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Reverie Design Studio

Reverie Design Studio occupied the second floor of Reverie Headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn, and it was the room where the brand's philosophy stopped being a tagline and became a textile, a formulation, a closure mechanism, a grip adaptation. The studio was where Reverie's in-house design team--product designers, textile specialists, packaging engineers--worked alongside the freelance collaborators, medical consultants, and disabled community testers who made the brand's products something more than well-intentioned guesses about what disabled bodies needed. The community wasn't consulted about the products. The community was in the room when the products were made.

This was the thing that separated Reverie from brands that claimed to design "with" disabled people. Other companies held focus groups. Reverie had regulars--disabled testers and consultants who came to the studio on a rotating basis, who knew the design team by name, who sat at the worktables with prototypes in their hands and said "this doesn't work for me because" and "have you tried" and "the zipper pull is fine for your hands but my hands do this." The design process was not a funnel that started broad and narrowed to a finished product. It was a conversation that ran continuously, and the studio was where the conversation happened.

Physical Description

The studio occupied the full second floor, a deep rectangular space that shared the building's historic proportions--high ceilings, large windows on the street-facing wall, the architectural character of a building that had been doing something else for a century before Reverie arrived. The renovation had opened the space into a series of interconnected zones: design workstations along the windowed wall, a materials library against the interior wall, a prototyping and construction area in the center, and a testing zone in the back third of the floor where products met the bodies they were being designed for.

The lighting was bright but not harsh--natural light from the windows supplemented by warm LED fixtures that provided consistent, accurate color rendering essential for textile and packaging work. The floor was a mix of hardwood in the workstation areas and commercial carpet in the testing zone, the carpet providing a softer, warmer surface for the hands-on product evaluation that testing involved. Wide aisles between all zones allowed wheelchair and mobility aid navigation without requiring anyone to ask someone to move.

Design Workstations

The workstations along the windowed wall held the in-house team's daily operations: CAD stations for product and packaging design, cutting tables for textile prototyping, and the accumulated tools of a design studio that worked across multiple product categories simultaneously. The workstations were built at adjustable heights, accommodating both the standing designers who preferred to work on their feet and the team members who worked from wheelchairs or seated positions. Each station had adequate surface area for spreading out materials, prototypes, and reference documents without crowding into the neighboring workspace.

Materials Library

The interior wall held the materials library--a floor-to-ceiling organized collection of fabrics, fibers, closures, hardware, packaging samples, and reference materials that the design team drew from during development. The library was organized by category and accessible from both standing and seated positions, with lower shelves holding the most frequently used materials and upper shelves accessible via a rolling library ladder with a locking mechanism. Samples were labeled in standard print and braille, and the most-used materials had digital catalog entries accessible from any workstation.

Prototyping Area

The center of the studio held the prototyping and construction equipment: sewing machines (industrial and domestic), a cutting station, a heat press, and the various tools needed to turn a design concept into a physical object that could be held, worn, tested, and evaluated. The prototyping area was where the design team built the first versions of everything--adaptive fashion pieces, packaging mockups, home textile samples, wellness product housings--and where those first versions were immediately stress-tested against the question that governed every Reverie product: does this actually work for the body it's designed to serve?

Testing Zone

The testing zone at the back of the studio was where community testers evaluated prototypes. The space was designed for comfort and honesty: a seating area with a mix of chairs, a couch, and open floor space for wheelchair users, a privacy curtain for trying on clothing prototypes, and a worktable where products could be examined, handled, and discussed. The atmosphere was deliberately informal--more living room than laboratory--because honest feedback required comfort, and comfort required a space that didn't make the people providing feedback feel like subjects in a study.

Community testers came on a rotating basis, and many were regulars who had been testing Reverie products for years. They represented the range of bodies and conditions the brand designed for: wheelchair users evaluated adaptive fashion for fit and function, people with limited hand dexterity tested packaging closures and grip adaptations, tube users evaluated skincare products for compatibility with medical equipment, people with chemical sensitivities assessed fragrance levels, and neurodivergent testers evaluated sensory properties--texture, weight, temperature--that neurotypical designers might not have flagged. The testers were compensated for their time and expertise, and their feedback was treated not as data to be collected but as design direction to be followed.

Sensory Environment

The studio's sensory environment balanced the practical needs of a working design space with the accessibility standards that the building maintained throughout.

Sound was moderate--the hum of sewing machines during prototyping, conversation between designers and testers, the occasional phone call, and the ambient noise of a creative workspace where people were focused but not silent. The carpet in the testing zone absorbed sound more effectively than the workstation area's hardwood, creating a slightly quieter environment for the conversations that testing required.

Smell followed the building's fragrance-free policy, which was especially critical in a studio handling materials that could off-gas during processing. Ventilation in the prototyping area managed the smells associated with fabric cutting, heat pressing, and adhesive work, and the testing zone maintained the same neutral scent profile as the retail floor downstairs.

Temperature ran slightly warmer than the ground floor, the second-floor position collecting rising heat from below, supplemented by the studio's own climate control. The testing zone was kept at the same warm temperature as the rest of the building--bodies being fitted and tested needed to be comfortable, not shivering.

Accessibility

The studio's accessibility went beyond the building-wide standards to address the specific needs of a space where disabled people were not just visiting but working and contributing to the design process.

All workstations were adjustable-height. The materials library was accessible from seated positions on its lower shelves and via the rolling ladder for upper shelves. The prototyping area's equipment was positioned with wheelchair clearance on all sides. The testing zone was designed for the full range of mobility aids, with furniture arrangements that accommodated power wheelchairs, walkers, crutches, and canes without requiring the room to be rearranged for each tester's arrival.

The privacy curtain in the testing zone allowed clothing evaluation without the formality (or the size constraints) of a traditional fitting room. Adjustable mirrors were available at multiple heights. The worktable was accessible from all sides, and its height accommodated both seated and standing users.

For testers with energy limitations, fatigue, or chronic pain, the testing zone's seating was designed for comfort during extended evaluation sessions: the couch could be used for reclining, the chairs had proper support, and there was no expectation that testing had to happen on a fixed schedule. If a tester needed to rest mid-session, the session waited.

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