The piece of clothing that changed Bree McKeen's life
Bree McKeen set up her firm to meet a need for comfortable bras, writes Alison Gray.
Is it possible that a piece of clothing can change your life? For Bree McKeen the answer is an emphatic yes, both personally when she discovered the technology that could create a bra that would fit her and be comfortable and professionally when she realised that she had just started a business, Evelyn & Bobbie, to supply these garments to women all over the world.
Bree launched Evelyn & Bobbie’s first products in 2018, laying the foundations back in 2012. After a lifetime of suffering discomfort thanks to ill fitting underwired bras Bree had had enough. That year she left her job at a Silicon Valley investment firm – where she was managing partner – and moved to Portland, Oregon. Considered an international hotbed for performance apparel and home to leading sports brands, including Nike, Adidas and Under Armour, Bree’s goal was to tap talent from that ecosystem in order to help her disrupt the bra industry.
Before quitting her role, Bree had worked at a boutique venture capital firm, ending each day counting down the seconds until she could rip her bra off. As a size 34DDD, she found it difficult to find the support she needed and experienced the all-too-familiar sensation of underwire digging into her ribs. Over time, it started to impact her posture, something that Bree worried would affect her presence and authority in business meetings where she would be surrounded by men in suits.
Eventually, she went to see a physiologist who taught her about the neuromuscular feedback loop – when your body adapts to the pain – meaning when Bree’s bra was hurting as she stood up straight, her body would automatically slouch to compensate. Advised to find a bra that fitted and felt comfortable whilst upright, she immediately knew it would be an impossible task, and, importantly, that millions of other women would likely be having a similar experience.
Through a range of informal polls with women and her own research, it didn’t take Bree long to realise there hadn’t been much, if any at all, change in bra innovation and design since the 1930s. So, by 2013, Bree had created countless prototypes from her attic, eventually filing a patent for the EB Core®. Over the next few years, Bree filed for more patents and slowly realised that her concept for the 3D sling – which is able to support 20 pounds or more of breast tissue and replaces the metal underwire, creating a seamless, invisible exoskeleton throughout the garment – really was the first of its kind. Fast forward to today and Bree who named the company after the two matriarchs in her life, her maternal grandmother, Evelyn, and her aunt, Elizabeth "Bobbie" is proud to have created a best-selling range of seamless wire-free smoothing bras that is now available to UK shoppers in John Lewis stores. Sizing is simple and while there is a range of colours in different designs, practical black and sand, are core. With the motto “stand tall and lead from the heart” Bree has created a piece of clothing that many women will celebrate.
John Lewis Edinburgh and www.evelynbobbie.com