Deep inside a Victoria’s Secret store–one of two within a block of each other on this stretch of Broadway in downtown Manhattan– Michelle Lam is holding up a sea-green push-up bra. As two white-haired women nearby puzzle over offerings from the Fabulous by Victoria’s Secret collection and a twenty-something paws through a bin of thongs (five for $26.50), Lam squeezes the mound of padding, looking simultaneously disgusted and excited. Lam, 35, is the founder of TrueCo., an online retailer that’s using the power of data to improve the bra-shopping experience for women. Today’s field trip counts as opposition research: Victoria’s Secret accounts for more than half of the $11 billion U.S. intimate apparel market. According to TrueCo.’s data, however, only one in five women is actually looking for the kind of bras that Victoria’s Secret is selling–which to Lam represents an opportunity as big as the cleavage staring down at us from photographs on all sides. TrueCo. wants women “to look at themselves in the mirror and feel like the most beautiful version of themselves, which is what a beautiful bra does,” she says, pointing to a photo of a Victoria’s Secret Angel. “That’s not every woman’s 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 cup size tell only half the story,” Lam explains. What neither metric accounts for is the curvature of the breast (shallow or full) 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 fat rolls under your arms or straps that won’t stay up–and in ways both physical and psychological, make a woman look less attractive.
TrueCo. is out to correct all of the unpleasantness. The differences start on its home page, where large type induces visitors to “take the quiz.” “The quiz” is TrueCo.’s primary data-gathering mechanism: You answer a series of questions–”How does your band fit?” “How do your breasts rest in your bra?”–and the company’s algorithm fills a personalized shop with bras, selected from more than 50 lingerie brands, that are most likely to fit your particular size and shape. (Eighty-six percent of the bras TrueCo. fit-tests don’t fit a single one of the body types identified and never make it into the algorithm.) You can either purchase bras outright or have up to five of your choosing sent to you, at no cost, to try on. You can send back the ones you don’t want; TrueCo. will charge you for what you keep. Then you’re invited to complete another short survey about how each bra fit you.
The company, which has grown tenfold in the past year, 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 a million women have taken the fit quiz, giving the company nearly 15 million data points to mine for refining its products and service. Although TrueCo. has been criticized by some lingerie bloggers, who contend that the fit quiz is a subpar substitute for an expert bra fitter, Lam says that her company has an 80% success rate with women who come to the site, a figure that she says will rise as additional customer commentary works its way back into the system.
TrueCo. is not a niche retailer, Lam emphasizes. Its mission is not to cater to underserved size groups. What it is attempting to do is make the process of buying bras something that women can feel good about. It’s the reason Lam started the business in the first place. “I was in a department store fitting room trying on bras,” she says. “Every one of them made my body look 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 principal, Lam had recently quit her job in Boston and moved to Silicon Valley with her husband, a professor of chemical engineering at CalTech. Rather than blame herself and her body, she chose to blame the bras. “Sitting there in the fitting room, I was like, ‘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 information was the basis for the TrueCo. fit quiz.
“We’re in this incredible age where new brands are making people’s lives easier, more convenient, more personalized,” says Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist Aileen Lee, whose own fund, Cowboy Ventures, was involved in TrueCo.’s seed round in 2012, and who now sits on its board. “Starbucks did this magical thing where it took a product that people didn’t really care that much about and made it this treat. It makes you feel better about your day and gives you a chance to reflect, makes you feel a little special.” For a lot of women, Lee says, buying intimates had been the equivalent of drinking 99-cent diner coffee. “TrueCo. has turned it into, Oh, my god! I like what I’m wearing, and it makes me feel more confident, and it makes me happy.”
These happy customers have yielded a trove of insights: TrueCo. has identified 6,000 distinct female body types, for example, which it has sorted into eight different color-coded categories, each corresponding to a different breast shape and weight distribution. It’s found that 8 in 10 women are “completely militant” about the level of padding they prefer, and 6 in 10 prefer a bra that’s either unpadded or lightly lined. Dark bras outsell light bras by a ratio of three to one.
With all of this intelligence at its disposal, TrueCo. knew it would be crazy not to market its own line of bras, and so it has–two, in fact, which now account for 40% of the company’s revenue. The first, She Walks in Beauty (+ Light), debuted late last year. 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 TrueCo.’s mission. Launched in June, it’s a complete collection of bras, panties, and loungewear based on the accumulated perspectives of more than half a million 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 one woman: Nikki Dekker, who works out of her apartment in Brooklyn. It’s an important distinction, because while Dekker receives weekly reports from the company’s marketing and merchandising teams and has access to every conclusion the data team derives, the products reflect her creative sensibility. The data helps her focus.
Dekker, 36, began her career designing intimate apparel for Target, where the designer and the customer were separated by infinite layers of corporate bureaucracy. “With True–I don’t know if this is the correct term, but I’ve been calling it ‘mass customization,’ ” she says. “We have the ability to get feedback and be like, oh, they want this bra to be smaller in the cup, or have a racer back. Okay, I’ll do something like that. I’ll put my own spin on the outside of it, but make 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 capacity and technical capability to produce at scale were in China, so they wound up cobbling together their own supply chain there–of “manufacturers who don’t do business with Victoria’s Secret,” Lam says.
After our Manhattan shopping trip, Lam and I go to a Soho café where she shows me some TrueCo. products she’s brought with her: a wire-free 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 there’s also a push-up in red with a black lace overlay, and a sweatshirt with cutouts at the shoulders that’s both comfortable and sexy. All of TrueCo.’s products make sense from a data standpoint, but not all the choices Lam and co. make are rational.
“Our woman is a contradiction,” Lam says, before launching into a lyric from the song “All of Me,” by John Legend: “All your curves and all your edges / All your perfect imperfections.” It brings to mind TrueCo.’s logo, which uses typography that references Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. He depicted a man inside a square inside a circle–the search for perfect body proportion. If anything, though, TrueCo.’s customer is the anti-Vitruvian: a woman in the world, imperfect and beautiful in her own way.
“I can’t get that song out of my head,” Lam says with a laugh. “We’re so much more fascinating than guys.”
TrueCo.’s Uniform Pushup ($46) was designed to fit 33% of customers, who tend to be bottom-weighted and have shallower curvature, so they often have extra room at the top of the cup. Some details:
The heart-shaped neckline bends inward where these women would otherwise experience gaps.
Eight percent of women report pain at the “center gore,” where the two underwires meet. The center gore on the Uniform 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 modest padding.
Most TrueCo. users have issues with itchy elastics and stitching, so this bra is made from silky microfiber, and the hook-and-eye clasp is cushioned with extra padding.
You might be familiar with the floral Japanese male bra that popped up online last week, leaving people confused and amused. You probably said to yourself, “This has to be a joke. This can’t be real.” Well it can, and there’s a market of men who enjoy wearing feminine-looking undergarments, and not because they want to look more like women (sorry ladies).
“There’s no variety in the men’s lingerie sold in department stores. It’s boxers and briefs, and if you’re really daring, maybe a thong!” says Australian male lingerie designer Brent Krause. “There’s no denying department stores sell good quality, functional underwear, and that’s fine for ninety percent of men. But not me.” These mangerie-wearing men like the fabric and feel of nice lingerie and believe it’s time for men to have a chance at feeling sexy in front of the mirror.
If you’re thinking these guys only exist on the other side of the world you’re wrong. Krause’s male lingerie company Homme Mystere states that most of their customers come from the United States. Krause says the U.S. makes up about 40 percent of its customer base, with Western Europe and the UK making up another 40 percent. They even send merchandise to Russia and Canada.
“I don’t think the male bra industry is any larger in Japan than anywhere else. Certainly our numbers show the USA and Europe to be about the same in terms of size with Japan quite a distance behind,” says Krause. “In saying that, our wholesale sales are very strong into Japan, which suggests guys are buying our lingerie but prefer to buy from a local store that speaks the language.”
So who are the guys buying this mangerie?
We sent a survey to Homme Mystere’s customers last week to get a sense of who these men are, and the replies we got were laced with surprises. For one, there’s a big market for male bras, but an even bigger one for beautifully tailored male undies.
One anonymous customer responds to our survey, “I wear panties daily!” Another says, “I wear lingerie daily, always panties, and a bra maybe three to four times a week. And nightly to bed.” While another customer goes as far to say, “No boxers left in my knicker drawer!”
These men are wearing their sensual skivvies more often than traditional male underwear. They’re wearing them to work, to movies, to meetings, everywhere. For men, it’s the nerve-racking taboo equivalent of a woman wearing crotchless panties to mass. You’re sitting there like, “Ooooh nobody knows what’s going on under these finely ironed dress pants!” What a frilly thrill!
Krause wants to elevate underwear in the daily level of priorities. “Choosing a department store brand of underwear each morning is a no-brainer. Choosing a style of Homme Mystere each morning is a little more fun,” he says. “Busy day with meetings – let’s go with PinStripe. Feeling a bit toey – frill thong. Life’s too short for plain underwear!”
Think about it, right now your male co-workers or peers could be rocking a lace bralette and you’d have no idea.
Some of Homme Mystere’s customers have been sporting female-styled lingerie for decades. “I wear a bra, panties, and pantyhose everyday under my male clothes,” says one very open customer. “I have not worn or owned a pair of men’s underwear for about 32 years.”
Another surprise — that maybe shouldn’t be — is that over 90 percent of the Homme Mystere customers who responded to the survey are in heterosexual relationships. Krause says that their customers are mostly over 40, married, and straight.
The survey showed that most of these men’s wives or girlfriends know about their underwear preferences and are ok with it, but their friends and co-workers remain in the dark. One customer says his wife has known since the day they met. “I was very open and honest with her and told her so that she could decide on her own if she wanted to have a relationship with me. We have been happily married for 13 years now, she has never once complained or felt ashamed of me, she loves me for ‘who’ I am not what I wear.”
Another customer says, “In fact [my significant other] likes her own Homme Mystere bra. She’s small breasted and says it fits her better.” Matching his and hers.
Krause spent around six months researching and designing lingerie before putting anything on the market in May of 2009. “We are definitely seeing very large increases in sales on our two sale days each year on Cyber Monday and our stock take sale each May/June,” he says. Apparently Valentine’s Day has become a big day for HM as well. “Sales from women spiked this year,” he says. “I think that’s probably a reflection of many women coming to the conclusion that just because their husband is into lingerie, it isn’t really that big of a deal.”
One man had less luck opening up to his wife about his undergarments, “I told my wife and she was not impressed and demanded that I stop doing it. She also discovered a stash of my panties at one time or another. I will not stop wearing my lingerie but I have to do it secretly and furtively now.”
The Homme Mystere blog added their two cents on why men wearing feminine lingerie does not mean men want to look or feel more like women:
“For some reason, many people still seem to think that Homme Mystere lingerie for men is a gay thing. Clearly this insinuates that all gay guys are effeminate and love to be the ‘girl’ in the relationship. If that was indeed correct, and all gay guys were actually wannabe girls, wouldn’t that make all gay guy couples lesbians?” Very meta.
Besides Japanese retailer Wishroom, Homme Mystere has designed the nicest male lingerie on the market. As many of the men on the survey exclaimed, once they went to Homme Mystere they never went back to boring bundled white cotton briefs.
“The first experience wearing my bra was a very exciting one,” says an HM customer. “Among other sensations, it gave the feeling, as Emily Master’s describes in her book Brassièred, of being embraced by a hug all day. It was, and still is, a beautiful and sexy feeling.” I wish I felt that way about the wiry constricting strap I have to put on every morning.
Another customer gave us a scene-by-scene description of the first time he bought a male bra. “I rushed out to my car and sitting down inside I furtively tore open the parcel. Inside wrapped in pink tissue was my very own sheer soft cupped bra and matching panty… I could hardly wait to try them on so I rushed home to shower first before trying them on. I lay them on the bed, arranging them nicely so that when I came out of the bathroom I would be presented with the sight of my beautiful and sexy bra… I had never done this before and it took a little time to get the back clip done up… I was extremely pleased, even excited and I could see my nipples pressing against the sheer fabric…” We’ll stop there. You get the picture. These guys love fabric.
But even more than making comfortable sexy male camisoles and underthings, Homme Mystere does one thing exceptionally right: it doesn’t judge. Where other male lingerie sites clearly call their customers cross-dressers or fetish-ers, Homme Mystere just talks about its nice fabric. Krause says, “I purposely tried to avoid any link to a fetish or any specific kind of label. If I had done that, it would have meant immediately labelling our customers by default and I have no idea how my customers view themselves.”
One of HM’s customers agrees. “The first [bra] I bought was actually for cross dressing, in which I wasn’t as interested,” he says. “I’ve much preferred the ones from Homme Mystere which are less concerned with faking the shape of a woman.”
Krause is already designing new styles for 2015 that he says has his seamstress is having a little trouble with. “I’m putting a little more effort into the bras and my seamstress thinks I’m a little crazy with a couple of my ideas, but until you try something different, how do you know if it’ll work?” he says. “Might as well have a go.”
So, if you’re a straight man bored with your Gap boxers, would you have a go?
