When Getting Dressed Hurts: A Founder’s Glimpse at Building for the Unseen

By: Vaishnavi Myadam

When MBA student Grace Nie 2Y ‘27 suffered a fracture on KWEST and still needed to attend classes, she expected the hard part to be to keep up with everything. Instead, it was getting dressed. Regular clothes required lifting or twisting she couldn’t manage, and the adaptive options online felt nothing like something a real patient would want to wear. Even basic buttons were nearly impossible to manage one-handed. 

That frustration became the starting point for Fracture Club, a six-person team that is co-building clothing with real patients, occupational and physical therapists, and surgeons. Her team, which includes Kellogg classmate Arpan Roy 2Y '27, NU undergraduates, Medill Integrated Marketing Communications Master’s students, and a part-time designer, formed organically as people discovered Fracture Club and asked to get involved. Their goal: make clothing that works for people with limited mobility, feels good, and still looks normal—something you can keep wearing after recovery. 

Discovering a Market That Technically Exists—But Barely Works 

Before building anything, the team surveyed 150 people. Only 30% even knew post-surgery or adaptive shirts existed. And among those who did, most didn’t want to wear them. The products they found were “too medical,” too low-quality, or too expensive. In fact, they are modeled on people who didn’t appear injured at all. The experience reinforced an unusual insight: this is a category that exists on paper, not in practice. 

It also surfaced a deeper truth about “invisible problems.” Recovery is temporary and often handled quietly at home. People improvise, tolerate discomfort, or simply push through. The need is real—but overlooked. The Fracture Club team believes adaptive clothing doesn’t have to feel temporary or disposable; it can be comfortable enough to keep wearing even after you heal. 

The Unsexy Reality: Co-Building, Prototype Headaches, and No Ability to Pre-Sell 

Fracture Club’s early prototypes are built for function first: 

Product design from Fracture Club

• A magnetic shoulder zipper so you can dress without lifting your injured arm 

• A side zipper that makes room for casts, braces, and swelling 

• Soft, gentle seams that won’t irritate sensitive or post-surgery skin 

  
  

But unlike typical DTC brands, they can’t use pre-orders to finance production. Customers recovering from injury can’t wait weeks or months—they need clothes now. That means the team needs upfront funding and partnerships to reach patients at this critical moment of need. Fracture Club is currently fundraising and has already secured a partnership with Athletico, an early but important step. 

Operationally, the learning curve has been steep. Coming from consulting, Grace was used to planning, not dealing with production fires—like the wrong zipper on a fundraising product, or the contract-management required to fix issues with vendors. Legal protection has also been a reality check. Clothing design patents are easy to bypass; a competitor can change a small detail and replicate the core idea. The team knows the risk but hopes brand trust and early-mover advantage will matter more. 

The most common questions Grace gets—Would people actually pay for this? Why hasn’t someone done it already? —reflect a broader challenge. Injury recovery is short, painful, and quickly forgotten by those who haven’t experienced it. 

From her perspective, the answers aren’t binary: 

• Sometimes business ideas are tough. 

• Sometimes the idea is good, but execution is the hardest part. 

• Sometimes a problem is real, but only visible to people who’ve experienced it.

  
  

It’s the classic tension of solving invisible problems: the need is clear to the people who experience it, but the market rarely sees or prioritizes it. 

The Career Question with No Clean Answer 

Grace is candid that she doesn’t have a neat post-MBA plan yet. She wants to keep pushing Fracture Club forward, but she also sees the reality of how operationally demanding it is. One option is to work full-time over the summer—she’s already applied for a $10K MBA stipend. Another is to continue building the venture with additional help or eventually step into a more passive role if needed. 

What she is certain about is the value of the experience: solving a problem she lived, doing the “boots on the ground” work she never saw in consulting, and learning firsthand how difficult it is to take a physical product from concept to launch. 

The Takeaway: Startups Aren’t Slides; They’re Scrape and Scramble 

Fracture Club isn’t chasing unicorn status. It’s tackling a specific, easily overlooked pain point that only becomes visible once you’re injured. Whether it becomes a long-term company or a chapter in her career, the early journey reveals something rarely said out loud in entrepreneurship circles: some of the most meaningful problems are invisible. 

And sometimes, building a company looks less like sleek frameworks and more like wrestling with a zipper that needs to fit around a cast.  Read About More Kellogg-Founded Startups: Devin Tyler, Tenacity Founder Nico Casaux, Bianca Founder