Karen Korellis Reuther

Creative, product and brand strategy executive experienced in the sports footwear and apparel industry, fashion, lifestyle, consumer products and electronics. 2022 Advanced Leadership Initiative Senior Fellow at Harvard.

A designer by training and practice for decades and today an activist for inclusion by design.

Karen Korellis Reuther has been a designer by training and practice for over forty years, and today is a practicing activist committed to inclusion by design and ending gender bias in product design. She left the Reebok C-suite in 2020 to pursue a Fellowship at Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI), and is currently a Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Karen teaches in the Master’s of Design Engineering program and founded the Inclusion by Design event series, hosted by the Harvard Grid. These events bring together students, faculty and practitioners who share her passion for designing a world that is safe, hospitable and inclusive for women. Karen is a sought after guest lecturer and public speaker across Harvard and the world.

Prior to her academic career, Karen was a creative, product and brand strategy executive in the sports footwear and apparel industry, with experience in fashion, lifestyle, consumer products and electronics. As Vice President of Creative Direction and Innovation at Reebok, she led the global creative strategy and implementation across every consumer touch point of the brand. Karen was also Global Creative Director at NIKE for twelve years where she developed major product, merchandising and brand strategies, solidifying NIKE at the top of its industry. She worked as a creative director and brand strategy consultant in the fields of design, innovation and technology and spent many years in the design of consumer products and electronics in both the US and Germany.

Using her work in the classroom, her scholarship endowment, and her experienced voice as a platform to raise awareness to the inequities in our built world, Karen encourages women to pursue careers in male dominated fields of design, architecture and engineering, make their voices heard, and assure that the female body is considered at every level of the design process-- from data, to design, to policy.

Shrink It and Pink It: Gender Bias in Product Design

Harvard Social Impact Review, October 25, 2022

Not accommodating the female body in the design of products has led to a world that is less hospitable and more dangerous for women.

“SHRINK IT AND PINK IT” is a common phrase used in the product creation world for designing products for women. Women are too often left no choice than to use products that were designed by men for men, just scaled down and colored pink, or some stereotypical feminine color. In the best case it can be insulting, in the worst case it can be deadly.

Women are 73% more likely to be injured in a car crash than men.

In the military, women suffer pelvic fractures at a much higher rate than their male counterparts. All a result of using products where the female population is an afterthought, if any thought at all. The female body is often invisible. Not accommodating it in the design of products has led to a world that is less hospitable and more dangerous for women. A world designed by men for men isn’t just a matter of style, or an issue of preference for women — we are excluding half of humanity for so many of the products being created. We need to fix that.