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How I Made It: Trusst Lingerie Founder On Designing Bras Like Bridges

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Courtesy of Trusst Lingerie

Sophia Berman, 32, founded Trusst Lingerie as a new bra brand for large-breasted women. Her innovation: Using the design of a bridge, with its trusses for support, as the template. It’s a unique design, and one that helped her raise $1 million in funding from family, friends, angel investors and tech accelerator Innovation Works. She launched the Pittsburgh-based business on Kickstarter in 2015, and opened an online store and single retail storefront in 2016. This year, with a lineup of bras that go up to size 46F, priced at $56 to $68, she figures she'll bring in at least $750,000 in revenue for the small but growing business. In comments that have been edited and condensed, Berman explains how she came up with the concept of making a bra like a bridge, and what it took to go from prototype to product:

Courtesy of Trusst Lingerie

I have family members who have large breasts. There were bra-breaking memes on the Internet. That was the impetus for the idea.

I studied industrial design at Carnegie Mellon, and we went through the AlphaLab Gear accelerator, which has a hardware and robotics focus. We pitched that we had this new idea for bra support using 3-D printing. We were an anomaly, bras in a sea of robotics. The guy next to me was trying to make a robotic sandwich maker.

Courtesy of Trusst Lingerie

We bought a 3-D printer, a MakerBot. We started with a lot of sketching and whiteboarding and brainstorming, and then experimenting with the 3-D printer. We started with a full bra cup in plastic, and we whittled away at it. We did 3-D printed prototypes. The goal was to have as little plastic as possible for the most amount of support. This is essentially the way bridges work, too. It juts out from the body so it has a cantilever aspect. It took a lot of trial and error and modeling and patience. It took two years of research and development to finalize the first round of products.

I was thinking from a physics perspective. If you had a load or something heavy, how do you lift it up? Wearing bras, you always feel like the shoulder straps are pulling down. No matter how well-fitting the band is, you get to a certain size and your breasts just don’t have enough support from underneath. It was, let’s stop pulling and start lifting instead. We had anecdotes from women who said, “I just want to hold my breasts up because it gives my shoulders relief.” We thought, “What it we had something that holds you up instead of your hands that provides that relief?”

Courtesy of Trusst Lingerie

I created a molded plastic piece. It’s designed by a 3-D printer and then injection molded. It’s a refined shelf with a comfort layer of foam. If you have large breasts there’s a lot of boob sweat and chafing. Having the lift means more air inflow and it helps with posture. We got a patent issued in January for the structure. It’s fully patented in the U.S. and patent-pending overseas. Our engineering background shows through.

The 3-D printing was quick and easy and cheap. We could go into CAD,  design the shape, print it overnight and sew it into a bra. It was a lot of sewing. With every design you come closer.

Courtesy of Trusst Lingerie

I think we tried over 300 prototypes. We made hundreds of bras. We would work with one fit model and make a variety of designs to fit her. Then we would bring in 10 women and get their feedback and fix things. Then we would go back to the model. We had a couple of fitting events at the accelerator before we launched our Kickstarter. We realized that the most comfortable way to do this would be to put it within a foam cup. Most bra-cup manufacturing is done in China, so that’s when we went over there. Manufacturing in the U.S. is much more expensive than overseas, and with the molded foam cup we could use the fabrics we chose for their antimicrobial properties.

Our new design has more side support. A lot of women have side-support issues so it has side mesh for some of the side boob that comes out of the bra. It provides more shaping and comfort.

Courtesy of Trusst Lingerie

We started with size 32DD and go up to 46F in the biggest band size and 36J in the largest cup size. There’s a lot of R&D to be done to go above that. We have had requests for larger sizes. We've also had requests for sports and swim and nursing bras. There are a lot of bras for sizes A to DD. There are no other brands doing what we’re doing. We were at this plus-size fashion event in Brooklyn a few weeks ago, and more women than you might think have these larger sizes.

Plus-sized apparel is a $24 billion industry, and 12% of that is lingerie and bras. That makes it a $2.5 billion business. The opportunities for these women are so few compared to those who wear a size 2 or a size 10.

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