BC Business
Doubl customers can send measurements from home using an app
Jessica Bosman is all about making breast friends—namely, custom-fit bras with 3D-image technology. Her company, Vancouver-based Doubl, is challenging industry sizing standards by designing a way for people to send in their body measurements from home. “There’s baggage associated with being bucketed into numbers and letters,” says Bosman, “and it creates a lot of body shame for women. It makes them feel like there’s something wrong with themselves when in fact there’s something wrong with the sizing system.”
When a customer orders a Doubl bra, they receive instructions to do a private scan using their smartphone. The measurements are fed into an algorithm developed by co-founders Bosman and Bryn Davis Williams, and then cut and sewn in Doubl’s manufacturing facility in London, Ontario.
The inspiration came about seven years ago, when Bosman and Williams were earning their bachelor’s in business administration from Ontario’s Ivey Business School. The pair had to design a venture for a class project and they decided to disrupt an industry they thought was ripe for innovation.
“Bras haven’t changed in over a century,” says Bosman. After graduating in 2017, she learned about fashion buying and merchandising, as well as manufacturing and development, through stints at Oak + Fort, Blundstone, MEC and Herschel—and incorporated Doubl amidst all of that in 2020.
It took three years to perfect the design, pattern and process for Doubl’s $99 T-shirt bra, says Bosman, and she’s keeping tabs on emerging technologies that could eventually be incorporated into the business (like Clo, a fashion software that can create 3D samples from 2D patterns).
With ideas for new designs to come in 2024, Bosman feels excited to get up for work every morning. “Right now, we’re still small, but we dream big,” she says. “We imagine this improving the lives of so many women and solving such a potent problem.”