A ‘NIKE FOR SPECIAL NEEDS’
RI college student is making a more inclusive world
WELLESLEY, MASSACHUSETTS – Jose Rodriguez would like to lend you his glasses.
Not actual glasses; he’d like you to borrow his perspective of the world, which has been centered on inclusivity and accessibility by an upbringing under two special education teachers and an extremely close relationship with his brother, who’s about a year younger than Rodriguez and has autism.
“Me and my little brother grew up best friends,” Rodriquez, 19, told The Call. “We grew up being inclusive, being open.”
It was this perspective and this relationship that led to the idea for Rodriquez’s company, Tasium, which creates “fidget-infused apparel.” The name is an anagram of “autism.”
Rodriquez was living in Woonsocket while attending the MET High School in Providence, where one of his business classes assigned a project that involved creating a prototype for a business model. While researching for the project, he found studies that showed fidget toys such as stress balls to be beneficial for students with ADHD who struggled to focus during class.
Rodriguez thought of how his little brother was always fidgeting with something and knew he would also probably benefit from keeping a fidget toy nearby. But there was another problem.
“He loses everything,” Rodriquez said. “I think it’s in our bloodline, because I lose everything too.”
A joke about how his brother, Joel, would lose anything not attached to him led to the idea to literally attach the fidget toy to him, via a small hole in the bottom corner of his shirt. Rodriquez said Joel was “extremely involved” in the research and design of the product, his feedback helping to determine the placement of the fidget toy in the bottom left corner (Joel is a lefty; Rodriquez said he is working on an option to allow customers to choose which side they want the toy to hang from).
With the initial idea and prototype worked out, Rodriquez entered the 2020 Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge hosted by the Network
for Teaching Entrepreneurship, whose curriculum is used by MET. Competing remotely against students from all around the world, Rodriguez went in with “nothing to lose” and advanced through round after round as the competition slimmed from tens of thousands down to one: him.
“It was very big chunks of people that were getting out of every round,” he recalled. “It was very exciting and intimidating at the time.”
Rodriquez received a $12,000 award of start-up money, which he said he immediately used to purchase copyrights, patents and trademarks for his idea.
As his business began to grow, Rodriguez was also beginning to consider and apply for college along with the rest of his class. He settled on Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts after examining the long list of successful alumni from the school’s business and entrepreneurship program, including Ring Founder and Chief Inventor Jamie Siminoff, who now sits on Tasium’s advisory board.
“If there’s something in the water, I gotta go taste it,” he said of his decision to attend Babson.
While applying, Rodriguez was also seeking out scholarship opportunities and came across one offered by the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship. All it required was an essay describing the candidate’s experience with NFTE – Rodriguez wrote that he had won the annual competition and was awarded a full ride to Babson.
Now, Rodriguez balances classes with running his business, but he said it’s not too hard when you have a team supporting you who “doesn’t make it feel like I’m doing something wrong by focusing on school.”
“When it comes exam time, you have to scale back on certain things,” he said. “I know I’m not wasting time,” he added, explaining that everything he learns in school can be “automatically” applied back to his business.
Throughout the process, Rodriguez said one of the biggest lessons he’s learned is a common statement in the autism community: “If you know one person with autism, you only know one person with autism.”
Rodriguez said the saying speaks to the way autism exists on a spectrum, presenting differently in every person, and said it was true of his personal experience, too. Growing up, he only knew one person with autism, Joel, and it wasn’t until he started Tasium that he began to learn more about the community.
“As a business, it forces us to really get to know every single customer,” he said.
When he can, he’s able to do that in person, such as engaging with people at the Imagine Walk hosted by the Autism Project. With out-of-state and international clients, it means chatting over social media and email. A lot of times, those conversations don’t just focus on Tasium’s products; Rodriguez said he also tries to help connect people to other resources when it seems appropriate.
“Maybe it’s not us, maybe we can connect you to a nonprofit in your area,” he said. “Yes, we are a solution but we’re also advocates.”
For the moment, Rodriguez is focused on crafting a TED Talk speech for the TEDxBabsonCollege event at his school, where he will be the only undergraduate presenter. He wants people to “lend people my glasses,” so they come away from the speech looking at the world as a place that can be made more inclusive and accessible, and seeing ways to serve underserved communities.
But looking ahead, Rodriguez has big plans for Tasium, beginning with the launch of a free newsletter that will include information about other resources relevant to people with autism. He also wants to continue experimenting and developing other ways to incorporate fidgeting into clothing, creating a “closet full of options” for people. Then, he wants to continue expanding by developing clothing to cater to the needs of other demographics, such as amputees or paraplegics.
“We want to continue expanding in that way and become the one-stop shop for people with special needs,” he said. “NIKE for special needs.”
Rodriguez’s TED Talk presentation will be on March 25 from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. at the Babson College Knight Auditorium in Babson Park, Massachusetts. More information about Tasium’s projects or ways to support the company can be found on the website, tasiumworldwide.com.