DESIGN FOCUS: After two years of research, Lucy Jones has launched Ffora for the disabled community.
Post-Parsons Jones worked as a social innovator for Eileen Fisher through a 12-month residency arranged through the CFDA. After being Involved with the company’s take-back program and its Remade collection, shr left Eileen Fisher in 2016. She then created some commissioned pieces for the Museum of Arts Design, and the Museum of Modern Art, at the requests of curators at both institutions. After doing these creative projects, Jones decided in June 2017 to start her own company and “to put herself to work.”
Her brand’s name Ffora is a riff on the Latin word “fora,” which means forum. “In our focus groups, it felt like everyone had an opinion, a place to say and everyone’s voice was accounted for,” Jones said. (The label’s double “F” is a nod to her homeland of Wales where that is very common in Welsh vocabulary.)
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The direct-to-consumer brand debuted in the U.S. Tuesday with a few accessories. The proprietary attachment piece retails for $49, the cup holders are $25, one crossbody bag is $108 and another style is $138. “I believe that great iconic brands are built on a really concise assortment of products. The disability community has constantly had to adapt and modify. It felt like a modular product offering really fit in to how they live their lives,” Jones said, claiming that the attachment can accommodate 21 manual wheelchair brands and more than 170 different models. She also noted the crossbody bags were designed to appeal to a wide range of people.
With a patent for the modular attachment system, Jones said “the design was left very open-ended with the ambition to potentially license to other brands in the future. We want to make sure that we can raise the bar in designing for people with disabilities. We also want to help other brands serve this huge demographic of people. Doing brand collaborations would be a wonderful way to show these products can work on wheelchairs.”