ATU800 – Silverts Adaptive and IZ Clothing with Josh Norris

Hi, this is Josh Norris, and I’m the CEO of Silverts Adaptive Clothing and Footwear, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello, and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson, with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to Episode 800 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on September 25th, 2026. You heard that right, listeners, today is our 800th episode of Assistive Technology Update. We have been coming to you for 800 straight Fridays or just a little over 15 years.

I have to take a few minutes to thank some folks. So, I definitely want to make sure that I thank Wade Wingler and Danny Wayne for kind of coming up with the idea of Assistive Technology Update and putting the original show together about 15 years ago. I suppose I have to give an extra shout out to Wade for allowing me to start hosting and putting together this show when he had to step away. A huge thank you to Nikol Allee for booking all of our guests and assisting me with getting folks on the show.

A huge thank you to all of our guests, including our guest today, who is Josh Norris from Silverts Adaptive and IZ clothing, and he’s on to talk about adaptive clothing and how this can just be really helpful and open up a whole world of access to individuals, but not just Josh, all of the guests that we’ve been able to have over the years for taking time out of their days and for coming on here and allowing me to really just learn a whole lot more about assistive technology and about these amazing accommodations that are out there for folks.

A huge thank you to all the blind and low vision radio stations that pick us up and play our show. And of course, a giant thank you to all of our listeners. Whether this is the very first episode you’ve ever listened to, whether it is the 800th episode you’ve ever listened to, a huge thank you for being a part of this journey. Hopefully, you’ve learned something over the course of time. Hopefully, you’ve found something that maybe could help you, a friend, a family member, or someone that you work with, or maybe you’re just finding out some cool new stuff that’s out there to help folks. A huge thanks of course to the AT Act and to Easterseals Crossroads, where our INDATA Project is based, and just all the great things that they do for folks here in central Indiana and to all our AT programs and all the amazing work that they do all over the state.

We look forward to having 800 more episodes with you folks, and we’re going to start today off, well, with someone else that I definitely need to thank. Need to send a huge thank you out to BridgingApps from Easter Seals of Greater Houston. They’ve been with us since close to the beginning, I believe, on their App Worth Mentioning segment. So, a huge thank you to Cristen and her team, the Amys, as well as Ale for coming on and doing our App Worth Mentioning. So, we will go ahead and start there. Thank you again, listeners, and we can’t wait for the next 800 episodes.

This is Ale Gonzalez with BridgingApps, and this is an App Worth Mentioning. This week’s featured app is called MealTrain. MealTrain is an app that makes it easy to organize meal support for individuals and families during times of need, such as welcoming a new baby, recovering from surgery or coping with an illness. Users can create a shared meal calendar, invite friends and family to sign up for meal deliveries and include dietary preferences, delivery instructions, and other helpful details. Our favorite features were the simple scheduling system and collaborative approach. MealTrain helps reduce the stress of coordinating support by keeping everyone organized in one place. It can be especially helpful for caregivers, community groups, and families who want to provide meaningful support without overwhelming the recipient. MealTrain is available for both Android and iOS devices. For more information on this app and others like it, visit www.bridgingapps.org.

Today, listeners, we are getting all dressed up to celebrate 800 episodes of Assistive Technology Update. We’re excited to welcome Josh Norris to the show from Silverts to talk about adaptive clothing and its importance in helping with independent dressing and looking darn good while doing it. Please join me in welcoming Josh to the show for our 800th show celebration.

Josh, welcome to Assistive Technology Update.

Thanks, Josh. Great to be here.

There’s going to be a lot of Joshes back and forth today, I know that, but that’s all good.

Josh, before we get into talking about the clothing and everything else, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Sure. So, I was formerly a professional poker player, and I did that at the highest levels for about seven years. And when it came time to ask for my wife’s hand in marriage, I went to my father-in-law and quickly asked him if he would bless our matrimony, to which he replied, “Sure, as long as you get a real job.” A distant cousin of mine had started this adaptive clothing business and loved poker and called me up one day and was like, “What do you think? Do you think there could be a place for you here?” I wanted to do something of value in my time. I think poker, as enjoying a bull of a pursuit as it is, it’s gambling, it’s a little inwardly focused. So, I was like, “Can I just do something where I make an impact in the world?” This senior’s clothing company was a little bit of a stretch, but I gave it a shot, and the kindest thing anyone ever did for me was he taught me the business from the ground up.

I started in the warehouse about 15 years ago now, and I very quickly fell in love with everything that adaptive clothing is and does. And what adaptive clothing does is makes a difference every day in the lives of the people who wear our clothing and those who help dress them. In the aggregate, it has really powerful impacts.

No, it definitely does, and I love that you went… I always love finding how people get into assistive technology, adaptations, all these different things. I must admit, poker’s a new one, a new one to come through there, but I can definitely understand. I lived in Vegas a long time ago and was an indoor skydiving instructor, so we all kind of find these paths in great ways. Well, I guess let’s kind of start talking about Silverts. I guess, when was it started?

So, Silverts is a 96-year-old business. It was founded in rural Ontario, Canada, and really came up serving the community and listening to its communities that it served, which I think really lays an effective backbone of what any great assistive tech company can do, which is listen to the people who require it. So, as the customers age, they needed different solutions or they needed the clothes to be driven to their home to try it on. And one day, we were visiting an elderly individual, and she couldn’t even raise her arms anymore to put up the garment. So, the founder cut up the back of a dress, wrapped it around her arms, and the category of adaptive clothing was born.

Nice, nice. I love it. And Josh, for folks who maybe don’t know anything about adaptive clothing, I guess, and I know we can’t go through all of them, it’s not that long of a podcast, what are maybe some of the adaptations made to clothing to make them more accessible for individuals?

Yeah, thanks for the question, and I think it’s something important to clarify. The best way I could help, I think, explain adaptive clothing is to envision a magnetic clothing dress shirt where instead of the buttons on the front, the buttons still are there visibly, but behind them are magnets that simply snap into place. If you have issues with dexterity, maybe arthritis, Parkinson’s, anything of that nature, you can now dress yourself in the clothing that you’ve always worn by simply having the magnets snap into place and being on with your day.

So, I’d say adaptive clothing has a couple of key distinctions. But at Silverts and that IZ Adaptive, which is the other kind of fashion brand of adaptive clothing that we own, our clothing is divided really into self-dressing solutions, so clothing that helps you keep dressing independently for longer, like those shirts or as simple as straps on the side of pants that are easy to pull up and push down for whatever challenges might be. That might be for young individuals who have autism who are learning how to toilet, and it could be for really senior elderly individuals who have continence issues or simply arthritis. So, it really stretches the entirety of that gauntlet.

And then we also have a division of assisted dressing solutions, which is really made for individuals seated in a wheelchair or who can’t dress themselves at all or who, if they’re in palliative care or they’re in rehab, they spend a little bit more time lying down. So, all of these solutions can be donned and off, completely pain and strain-free for both the wearer and the individual who’s helped dressing them. And that’s really the bread and butter of Silverts. We’ve really grown as a company servicing the nursing homes, skilled nursing facilities, long-term care institutions across Canada and now the United States.

Awesome. Awesome. And yeah, I know, whenever we get out, people find out more later. I definitely say go and look because some of them will really surprise you on some of the different ways.

Josh, you kind of brought up IZ Adaptive. Can you tell us the difference, I guess, between them in Silverts or what this line is?

Yeah, so we’re talking about basically the two original adaptive clothing companies. So, Silverts really came up servicing a little bit more senior demographic, a little bit more medical in nature, worked with clinicians to really understand the programs and needs for the staff and residents within some of these more institutional settings. And that’s where the category of the goods that Silverts serves really comes up. IZ Adaptive is a line of clothing that was started by an iconic fashion designer and my mentor in adaptive clothing and good friend as well, Izzy Camilleri, who is, again, a total icon in the fashion world.

Someone reached out to her one day. This individual had been a victim of a terrible but very prominent shooting also in Toronto, Canada. She was getting recognized with an award and wanted an awesome garment to really rock that ceremony and reached out to Izzy, and that’s when Izzy Camilleri learned about what adaptive clothing is. In working to build that single item, this is an individual who’s dressed like David Bowie and some of the biggest stars in the world, learned deeply about what the real design challenges were to make a garment that fits an individual who’s seated in a wheelchair, and it spoke to her deeply. She exited the kind of high runway fashion world she spent most of her career building and started this fashion-based adaptive clothing company that really serves an audience of as young as like 15, 14, all the way through anyone who wants to look stylish who has some dressing challenges.

Again, Izzy’s been a long time friend and mentor. She is the best designer of adaptive clothing in the world. We got together in September of 2025 to see if we could best tackle these challenges together. So, Silverts and IZ Adaptive are now one and the same, and we’re working to bring incredible adaptive clothing designs at the best prices we can to the most people we can help.

I love it. I love it. I love that there’s an option out there to stay stylish, to still be able to wear what you want just in a little bit different way. That’s awesome.

Josh, we mentioned magnets and some other things. I guess, what are some other kind of popular styles and/or types of adaptive clothing out there?

Yeah. I think as an adaptive clothing company, we’ve taken it as a challenge to make sure we have head-to-toe dressing solutions, so we offer categories across shoes, pants, tops, and any kind of accessories that any individual would need. That can be as simple as, on the accessory side, like a blanket that clips to a wheelchair so that it doesn’t fall off the individual’s legs, or more prominently, a towel cape that makes it easy to be warmly and safely transferred from a shower or bath back to a chair and solutions in and around that area.

But in shoes, what we really specialize in is proper fitting footwear for edema and people who have really swollen feet, because of course, when your foot starts to swell, it’s the circumference of the foot that changes, not the length of the foot, but more often people think, “Oh, swollen feet, we got to get bigger shoes.” But wearing larger shoes is what will lead to more slips and falls, and those can be catastrophic. So, what Silverts footwear really specializes is adjusting to fit the foot where it swells in the circumference of the foot. Think Velcro closures that allow for safe fitting footwear throughout the day.

We also do open-back pants. We commonly refer to these as wheelchair pants that essentially have a flap in the back so that a caregiver can dress an individual without them having to press up on their chair to even have to scooch their bum up. The garment simply can be lifted over the legs and it snaps in the back and it’s completely strain and pain-free for the wearer and the individual who’s helping to dress them. A similar concept in a top where you don’t have to wrangle it over an individual’s arms, they don’t even have to raise them. The garment opens in the back, and it is simply snapped into place around the shoulders of the wearer, allowing for quick and easy dressing.

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Josh, I’m sure you have a ton of these, but I know you’ve been there for quite a while starting in the warehouse, moving all the way through. Can you tell me a story about someone’s experience with adaptive clothing and maybe how it was able to make a difference for them?

Oh, well, there’s a lot to choose from.

Well, maybe narrow it down to a few that kind of stick with you.

I’ll tell you the one that sticks with me most because… In so many ways, what we hear the most with adaptive clothing is, “I wish I knew sooner.” I think often people find out that this could help them afterwards. Our biggest challenge is category awareness. Most people simply don’t know the solutions we create exist in the market. So, they look for like, “Oh, my loved one has trouble putting on a top, so let’s get them a triple XL sweatshirt from Walmart, and that way it’ll be really easy to throw it over their head, even though they’re only a medium, or now maybe it’s small. This will make dressing easier,” which I think… I mean, you brought it up, Josh, people want to look stylish. People want to dress in the way that makes them express themselves and feel good about how they present to the world. That’s just a human nature, and I think it’s something we all deserve.

There was one individual who was wearing adaptive clothing, and they later passed, this was a Silverts customer who was living in a nursing home, but for three, four years wore exclusively adaptive clothing. And at their funeral, their partner, their wife at the time, made a stuffed bear and made her own adaptive clothing to dress that stuffed bear, because adaptive clothing had become such a big part of her partner’s life and how they express themselves, and it made such a difference in their lives. After the funeral, they sent us pictures, and then they sent us the bear. It’s deeply moving to know that you’ve had an impact like that. We went on to start a program where we took Build-a-Bears, those massive oversized novelty teddy bears, and we made adaptive clothing for them, and we put them in all the nursing homes that we served. We put QR codes on there, and they became a part of those nursing homes as a result of that story and that incident and that wonderful tribute that was shared with Silverts. I think it’s something I’ll never forget.

I built my entirety of my professional career for this to become my mission in life to make sure that anyone who can benefit from adaptive clothing knows it’s available and we can get it to them at an accessible price point. It really is a game changer, and this is… On the slower days, on the harder days of running the business, I always use this as a North Star to keep me pushing forward and trying to find ways to reach more individuals.

Awesome. Awesome. I love it.

So Josh, talking about affordability and thing, in looking through the website and stuff, can I use my health savings account funds to help purchase adaptive clothing?

Yeah. A lot of our adaptive clothing, especially on the footwear side, has HCPCS or HSA, FSA eligibility, and it has the coding. Simply through the checkout process on the site, you can get a consultation and get a lot of the goods approved based on need. Again, I think like all assistive tech, accessibility is just the key to driving impact.

Oh, most certainly. Most certainly.

And speaking about accessibility, how do folks find out more about Silverts, about IZ Adaptive, and about these amazing clothing accommodations?

Probably our websites have a lot of good information, so that’s www.silverts.com or izadaptive.com are great places to start. We try to make sure that the education and information about the nature of our solutions is clear and always open to feedback. Of course, we’re now working as an official partner of Easterseals to really make sure that we can amplify our network effects and find the right audiences to get products into the hands of people who need them.

Nice. And you just kind of led me right into my next question. I was going to ask you a little bit, could you tell us a little bit more about your partnership with national Easterseals?

Oh, with pleasure. I mean, this has been a dream. I, of course, known about Easterseals my whole life, had the pleasure of crossing paths with Robyn Elefane on the national team for Easterseals, and there was just an instant synergy and match of values and mission, and I think probably most exciting is care. Since we’ve been able to advance our conversations and get to meet the greater team around Easterseals and starting to meet all the affiliates, we just see this giant overlap of organizations who work hard every day, who have care at the center of the mission and getting AT into hands of people who need it or getting the right services into those individual needs or whatever it might be. There’s a scrappiness that surrounds both organizations or combined. And if you throw in IZ Adaptive and combined, we have over 200-plus years of servicing the disability communities.

We signed this agreement in early June, and we are ramping up to a significant overall partnership over the next several years with a lot of exciting milestones ahead. But July has marked our kind of first real campaign that we’ve put in together for Disability Pride Month where a big percentage of our sales are going back to Easterseals, the biggest social impact program we’ve ever run at Silverts. And again, lots, lots more ahead.

Awesome. We can’t wait to see where the relationship goes. Yeah, it’s great whenever you can find just where you share that mission and are able to really be able to get the word out and impact as many folks as you can.

I know you said one of the biggest… I don’t think you used the word frustration, but one of the hardest things is really letting people know that these things do exist and that adaptive clothing is even an option. I just was presenting on assistive technology and stuff to some folks who are all a little bit older, and one lady was mad at me the entire time because she said, “Why didn’t anybody ever tell me about this before?” And it’s like, “Oh, I promise, I try,” but it’s hard to get the word out to everyone.

Josh, thank you so much for coming on here today for celebrating not just 800 episodes of our show, but really just telling us about adaptive clothing, about Silverts, about IZ Adaptive, and just about how these accommodations can really help folks either stay independent, independently dress, can help the caregivers with helping folks dress, and even better, can allow them to stay stylish while they’re doing it. So, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Thank you so much for having me and for your questions and for all the work y’all do. Congratulations on 800 episode, that is no small milestone, and I’ll keep listening in and learning along.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAproject.

Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com.

A special thanks to Nicole Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guest are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners, or this host.

This was your Assistive Technology Update, and I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana.

We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.