In the 100,000 years of the existence of biological “modern” human females, sports bras exist only in 45 of them. In 1977, a graduate student named Lisa Lindahl collaborated with theatre fashion designer Polly Smith to invent the first ordinary sports bra. Initially, they called it “jockbra” because it was like this: a bra was fastened from two jockstraps stitched together.
Playtex acquired the company in 1990 (later renamed “Jogbra”). Years of research followed by Dr. Christine Haycock, associate professor of surgery at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in New Jersey. When this category really took off, it was not even 30 years ago.
“Now, the brand has been democratized, you can let women take the helm, make decisions, and take charge of the entire project. This will bring more innovation,” said Joanna Griffiths, founder and CEO of Knix, a direct-to-consumer lingerie apparel brand. Said. . “But for a long time, it was just ignored. As long as everyone makes the same bad product, no one really has to strengthen their game.”
Like Lindel, Griffith came up with his own business model during his graduate school and earned an MBA from a university outside Paris. Initially, Griffith was eager to run his own media company. But her trajectory has changed. In a poor conversation with friends, Knix, a women-focused, consumer-centric, research-led lingerie company, has become a reality for wine. Griffith ran with it.
“I don’t have a clothing background. I have never owned my own company before. I may be the most unqualified person on the planet,” she said in a hometown call in Toronto. “What I did was seriousness and serious enthusiasm for women, changing women’s feelings about themselves and their feelings about themselves.”
Griffith spent a year investing a lot of work at the business school: doing research, interviewing hundreds of women, and finally combining the prototypes. It was at these early stages that she found that women had two primary problems with the underwear market: one was that most products were either extremely functional or very sexy. The other is less obvious: to be honest, the news is disturbing.
Griffith said: “The brand at the time made women, including myself, feel very bad about themselves and our bodies.” She wanted to reinvent the wheel. “Our goal is to be a brand that truly represents women, to communicate with women, to see us as smart, smart, and diverse, and we are like this.”
In our interviews, I usually ask how the company achieves this financially. But Knix’s story has made headlines: In order to launch the brand in 2013, it launched a successful crowdfunding campaign through Kickstarter and launched another one two years later. The latter raised nearly $2 million in pre-sales; demand was so alarming that Knix turned its strategy from a wholesale-focused business to a direct-to-consumer business. (It is still the most funded woman to date and the fashion-friendly Kickstarter.) In 2017, Griffith rejected the investor’s terms list, so she can continue to grow her business according to her own conditions.
“The many choices I made for Knix, especially the continuous, conscious choice of working with clients, listening to women, and making what they want us to make, always come from facts that I don’t like. I have a costume back. Jing, I never thought I knew all the answers,” Griffith said. Through crowdfunding, even if they only contribute $1, customers can invest as shareholders in financial and emotional terms.
Knix’s products help solve real-life problems – or difficult, universal and patriarchal “out of date” issues that are rarely addressed by companies that are run by male-run women. The best example is Knix’s leak-proof underwear, which is the first product launched by the brand in 2013.
