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as a pleasant surprise for managing director Patricia Watson, who in her own words, is a newcomer to mail order and runs a company that is “miniscule beside some of the Titans” of the sector.


How did you end up launching Able2 Wear?


I started the business with my colleague Harry Gillespie to offer a stylish and practical range of clothing and accessories to wheelchair users. Generally speaking, I do the research and develop the innovative designs and Harry converts them into patterns and garments. We have worked for over two decades in


the field of specialist garment design. We originally made waterproof and high-visibility clothing for the emergency services, and on obtaining a Gore-Tex licence we added outdoor waterproof clothing for the leading name in hillwalking jackets. After we sold that company we searched for an unexploited niche market and found that no-one was making properly designed clothes for the hundreds of thousands of wheelchair users in the UK. With modern medical science saving and prolonging the lives of injured and seriously ill people, this is a rapidly growing sector of the population that has gone completely unnoticed by the clothing industry. We don’t do tartan rugs and shapeless,


waterproof covers in dull colours. Our clothing range mirrors standard high-street styles, but all are cut properly to be worn sitting permanently. We have also introduced a range to suit the needs of disabled people who don’t use wheelchairs but struggle to be independent.


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What has been your biggest achievement on the job so far? I think our greatest achievement so far has been our expansion to offer a complete range of clothing for disabled adults—everything from waterproofs to underwear. And we now have Junior A2W, meeting the needs of the many children who use wheelchairs. We have been able to grow and progress while other people who have also seen the opportunity have started up and failed. I put that down to our meticulous research and our in-depth knowledge of the market and its unique requirements. Our sales for the last year were up by 30 percent, and for the Christmas trading period were up by 70 percent.


Q&A with... A


Patricia Watson of Able2 Wear


cataloguer of apparel for wheelchair users, Scotland- based Able2 Wear won the ECMOD Award in April 2010 in the category of health and special needs. The win came


What is your greatest day-to-day challenge? As our background is in design and manufacture, I would say that our greatest challenge is in the day-to-day running of a mail order company, which is second nature to people who have worked in the mail order sector for years. There is no tradition of fulfilment houses in Scotland, so we are obliged to do fulfilment in-house. We are self-taught, and I suspect that some of our practices and methods would make the experts wince. Certainly, when I read Catalogue e-business I realise just how much we don’t know.


Looking back is there anything you would do differently? I don’t know how I would have done it up here in Scotland, but I think I would have tried to find some sort of training in mail order management. That could have saved us from always having to learn by our mistakes but also introduced us to the sophisticated fulfilment and customer management systems used in the industry.


What can we expect from the business? We have been asked repeatedly by mobility equipment distributors if they can sell some of our products, and we have had enquiries from companies in Europe and the USA wanting to sell our products there, so that is an opportunity that would also increase our buying power, and which we are currently investigating. We have several new products in the pipeline


which have been developed and tested and are now being sampled, and we will be adding them to our range in time for the winter sales surge.


As a newcomer to the sector, what’s the best piece advice you’ve received? The best piece of advice I ever had was from Andrew Wilson of The Catalogue Consultancy, who told me “a mail order company’s customers are its crown jewels”. This is absolutely true. We have tremendous customer loyalty, with a high repeat purchase rate, and our customers are quick to recommend us to others. Many of our unique products have been developed as a result of requests from customers, who will then wearer-test our prototypes, and their feedback has been invaluable. We send out newsletters on a regular basis to online customers, which costs little and is very effective, but a small company has to use its print budget wisely, and our printed catalogue customers never let us down.


Catalogue e-business www.catalog-biz.com


Whom in the business world do you most admire?


There are people within the mail order sector for whom I have great admiration—for example, Nigel Swabey of Scotts & Co, who has created and developed diverse but massively successful mail order companies. I also admire the courage, stoicism and determination of small-business people who persevere through good times and bad, simply to have their own businesses and serve their customers.


Patricia Watson


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