In the fall of 2023, some marketing people and top executives of Port Washington-based Spectrum Designs, an apparel company that goes out of its way to hire people on the autism spectrum, met to come up with a new way of highlighting the business and its workers.
Kelli Fisher, 34, the company’s marketing and development specialist, who is on the autism spectrum, was the first to come up with an idea: a television commercial that featured her standing in front of a black backdrop with a box on her head.
Why that?
“This is how the world sees us,” said Fisher, in an interview with the Press. “They see us as all the same. But we’re not all the same. We’re all different.” Fisher is petite, wears wide round eyeglasses, and has short closed-cropped black hair, and has a fit build, suggesting the athlete she is.
Spectrum, a nonprofit that was founded in 2011, designs T-shirts, hats and other apparel, had never before done such an ad, before, Fisher said.
“It was a risk,” she said. “It was so stark.”
It worked. The nearly 40-second commercial aired on WABC-TV and News12 Long Island, and a number of social media sites, including YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. There are also cardboard display ads at Long Island Rail Road stations in Port Washington and Great Neck.
Company officials said that since the commercial began airing on April 1, in recognition of Autism Awareness Month, it has been viewed on television 70,000 times and that traffic to Spectrum Designs’ website is up 300% over the same month last year.
“I love the commercial,” said Patrick Bardsley, 36, the company’s chief executive and one of three founders. The two others Stella Spanakos and Nicole Sugrue, are mothers of children on the autism spectrum.
Bardsley, raised in the United Kingdom, said the company really does go out of its way to hire those on the spectrum. He said that 65% of its 75 employees – 55 of whom work at the company’s imposing white-stone building overlooking Port Washington Harbor – are on the spectrum. The company, he said, receives resumes from New York State programs, and also uses other methods, such as word-of-mouth.
Bardsley said he knows the company is meeting a need. About 85% of people who have autism are unemployed, he said, and there is a wait list to get hired.
Bardsley said the idea for the company sprang from a job he had some years ago for special needs people, in High Falls, in upstate Ulster County.
“That was my introduction to the world of disabilities,” he said in an interview in the company’s conference room, yards away from screening machines and other printing devices.
“I had conversations with parents and heard their fears of what would happen to their children as they got older. One woman started crying. She said her one wish was that she lived one day longer than her son,” he said.
The company started small, Bardsley said, and grew. Customers now include J. Crew, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, J.P. Morgan, and 1-800-Flowers.com, to name several. Bardsley said annual sales are between $5 million and $6 million.
Fisher, who lives in Plainview, knows what a struggle people on the spectrum go through to find work. She went to culinary school, she said, “But I always struggled to get a job.”
Before coming to Spectrum Designs, Fisher, a fitness enthusiast, had an interview at a health club.
“The guy there wouldn’t hire me because I didn’t make eye contact,” Fisher said. “I was really devastated. That really put me down. I was upset, depressed.”
Those on the autism spectrum can find job interviews challenging, as the ways they communicate may be different from those who are not on the spectrum. She was hired at Spectrum Designs five years ago, and now handles marketing and communications.
Fisher, the company’s first employee on the spectrum to work in marketing, is regarded as the brainchild of the recent commercial, which also features other employees and some Spectrum Designs products, including hoodies, backpacks and mugs.
The company had a commercial on WABC before, but Fisher said, “It was not different. It was not attention-grabbing.”
Fisher said she and her team are already thinking of new commercials, perhaps a billboard in Times Square or more ads on social media.
Spectrum Designs hired an ad firm, Second Opinion, of Port Washington, to help put the commercial together.
Daniel Hassan, Second Opinion’s owner, said he was brought in to work with Spectrum Designs’ marketing team.
“I think what they’re doing is a miracle,” Hassan told the Press, in terms of hiring people on the spectrum and adding meaning to their lives.
“There is a much bigger story to be told here. I put [Fisher’s] insight into an advertising product. She provided great creativity,” Hassan said.
“The company’s story is not just that they hire people on the spectrum, but that the career they gave them has transformed their lives.”
