One Person, Two Bodies: What Being a Twin Taught Me About Building EQL Threads

People ask us all the time what it's like being twin co-founders. Honestly? It's like having one person who happens to live in two bodies and keeps two totally different schedules.

I'm up early by 5:00 AM and in bed early. My sister Candy is the opposite, staying up later, way past 1:00 AM. I teach piano, so my afternoons are booked with students starting around 2:45 PM, and I don't wrap up until closer to 7:45 PM. Candy works more normal business hours. So when do we actually do EQL Threads? I focus on it in the late morning and early afternoon, before I teach piano. Candy does hers starting around 11 PM, most nights way past midnight. We're basically running this company in shifts, like a business that never sleeps. And yet it works, because we're wired so differently that we cover each other's blind spots without even trying.

Candy is the analytical one. She loves data, research, digging into the why behind something. As an occupational therapist for almost 30 years, she's spent her whole career watching how people's bodies change over time and what they actually need to move through the world more easily. That knowledge shows up directly in how we design. She knows exactly which cut, which length, which style a body needs.

I'm the opposite. I'm the one who gets excited about fabric and color, who can picture something in my head and then figure out how to actually make it real. I care about how a piece flatters someone, how it feels, how it looks. Where Candy sees function, I see form. Put us together, and you get one complete person.

Where we're identical, though, is that we're both doers. Give us a long list of tasks and research projects, and we get more motivated, not less. We agree on the big stuff together: which products to create and manufacture, who's on our media team, which models, which venues. All the unglamorous behind-the-scenes work. We still keep an old-school paper calendar where we write down tasks and cross them off, because somehow that keeps us more accountable than any app ever has. And we're constantly sending each other voice memos on WhatsApp, long rambling ones full of half-formed ideas that somehow turn into real decisions by morning.

This isn't new. We've been like this our whole lives. We ended up at the same college, the University of California at Berkeley, both majoring in Music. Candy also studied Psychology; I studied Biology. We almost both went to USC for grad school, her for OT, me for PT, but I bailed on that path. We both taught piano all through high school and college, but I just never stopped, especially after a brief, not-quite-there attempt at a few biotech startups. Candy kept going with OT and never looked back. We've always worked out together too, chasing whatever new calisthenics challenge is in front of us: handstands, pistol squats, you name it. We eat the same way, love the same baked goods, and got seriously into jump rope, almost competitive-level, until I blew out my knee in a Spartan Race. Obstacle course racing was very much our thing too. At one point we did 100 burpees a day for 100 days straight to train for races, because apparently that's just how we're built.

All of that, the shared drive, the opposite skill sets, the constant back-and-forth, is basically the operating system EQL Threads runs on.

It's also why becoming an Adaptiv founding brand felt so obvious to us. Over and over, we meet people we've designed for who say some version of the same thing: “I didn't know adaptive clothing existed.” “I had no idea there was clothing out there that could make my life this much easier.” And that gets to the core of why we do this. Our bodies change, through age, injury, surgery, arthritis, a hundred different reasons, and that's just part of being human. But fashion hasn't caught up. The button has been around for something like 800 years and hasn't changed a bit. A lot of us can't use buttons anymore, so why is the industry still designing like it's the Genghis Khan era?

EQL Threads exists to design for our bodies today, all of our bodies. That's why we swapped buttons for discreet magnets, why our fabric is soft and stretchy and easy to get on and off, why everything's built to layer and actually last.

Being part of Adaptiv is about getting that message to more people who don't know these resources exist yet. I want to see Adaptiv keep growing, bringing more brands into the fold, so this community has real support to make everyday life a little smoother, with less struggle, and a lot more ease.