This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Greetings and welcome back. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School. I have a question for you. What if your clothing was attacking you?
What if every day something that was personal to you was also a big struggle? Well, this is not a problem that I have personally, but many women experience this issue with an item of clothing that most of them wear every day. And today's story is all about an Indian-born designer who now lives in California and sets out to remedy this problem. I'll tell you all about it in just a moment. Today's story comes from Madhavi Jagdish in San Francisco, California.
By day, Madhavi works as a user experience designer for a startup, but in her spare time, she's building a clothing hustle to empower other women in their decision to shed the underwires in their bras. Madhavi grew up in India, and she remembers her mother taking her shopping for her first bra. It was lightly padded, and it was totally wire-free. She continued to buy and wear the same wire-free style for the next several years, even after she moved to San Francisco for art school at age 18. For a while, she only shopped for clothes on trips back to India, since the prices in the U.S. were generally more than her student budget allowed.
As is typical with fashion, a new trend emerged, and the rise of the push-up bra meant that the available supply of lightly padded, wire-free bras began to dwindle. She also wasn't going back to India as much, so after searching high and low for something more familiar in the U.S., she decided to take the plunge and visit a popular lingerie store. She was sized and fitted by a store attendant, and she picked out a style she liked and walked out of the store with a tiny pink and white striped bag. When sharing her story, Madhavi says that there's a special type of buyer's remorse that is reserved for when your clothes start to attack you. And this first new style bra purchase drove that home.
It was tight, it pushed up too much, it constantly cut into a ribcage, and as bad as that was, things worsened over the next few weeks of wearing it. It began to lose its shape after only a few washes, and then one day she felt something sharp stab her in the underarm. After running into the bathroom to inspect, she noticed that the wire of the bra had poked through and was sticking its plastic covered head out of the fabric. She'd been attacked by her bra. Not wanting to take such abuse without a fight, Madhavi took a pair of scissors to the other cup, removing the offending wire and freeing herself from being continuously pricked and prodded throughout her day.
After this eye-opening experience, she took a hard look at the mainstream bra industry and realized that sexiness, or at least perceived sex appeal, was taking priority over comfort. After conducting further research, she discovered that wired and push-up bras make up most of the market. There are still some wire-free bras available, but most of them are targeted at nursing mothers or more like sports bras. Madhavi felt there should be an option that would allow women to feel sexy, yet be comfortable enough for day-long wear. She also believed she couldn't be the only woman feeling this way, so she decided to pull $15,000 of her savings from her day job and set out to design and manufacture a line of bras.
As a UX designer, Madhavi was fanatical about customer experience, but she also realized she didn't know the first thing about manufacturing clothing, so she signed up for a 3-day apparel production seminar. During that seminar, she learned about the entire process of making a garment, sketching, design, technical drawing, grading, prototypes, and final production. It was a good learning experience, and it inspired her to set out to find factories that would help her manufacture her bras. One of the things she learned is that a bra is actually one of the most complex garments you can make, since it generally consists of about 8-10 different pieces that all have to be made in several sizes. A lot of the first factories that she talked to had price quotes that were astronomical.
After many fruitless Skype conversations and dead ends, she posted on a manufacturing group on LinkedIn, and an agent based in Hong Kong with 20 years of experience contacted her. She sent him a sketch of her initial design, and he sent her her very first samples within a few weeks. Simple bra, as she called it, was finally becoming a reality. Madhavi and the manufacturer went back and forth a few different times to perfect the prototypes, choose some custom fabric, simplify the sizing to just have four basic sizes based on traditional clothing sizes, extra small, small, medium, and large, and after she signed off on the next set of samples, they began production. That $15,000 she put toward her initial investment went toward the first run on design, production, marketing, and a photoshoot with a model for her new website.
Since its debut, over 300 bras have been shipped from Simple bra, and because Madhavi didn't have to ask for a loan, every penny she's received has gone right back into her pocket. She's already recouped her initial investment, and then some, but for her, this is not necessarily about making money as much as it is about satisfying a creative and entrepreneurial itch. In her own origin story, Simple bra was created out of necessity, and she wanted to provide other women with an option that offered both comfort and style. As a bonus, each new sale allows her to add a little more each time to her young son's college fund. It's a win-win-win scenario.
So this is an item that most women wear every day. It's an intimate form of clothing, and people have clear preferences and feelings about it. But this also makes for a challenging side hustle because there is so much to learn, and the potential for things to go wrong is pretty high. In fact, the process of discovery is extended because of all the steps involved, and that's almost how it always is for manufacturing, but in particular for something like this that has those eight to ten different pieces, all the different sizes, etc. And accordingly, there's probably more risk in this kind of hustle compared to some others, but it also relates to this clear vision that Madhavi had, where she's attempting to correct a real problem, so perhaps there's more potential reward as well.
Remember, as always, people have different goals for their hustles, and even each person's hustle goals can change over time. Sometimes you really need money, and the security that comes from a second or a third income. But for Madhavi, this is more of a mission, and because it's a side hustle, she's not relying on it for her livelihood. She has more time to experiment. Now, clearly Madhavi doesn't need my advice, but one thing I thought of while researching her story is that this would be a great Kickstarter or Indiegogo or other kind of crowdfunding campaign.
These kinds of ideas do really well with crowdfunding because there is a grand vision combined with a clear need for funding, and this way you also have the potential to get pre-commitment in the form of backers. And in case you're wondering, it's not too late to produce a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign, even if you've already started your hustle. In fact, it's often a benefit. You can position it as showing your commitment to the cause, so you're not just out there dreaming up random ideas. You've actually spent a lot of time.
You've invested your own money. You're really trying to make this happen, and you want supporters to join your cause and help you scale that idea and reach more people. So to me, that's the very best kind of crowdfunding, which is why I thought it might be great for something like that. Anyway, congratulations to Madhavi, and it may not happen exactly like that for you, but if you listen to these stories, you apply them to your own hustle, you will see results. Remember, inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better.
If you want to find the show notes for today's episode with some information on manufacturing as well as a link to Simple Bra, just go to sidehustleschool.com slash 45. I'm Chris Guillebeau, you're listening to Side Hustle School, and I hope to see you tomorrow.
