In 2008, Bree McKeen had just graduated from Stanford Business School and was working at a small venture capital firm, but she was experiencing nagging bra pain due to weekday hardships in Silicon Valley.
He thought it was because of his posture or that he wasn’t fit enough, so he spent six months on core strength. Standing in his physiologist’s office one day, McKeen was told he had a neuromuscular problem similar to a pebble in his shoe. If her bra hurt, it would affect her ability to stand upright.
“There was nothing that worked in my size,” McKeen recalls. Evelyn and Bobbie CEO and founder. “How do we live in an AI world where I don’t have a comfortable bra? Half the population wears it every morning for life.”
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McKeen of 34DDD had stumbled upon a product gap. As she delved deeper into the history of the underwire bra, which was first invented in 1931, she realized there had been no “meaningful structural innovations” in over 90 years.
Until the first 3D technology patent was published in 2014. The year-long study found that the bra design helped redistribute weight from the shoulder muscles to the core muscles.
“The design thesis was about how a woman looks and feels doesn’t count, and comfort doesn’t matter,” says McKeen on a recent exploratory trip to London, where her wire-free bra solution brand will expand to England this spring.
A second lightbulb moment that supported her decision came as she was raising money and spending time with predominantly male investors. McKeen wanted to convince them why a comfortable bra was needed.
He gave the investors homework; Talking to four women on Thursday at 6pm about whether they like bra shopping, how many bras they own and how they feel about them. Mostly negative answers emerged.
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This was enough to convince him to quit his job. It moved to Portland, Oregon, home of leading apparel companies like Under Armour, Nike and Adidas, and recruited talent there ahead of its launch in 2018.
While there has been an increase in celebrity investments in the bra market, McKeen says there is less focus on technology and approaching it as a problem solution.
Additionally, McKeen says alphanumeric sizing has never been standardized. “All these old systems didn’t make sense,” he admits. “As an outsider, it was a matter of making sense of it all. Women need to wear a bra and be comfortable all day long. “They are willing to pay for it, and we need to make it easier.”
Evelyn & Bobbie, a $20 million company, aims to simplify sizes with fits from small to 3XL. Seamless and invisible under clothes, the bras can also stretch to fit bodies up to K cups.
The company has seen 90% growth in 2023 as the bras cost around £70. “We can’t explain our growth by our marketing spend, so we know women are telling each other about us,” McKeen admits.
They also tell Evelyn and Bobbie: “I never wrote a love letter to a company, I just wrote a complaint,” smiles McKeen, whose company’s customers range in age from 13 to 95.
He adds: “This product category has been neglected for too long. Now I’m comfortable and dress like my husband every day. Why would you go through so much trouble for something you have to wear all day?”
‘Do it yourself’ was McKeen’s mantra growing up in the US. A child with an outdoor mentality, she made dolls out of pine cones or built tree houses across streams.
The company name is also a name with family ties. Evelyn is the grandmother he never knew; His aunt Bobbie, an entrepreneur and “meticulous seamstress”, taught him how to plant.
Now McKeen aims to be “synonymous with the bra solution globally.”
“The female body is ready,” he says. “These bodies have always existed with these needs, we looked from the wrong window.
“The reason we won is because we were very focused and didn’t try to be everything to everyone.
“I’m not trying to be a fashion or trend-focused brand; we’re the essential solution women reach for every day.”
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