Slick Chicks Partners With WCMX First Women’s World Champion Exploring What It Means To Celebrate Disability

Sensitivity around diversity and inclusion mainly focuses on race, nationality and gender. However, discussions and awareness should extend to encompass people with disabilities. Although ableism within the community is slowly declining, there’s still room for improvement and opportunities to make everyone feel included.

Slick Chicks, a company bridging the gap between fashion and function founded by Helya Mohammadian, is making clothing accessible for all types, sizes and handicaps with its expansion from undergarments to now offering apparel. Mohammadian and her team decided to expand the Slick Chicks assortment after witnessing a growing demand for more accessible clothing.

Since its 2012 idea inception, the company has operated under bootstrapped operations, only raising a small round of $600 thousand. As the company expands into new markets, Mohammadian is in the process of a funding round to raise capital to support the company’s growth both locally and internationally. Last year Slick Chicks launched with QVC and went on air with QVC Live in the Fall of 2022. It was the first time an inclusive model and intimate brand was featured on QVC Live. Additionally, it has an ongoing partnership with the American Cancer Society and will be launching a new campaign with them in Q4 featuring one of the Slick Chicks ambassadors.

Last month, Slick Chicks teamed up with Angel City Sports for Any Other Day, a campaign celebrating the accomplished writer and champion adaptive athlete Jamey Perry. It highlights how Perry balances life as a mother, writer and athlete, exploring what it means to celebrate disability, an ingenious way to live.

“When we set out to create the Any Other Day video,” Mohammadian stated, “we wanted to express through Jamey’s story that lives are always evolving. With the right tools and mindset, no matter our age or ability, we can all take on a new challenge, whether physical, mental or emotional, just like any other day. Additionally, a lot of people don’t even know what ableism is. They don’t know that they’re doing it or that they’re contributing to ableism. That’s part of why we wanted to do this [campaign] video.”

Mohammadian connected with Perry through the Angel City Sports women’s wheelchair basketball program. When the two women met, their conversation turned to how people can be more inclusive in general, which led to Perry being featured in the campaign.

During the interview, Perry expressed that she’d like the story told of her not to focus on how she wound up in the wheelchair. There’s much more to her narrative; it’s not the ending, it’s just the beginning. So asking is part of the ableism that people like Mohammadian and Perry are trying to change the perspective. “It [the story] is something that becomes the story for disabled people,” Perry states. “What it does is it creates the assumption that that is a piece of information that people are entitled to. I have had people literally, as I’m passing them on the street, I don’t know them, ask, ‘What happened to you?’ It’s none of your business.”

As industries change and cultures shift, so do people’s mindsets. It’s no longer just about using the proper or politically correct language; it’s about taking action.

Perry continues, “We’re actually going back to identity-first language, where it’s non-disabled, you can say it; it’s not a dirty word. So I identify as a disabled woman. I’m a disabled person. And that’s reclaiming that word.”

There are many forms of disabilities that people deal with on a daily basis, but that doesn’t mean, especially for women, that they can’t feel confident or sexy. Mohammadian’s pivotal career moment came when her sister experienced complications from a C-section. The post-surgery recovery left her feeling debilitated for several weeks. A major issue was just bending over.

In wanting to help her sister, she discovered a much larger issue. Many people have trouble just getting dressed—the genesis of Slick Chicks. Now, with partners and ambassadors like Perry, Mohammadian is pivoting an industry exclusive to able-body individuals showing that anyone can be confident, radiant and sexy in what they wear.

“When you look up accessible jeans, you’ll find some, but they’re built for someone who is older who has a caregiver,” Perry states. “So I was immediately impressed that it was young and there items like midriff sweatshirts—things that women and girls of any age are interested in wearing as a fashionable piece, not as just a functional thing. And I loved that right off the bat.”

In addition to playing in the basketball league and now starring in campaigns, Perry is a WCMX, wheelchair motor cross, champion and Hollywood writer who sold one of her scripts for television.

As the newfound friends continue to transition mindsets and break the stigma around disabilities, they focus on the following essential steps:

• Keep your why at the forefront of your actions; it will create a manageable and achievable strategy.
• Focus on who you are helping and how you can make their lives easier no matter what service or product you offer.
• Embrace the skills you struggle with, accept them and continue to move forward; connect with the people who complement your strengths.

“The core mission behind what we do, and not just making inclusive products, is we try to be inclusive in everything that we do from the products that we make to who’s making them to who’s working with us,” Mohammadian concludes. “There’s so much diversity within our team within our company, we wanted to have that in the way that we showcase our brand and we tell stories. So we wanted something authentic and that spoke to who we are as a company and our products.”