Why I started AYAMI

If you’d told me ten years ago that I would one day start a clothing company, I probably would have looked at you perplexed a couple of seconds too long for comfort.

My name is Anne-Marlene Rüede, and I’m the founder of AYAMI.

At the time, I was studying architecture.

Later, I would spend years researching complex space missions with EPFL, MIT, and the European Space Agency. I completed a PhD developing methods for generating and evaluating highly complex designs with many competing constraints and requirements.

Fashion wasn’t part of the plan.

But neither was discovering, at the very end of my PhD, that I was autistic and had ADHD.

Looking back, many things suddenly made sense.

Why certain fabrics could ruin my day.

Why some clothes felt unbearable while others seemed to disappear completely.

Why I kept wearing the same garments over and over again.

Why getting dressed sometimes felt far more complicated than it seemed to be for everyone else.

For most of my life, I assumed this was simply normal. Or perhaps just a personal quirk.

Then I received my diagnosis.

And for the first time, I realised two things.

First, many of the struggles I had experienced around clothing weren’t universal.

Second, I wasn’t alone.

I started talking to other autistic and ADHD adults. Then to disabled people, people with chronic illnesses, people with sensory sensitivities, and people with non-standard body proportions.

Again and again, I heard different versions of the same story.

People adapting themselves to clothing that had never really been designed with them in mind.

That was the moment I started wondering:

What if the problem isn’t that people are different?

What if the problem is that clothing isn’t designed for the full diversity of human needs?

That question eventually became AYAMI.

From space missions to clothing

At first glance, fashion and space exploration seem to have little in common.

But the more I worked on AYAMI, the more familiar the problem felt.

In space mission architecture, there is rarely one perfect solution. Every design has to balance many competing needs: cost, risk, logistics, performance, resources, timing, and technical constraints.

Clothing is surprisingly similar.

A garment has to balance comfort, movement, sensory tolerance, temperature, fit, maintenance, self-expression, accessibility, and production feasibility.

What works beautifully for one person may be completely wrong for another.

For the first time, I realised that the same systems-thinking approach I had spent years developing for space missions could also help solve a problem much closer to home.

Not by designing clothing for an “average” person.

But by helping create clothing that works for real people, with real bodies, real preferences, and real constraints.

Why AYAMI exists

AYAMI is still at the beginning of its journey.

We are testing fabrics, building garments, listening to customers, making mistakes, learning, improving, and repeating the process again.

The goal isn’t simply to make clothes.

The goal is to create clothing that adapts to people instead of asking people to adapt to clothing.

Clothing that is comfortable without sacrificing style.

Functional without feeling medical.

Inclusive without reducing people to categories.

Most importantly, clothing that helps people feel more like themselves.

Because after all these conversations, all these prototypes, and all these fabric tests, that’s what I’ve come to believe this is really about.

Not clothing.

People.

And helping them feel comfortable being exactly who they are.

That’s what AYAMI means to me.

And that’s why I started it.