It seems like it would be easy enough to give an approximate dollar figure, but there isn't one. "We donate 100% of profits at the end of the year to charitable foundations, programs, and researchers focused on our mission." This seems to avoid the question. Here's what I gathered from scouring their website: It's already annoying enough when people ask me how I dress myself or know what I'm wearing I don't need a company like their's only playing into that stereotype. They've really rubbed me the wrong way-the whole 'shop blind' challenges bothers me a lot as someone who's both blind and quite into fashion. “That’s why we have the arcade games, to duke it out whenever we have an argument.I do not, but really glad someone else is asking this question. “It can get a little intense,” says Bryan. Now, they’re focusing on fashion full-time, and have hired three employees who work in the brothers’ shared living-and-work space near Canal Street. (The $30,000 check from the host helped, too.) Two Blind Brothers sold its first shirt last May, but it wasn’t until Ellen DeGeneres invited the entrepreneurs on her show in January that they could quit their day jobs, due to the They sent photos to their nonvisually-impaired friends for feedback. “We spent about six months debating whether the sleeves should be a quarter-inch longer,” says Bryan. “And then once we got that we were like, ‘Great! Now, how do you make a shirt?’”Ī friend tipped off Bradford and Bryan to a cut-and-sew manufacturer in Midtown, where the owner whips up samples based on the brothers’ specifications. “We probably touched 10,000 fabric swatches,” says Bryan. Stephen Yangīut the fashion newbies had a lot to learn. “We just thought that it would be a really great way to interact with the community, but also expose to other folks as well,” says Bradford. It was during a shopping trip to Bloomingdale’s - spent touching dozens and dozens of shirts in search for the softest one - that the two thought of starting a clothing company. The brothers currently have 20/400 vision, which means that they can see colors and shapes but no definition.īradford went to the University of Virginia and moved to New York to work at an investment company, and Bryan followed in his footsteps, landing a job in data sales after also graduating from UVA. (The disease, which affects 1 in 10,000 people in the US, is genetic, though no one else in their immediate family has it.)īy the time they each graduated from high school, they’d had learned to read Braille and carried magnifying glasses in order to read type.
The Mannings, who grew up in Charlottesville, Va., were diagnosed with Stargardt disease, which gradually erodes the patient’s central vision, when they each turned 5.
“But we did have to call in a lot of favors.” A Two Blind Brother shirt, featuring Braille writing. “We do have an edge when it comes to fabrics and responding to touch,” says Bradford, when asked how two guys with a rare degenerative eye disease would go about designing clothes. Their New York City-based online label, Two Blind Brothers, which launched a year ago, offers supersoft, Braille-enhanced T-shirts and henleys from $30 to $125, for both men and women - Richard Branson is a spokesman - with all of the proceeds going to the Foundation Fighting Blindness, which conducts research to help eradicate blindness. Bradford and younger brother Bryan, 27, are legally blind. It wasn’t a dig at their sartorial sense. “Our dad was like, ‘You guys can barely dress yourselves!’”
“I think they were a little confused,” says 31-year-old Bradford. When brothers Bradford and Bryan Manning told their parents they were leaving their finance jobs to start a joint fashion line, their parents laughed.
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