Ryan Mario Yasin is a trained design engineer with a background in aeronautical engineering. Prior to founding Petit Pli, Yasin worked at Red Bull Racing and designed for Volkswagen Germany. Yasin holds a dual master’s degree in Global Innovation Design from Imperial College London and Royal College of Art, as well as a master’s in Aeronautical Engineering from Imperial College London. Yasin invented, photographed and promoted Petit Pli in 2017, while he was a student. Since graduating in 2017, Ryan has evolved Petit Pli’s designs from a proof of concept to a commercially available and patented design around the world. Ryan’s motivation to engineer a solution which reduces waste in children’s wear was inspired by his nephew Viggo. Shortly after buying garments for Viggo, he learned how quickly they were outgrown. The experience brought light to the fact that children’s wear on the market is miniaturized adult clothing – designs unfit for their users. To realise Petit Pli, Ryan set out to understand the needs of users, retailers and manufacturers to engineer novel designs using his understanding of deployable satellites and origami structures. Petit Pli aims to reduce waste in fashion at the point of production, transport and use by creating clothes that grow. Children grow seven sizes in their first two years on Earth and this equates to a lot of wasted clothing. Petit Pli’s patent-pending rainproof garments are pleated in such a way that they can grow bi-directionally to custom fit a range of seven sizes.