BUSTING OUT
OF ALL THE WOMEN who saw the Craigslist ad asking them to strap on their best bra and go to a loft in downtown San Francisco, 100 showed. After hiking up three flights of stairs, each was told to take a photo of her breasts with an app that could calculate her bust size.
What might sound like a dodgy film audition was actually a highly technical R&D session run by a woman with an MBA from MIT. “Women literally emailed to ask, ‘Is this safe?’” recalls Heidi Zak of the experiment three years ago, when she turned the barebones office of ThirdLove, the new online bra company she co-founded with her husband, Dave Spector, into a brassiere laboratory.
At the time, Zak was hoping the participants—women ranging from age 17 to 70, and with cup sizes from AA to F—could help refine ThirdLove’s virtual bra shopping app. Most women have experienced one or many of the indignities of a poorly fitting bra, including saggy cups, itchy tags, pokey underwires, and a band so tight that it causes ripples in one’s back or, more unflatteringly, in one’s boobs. Worse than shopping for a bra in a store—the endless hunting for the perfect fit, the handsy saleswomen—was shopping virtually, where you couldn’t even test the intimate and finicky undergarment. “I always dreaded bra shopping,” says Zak, 37, who was setting out to fix all of this. By using her startup’s body-scanning technology app, women could, theoretically, get a bra fitting in the comfort of their own home as accurate as one from a seamstress. Then, ThirdLove could use the fit data of all its customers to design and build the
