one, and they just wanna help. And I, I think that is sort of also what makes our ecosystem so unique is that see, people really do wanna help each other because everyone understands that this is a universal human thing that connects us all.
So that was actually my last question. Is there anything that we didn’t talk about that you would like to add? Any call to action to people in the audience?
Jimmy Zollo: No, just th thank you so much for having me. For people in the audience, please feel free to check us out, joe and bella.com. You can find us on any of the socials and. If you have any feedback about what we’re doing, how we’re doing and the types of products you might wanna see, the colors, the pattern, SPRs, any of that we love feedback because we are only as strong as the community that we have built and are relying on.
So please feel free to, to reach out and let us know what you all think.
Keren Etkin: Thank you so much, Jamie. Thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It was an absolute pleasure chatting with you as always.