Teens use fashion to express their individuality, but they can’t do that in the hospital. Starlight Children’s Foundation, a global charitable organization that exists to brighten the lives of hospitalized children, wanted a big idea to empowerhospitalized teens.
We started with a simple insight: teens use fashion to express their individuality. From there, we quickly found the problem we needed to solve: hospitalized teens can’t express themselves through fashion; they all have to wear the same boring hospital gown.
So we collaborated with top designers to create unique hospital gowns teens actually want to wear. We dubbed the initiative, WARD + ROBES.
To execute our idea, we collaborated with designers to create unique hospitalgowns for teens. During the creative process, the designers partnered with medical professionals to ensure the new gowns were not only more fashionable, but were more comfortable for patients as well as more functional for health care providers.
The designers handcrafted each garment so that every single gown was just as unique as the teen who wore it.
Through partnerships with pediatric hospitals, we were then able to gift hospitalized teens across the country with the new and improved gowns. The teens were able to choose the gown that best represented their personal sense of style.
We wanted the greater design community to collaborate with us. So, we provided online specs, patterns and guidelines so they could participate in the WARD + ROBES initiative. Designers from around the world donated their own unique gowns.
Our unique collaboration captured the attention of news outlets around the world. WARD + ROBES was the most shared charitable initiative of the year resulting in a 780% increase in donations to further expand the program. WARD + ROBES has expanded to Starlight’s network of 60 million patients across the globe.