How Sensory Product Design Began

I am now the CEO of Sensory Product Design. But the discovery of my own Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD), is how my business was conceived. As a life-long inventor and a six time award winning Industrial Designer, living in a body that has always been challenging. I’ve always felt like I needed to deign my life around pain, serious dyslexia and with the discovery of SPD, that came into play. With each of these revelations at very distinct parts of my life, I quickly realized that nobody was going to make any of these situations better, in fact most the time it was met with quite the opposite. This resulted in amazing gifts! After all my school age years, “faking it” about the dyslexia, I had a wonderful professor sophomore year that on the first day of class, told us about his dyslexia, and I knew that was me! Flash forward to teaching myself to read (starting at the beginning and finishing at the end), I realized that I had been doing a form of speed reading, and of course I had to come up with quite a range of skills to not get caught. So I began to see this thing as a blessing, not a curse. 

I also have struggled with headaches every day of my adult life. I have chased down dozens of doctors, therapies and practitioners trying to find relief. With little to no progress forward. This one was much harder to “design my life around”, but I did as best I could. The part that is a gift, is I understand my body really well now.

Flash forward a couple more decades, to my SPD diagnosis. While I never knew there was such a thing, sensory processing disorder. I certainly knew if I got blinding light in my eyes, my headache would go from bad to worse fast! Same with all my senses, and several triggers within these senses. But the SPD, I want to say was ”easier”. I just found them to be more tangible things I could solve. I was also really dismayed that there were so few resources for adults. Lots for children, which I 100% support — boy would it have been great to know any of these things as a child. But for the many many people like me that have been struggling with not only the triggers, but also (less than supportive) people’s reactions. THIS is why I had to start Sensory Product Design, to help people like me, but also educate people so that they can exhibit more grace, honestly my vision is for all kinds of people to give each other and ourselves more grace & understanding!