"Look at this matter: Information technology's like a Sealy mattress."

Deep inside a Victoria'southward Hush-hush store–one of two inside a block of each other on this stretch of Broadway in downtown Manhattan– Michelle Lam is holding up a sea-green push-upward bra. As two white-haired women nearby puzzle over offerings from the Fabulous past Victoria's Cloak-and-dagger collection and a twenty-something paws through a bin of thongs (five for $26.l), Lam squeezes the mound of padding, looking simul­taneously disgusted and excited. Lam, 35, is the founder of Truthful&Co., an online retailer that's using the power of data to improve the bra-shopping feel for women. Today's field trip counts equally opposition research: Victoria's Secret accounts for more than half of the $xi billion U.Southward. intimate wearing apparel market. According to True&Co.'due south data, however, only one in v women is actually looking for the kind of bras that Victoria's Hole-and-corner is selling–which to Lam represents an opportunity equally big as the cleavage staring down at us from photographs on all sides. True&Co. wants women "to look at themselves in the mirror and feel similar the most beautiful version of themselves, which is what a beautiful bra does," she says, pointing to a photo of a Victoria'southward Hush-hush Angel. "That'south not every woman'south definition of beauty."

Bra shopping has never been a very satisfying experience for women, who are often faced with oversexualized advertising, inexperienced bra fitters, and harshly lit dressing rooms. But the problems begin with the way bras are sized. "It doesn't matter if you are a 32C or a 32B; the band and loving cup size tell just half the story," Lam explains. What neither metric accounts for is the curvature of the breast (shallow or total) or the weight distribution of the breasts (where they sit on a woman's chest). This is where the biggest variation occurs among women, meaning that even a bra in your size might cause you to spill over or have fatty rolls nether your arms or straps that won't stay up–and in ways both physical and psychological, make a adult female wait less attractive.

True&Co. is out to right all of the unpleasantness. The differences start on its home page, where big type induces visitors to "accept the quiz." "The quiz" is True&Co.'s chief data-gathering mechanism: You lot answer a series of questions–"How does your band fit?" "How do your breasts balance in your bra?"–and the company's algorithm fills a personalized store with bras, selected from more l lingerie brands, that are nearly likely to fit your particular size and shape. (Eighty-half-dozen percentage of the bras Truthful&Co. fit-tests don't fit a single one of the body types identified and never brand information technology into the algorithm.) You tin either purchase bras outright or accept upwards to 5 of your choosing sent to you, at no cost, to try on. You can send back the ones you don't desire; True&Co. will accuse y'all for what you go on. And then you're invited to consummate another short survey nigh how each bra fit you lot.


The company, which has grown tenfold in the by yr, has been called both "the Warby Parker of bras" and "the Netflix of bras," and each is more or less accurate. So far, more than than a one thousand thousand women have taken the fit quiz, giving the company most 15 million data points to mine for refining its products and service. Although True&Co. has been criticized by some lingerie bloggers, who contend that the fit quiz is a subpar substitute for an good bra fitter, Lam says that her company has an fourscore% success rate with women who come to the site, a figure that she says volition ascent equally boosted customer commentary works its way back into the system.

True&Co. is not a niche retailer, Lam emphasizes. Its mission is not to cater to underserved size groups. What it is attempting to practise is brand the procedure of buying bras something that women tin can feel good about. Information technology's the reason Lam started the business concern in the first identify. "I was in a department store fitting room trying on bras," she says. "Every i of them fabricated my body await worse than I thought it should look." A former investor who'd worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Microsoft Corporate Strategy, and who became Bain Capital Ventures' first female person principal, Lam had recently quit her job in Boston and moved to Silicon Valley with her hubby, a professor of chemic engineering at CalTech. Rather than blame herself and her body, she chose to arraign the bras. "Sitting in that location in the fitting room, I was similar, 'How can we use technology and data to rethink this?'"

What happened next is now company legend: Lam charged 500 bras to her credit card, put them all in her living room, and bribed her friends with sushi and champagne to try them on and give her feedback. That data was the basis for the Truthful&Co. fit quiz.

"Nosotros're in this incredible age where new brands are making people's lives easier, more convenient, more than personalized," says Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist Aileen Lee, whose own fund, Cowboy Ventures, was involved in Truthful&Co.'southward seed round in 2012, and who now sits on its board. "Starbucks did this magical thing where information technology took a product that people didn't really care that much most and made it this care for. It makes you feel better about your day and gives you a chance to reverberate, makes you feel a little special." For a lot of women, Lee says, ownership intimates had been the equivalent of drinking 99-cent diner coffee. "Truthful&Co. has turned it into, Oh, my god! I similar what I'g wearing, and information technology makes me feel more confident, and information technology makes me happy."

These happy customers have yielded a trove of insights: True&Co. has identified 6,000 distinct female person body types, for instance, which it has sorted into viii different color-coded categories, each respective to a unlike breast shape and weight distribution. It's found that 8 in 10 women are "completely militant" virtually the level of padding they prefer, and half dozen in 10 prefer a bra that'due south either unpadded or lightly lined. Night bras outsell lite bras by a ratio of three to one.


With all of this intelligence at its disposal, Truthful&Co. knew it would be crazy not to market place its own line of bras, and then it has–2, in fact, which now account for 40% of the company'southward revenue. The get-go, She Walks in Beauty (+ Low-cal), debuted tardily last yr. It was a limited collection of bras and a few panties designed to address common fit issues. The second line, Uniform, represents the full expression of True&Co.'s mission. Launched in June, it'due south a complete drove of bras, panties, and loungewear based on the accumulated perspectives of more than one-half a one thousand thousand women.

In reality, however, the line is not "designed by 500,000 women," as the site's ad copy says. Both Uniform and She Walks were designed by 1 woman: Nikki Dekker, who works out of her apartment in Brooklyn. Information technology's an of import distinction, considering while Dekker receives weekly reports from the visitor's marketing and merchandising teams and has access to every decision the information squad derives, the products reflect her creative sensibility. The data helps her focus.

Dekker, 36, began her career designing intimate dress for Target, where the designer and the client were separated by infinite layers of corporate hierarchy. "With True–I don't know if this is the right term, but I've been calling it 'mass customization,' " she says. "Nosotros accept the ability to get feedback and be like, oh, they desire this bra to exist smaller in the cup, or have a racer back. Okay, I'll practice something like that. I'll put my ain spin on the outside of information technology, but brand sure it works the way that they need it to." Although Lam and Dekker initially intended to manufacture their products in the U.S., they found that the factories with the best chapters and technical adequacy to produce at scale were in China, so they wound up cobbling together their own supply concatenation there–of "manufacturers who don't exercise business concern with Victoria's Secret," Lam says.

Later our Manhattan shopping trip, Lam and I get to a Soho café where she shows me some True&Co. products she's brought with her: a wire-gratis T-shirt bra (45% of women complain about pain from underwires) and a soft, triangle-shaped bra that distracts attention from underarm bulging (which 10% of women complain about). But in that location's also a button-upward in red with a black lace overlay, and a sweatshirt with cutouts at the shoulders that's both comfy and sexy. All of Truthful&Co.'south products make sense from a data standpoint, but non all the choices Lam and co. make are rational.

"Our woman is a contradiction," Lam says, before launching into a lyric from the vocal "All of Me," by John Legend: "All your curves and all your edges / All your perfect imperfections." It brings to listen True&Co.'s logo, which uses typography that references Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. He depicted a man inside a square within a circle–the search for perfect body proportion. If anything, though, True&Co.'s customer is the anti-Vitruvian: a adult female in the earth, imperfect and beautiful in her own fashion.

"I can't become that vocal out of my head," Lam says with a laugh. "Nosotros're so much more fascinating than guys."

A Ameliorate Bra

Photograph: Celine Grouard

Truthful&Co.'due south Uniform Pushup ($46) was designed to fit 33% of customers, who tend to be lesser-weighted and have shallower curvature, and so they often have extra room at the acme of the loving cup. Some details:

  • The heart-shaped neckline bends inward where these women would otherwise experience gaps.
  • Eight pct of women report pain at the "heart gore," where the 2 underwires meet. The center gore on the Compatible Pushup is lower and less likely to press into the sternum.
  • The "banana pad," aka the push-up part of the push-up bra, is specifically designed to provide support to women whose breasts tend to fall to the sides.
  • Forty percent of women prefer pocket-size padding.
  • Most True&Co. users have problems with itchy elastics and stitching, then this bra is made from silky microfiber, and the hook-and-heart squeeze is cushioned with extra padding.

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