Jan Erickson was a volunteer caregiver. Answering her church’s call to be of service to the elderly and infirm, she worked with a number of women, one of whom broke her heart before inspiring her to dream, literally. That dream became a specialty clothing company with which home health care and hospice nurses and therapists need to be acquainted.
Jan’s church assigned her to a woman who regressed over a period of years and a series of strokes from complete independence in her own home to moving to an assisted living facility and finally to complete dependence in a skilled nursing facility. Unable to dress herself, she spent her day in thin pajamas, worn robes and unflattering hospital gowns.
“Finally,” Erickson told HCTR, “she was limited to transfers from bed to wheelchair and back again, nothing more. I visited her and looked in her closet for something she might wear that would be warmer and less institutional in appearance. But it was obvious to me that she could no longer get into any of the clothes in her closet. She was cold all the time and complained both about being uncomfortable and about how she looked like a sick person.”
That very night, as Jan Erickson tells the story, she had a dream. In it, she saw the design of a jacket that her friend might be able to get into. “I got up in the middle of the night and sketched the basic outline of the jacket,” she remembers. “It included a raglan sleeve* and a kangaroo pocket that doubles as a handwarmer.”
Most importantly, she continued, it goes on from the front and wraps around the back, held in place by overlapping or by the wheelchair itself. Even from a wheelchair, she hoped, her declining friend might be able to put it on and take it off without assistance. “Plus, at jacket length,” she added, “it did not include any of the well-known dangers of those dime-store blankets with sleeves that are so long people have reported serious injuries from tripping over them.”
From dream to national sales and distribution
Erickson’s hopes were realized. Six years later, Janska, LLC is exhibiting at healthcare and fashion trade shows and selling her designs through resellers that include Amazon.com and SkyMall magazine. She believes that one of the smartest things she did was to select Polartec® fabric, named by Time magazine as one of the top inventions of the 20th Century, because it is warm but lightweight, wicks away moisture, stretches, tends to be stain resistent and is machine washable. “A whole list of features just perfect for disabled people,” she said.
The company has added a full line of easy on, easy off accessories since jacket sales took off. Erickson studied the sociology and psychology of clothing and learned that people with mobility and other ADL issues are profoundly affected by being in real clothes rather than “sick people clothes” all day. So she specified that Janska clothing must always be colorful as well as functional as she expanded into leg warmers, mukluks, lap blankets and shawls.
“Research in the fields of both sociology and psychology has shown that, when people are dressed in bright colors, others tend to engage with them more,” she said, shifting easily into teaching mode. “People with dementia respond positively to soft things, even when they respond to little else.”
Vowing never to sacrifice style for the sake of comfort, not skimp on quality for the sake of ease of use, Erickson insists on using both male and female models in her display ads, emphasizing that neither gender has less of a right to look good while living with limitations. “We are as interested in dignity as we are in restoring someone’s ability to safely dress themselves or safely dress someone else,” she explained.
Explaining clothing and safety, she said, “Caregivers tend to lean over too far when dressing someone in a wheelchair, which can become a safety issue. If someone is unable to put on our jacket without help, it is easy for someone else to get them into it.”
Warmth and comfort are just as important as safety, ADL improvement and personal dignity, in Erickson’s opinion. Janska’s mukluks, lap blankets and shawls are sewn with seams on the outside to improve the wearer’s feeling of comfort.
These days, Jan Erickson spends as much time at fashion-oriented trade shows as she does at those focused on the elderly and infirm. “We must have done a good job when we decided to maintain style while adding functionality,” she laughs. “We have boutique resellers who made us develop separate marketing materials that do not mention the words elderly or infirm, so as not to scare of their perfectly able teen and young adult customers, who think the Janska clothing is simply “cool.”
*According to Wikipedia, a raglan sleeve is a type of sleeve whose distinguishing characteristic is to extend in one piece fully to the collar, leaving a diagonal seam from underarm to collarbone. It was named after the 1st Baron Raglan, probably because it was designed to fit his coat for the arm lost in the Battle of Waterloo.
