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As a precocious girl growing up on the 700 block of Montrose Street, Connie Bevivino-Huffa kept “can’t” out of her vocabulary and pondered the possibilities of her penchants for fabrics and science.
With added enthusiasm and a likewise curious husband, she has continued to pursue her place in the creative universe and is aspiring to seal it through their involvement in the LAUNCH Systems Challenge 2013. The couple already have garnered distinction for their textile-armored compression space suit, adaptations of which they hope to market to numerous entities.
“It is shaping up as our most daunting yet rewarding project,” the Bella Vista native said Tuesday from their Fabdesigns Inc. headquarters in Encino, Calif. “We’ve always sought to offer our best, so with a chance to further our beliefs in sustainability and safety, we’ve aimed high.”
The graduate of St. Maria Goretti High School, now Ss. Neumann-Goretti High School, 1736 S. 10th St., and Bruce, her spouse of 25 years, emerged earlier this month as one of 20 finalists among hundreds of ambitious submitters. Having helmed their company since 1988, they have interacted with many high-profile corporations, including Nike, which teamed with NASA, the United States Agency for International Development and the Department of Defense in 2010 to form LAUNCH. The global initiative strives to promote that which can offer tangible solutions to urgent societal challenges, so the Golden State duo, with many individual patents, chose to tackle eliminating barriers to astronauts’ hurdles through space.
“They can experience so much, so we felt designing something that would go toward safeguarding them against such woes as the loss of muscle and bone density, radiation and flexibility issues would be our top way to contribute to their work,” Bevivino-Huffa, also an alumnus of The Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, now Philadelphia University, where she also served as a Master’s program adjunct professor from 1996 to ’98, said. “We love being mentioned with so many talented people and hope to get word soon on whether we’ve made the top-10.”
To improve the chances for her and her British beau, whose résumé includes a teaching stint at California’s Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, she circulated word to her relatives and friends, who voted for their creation through Aug. 20. Not simply a popularity contest, the competition also calls on corporate figures to gauge which contributions could advance their fields.
“Everything is a puzzle,” Bevivino-Huffa said of taking her spring discovery of the challenge and tinkering with ideas to devise the outfit. “It’s all about getting things to work so that what we produce is aesthetically pleasing, sure, but durable.”
Finding their brainchild in fifth place last week, she hopes the support and the sponsoring agencies’ opinions will result in their invitation to September’s gathering at the Pasadena-situated Jet Propulsion Laboratory. With NASA’s potential mission to Mars as an inspiration for their ingenuity, Bevivino-Huffa realizes the ambitious girl who developed her love for piecing together possibilities as a high schooler has become an even more conscientious woman for whom the sky is certainly no limit, with her partner equally mindful of the world’s instability and need for agents of change.
“Our goal in this project is to protect human beings from hazardous environments and improve not only their chances of survival, but the quality of life afterwards,” Huffa said.
Though the two are obviously focusing on hearing positive news from the sponsors, they stand to achieve recognition even if they do not find themselves among the final list of esteemed originators. Confident in the quality of their stitching, they foresee being able to match descendants of the suit with military personnel, energy workers, health and safety employees, transportation hires and first responders.
“The bombing in Boston helped to serve as inspiration for examining the civilian side of everything,” Bevivino-Huffa said of the April 15 Boston Marathon incident through which a pair of pressure cooker bombs killed three people and injured nearly 300 others. “The world is very dangerous at times, so whatever we can do to improve health and well-being, we’re on it.”
She and Huffa have been seeking to give all of their clients comfort since they called South Philly home, with their then-new company serving the city’s sweater industry. As their talents and scopes have evolved, the two have continued to align themselves with similar thinkers, with the overall maintenance of the earth as an overt goal.
“With the ability to produce things comes equally great responsibility to human health and the environment to manufacture with minimal impact on the environment,” Huffa, the inventor of Nike’s Flyknit shoe, said. “In our system, we use just the materials needed.”
The California dreamers have gladly watched their daughters Sarah and Jennifer take an interest in their work and have welcomed their input in projects. Having gone from working with local outfits to national and global conglomerates, they see their endeavors not only as labors of love to inspire their offspring but also as means to develop holistic, natural pieces that will not contribute to the world’s staggering pollution problems. They will continue to advocate for responsible engineering by corresponding and meeting with Apple, New Balance and The North Face Co., so aside from personal gain, they are striving, like Benjamin Franklin, whose eponymously-named institute Bevivino-Huffa flocked to as a girl to understand the wonders of the scientific world, to understand causality and the propelling force behind creativity.
“It’s been wonderful to have had the chance to get our vision out there,” the Fabdesigns president said, confident other ideas soon will be blasting off. “We have added credibility and find ourselves humbled to be among those who are really conscious of what we can do to better our lives.”
Contact Staff Writer Joseph Myers at jmyers@southphillyreview.com or ext. 124.
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