For most of my adult life, finding a bra that fit properly, sports or otherwise, meant settling - with one or two brands, if I was lucky, or nothing at all, most of the time. For years, I treated that as just how things were for someone built like me.
This is the story of the moment I stopped accepting that.
Proof It Wasn't Just Me
I left the golf side of my career in 2018 and went back to studying, more out of curiosity than any real plan. Having always loved shopping, I wanted to understand how clothes were actually made; a fashion technology diploma was one of the things I picked up along the way.
A fashion marketing class inside that diploma is where I said any of this (bra-fitting gripe) out loud as a business idea for the first time. It was a two-day group project, we had to pitch a company and a plan to market it. My team and I picked a bra line for women whose sizes the mainstream brands skipped over entirely. It was the gap I already knew from the inside.
We hadn't done more than a weekend's worth of research. It wasn't a real business - not close - but when we presented, a few classmates - women who actually needed sizing like this, told us straight: if you ever launched this, I'm in. One of them runs a modest activewear label now. I've lost touch with her since, but I still remember exactly how direct she was about it.
That mattered more than a compliment. Up to that point, the gap had only ever been mine, something I worked around quietly, on my own. Their reaction was the first real evidence that other women were living it too, and that I hadn't imagined or exaggerated any of it.
A Long Detour
That same year, I made my first real attempt at building it. I got far enough to know the idea was solid, and then I shut it down before it could launch. COVID hit. Shipping and manufacturing costs made the whole thing impossible almost overnight. Not a failure of the idea, just bad timing. The kind nobody could have planned around.
After that, I went back to travel, working in the industry again for a couple of years. This wasn't a case of the original idea quietly waiting in the background the whole time. Life had genuinely moved somewhere else for a while.
The Moment I Stopped Waiting
Burnout from that work eventually made it obvious I needed a different chapter entirely. In April 2025, on a trip to Nusa Penida, off Bali - the kind of trip where I'd gone to switch off and think about where life should take me next, not to plan a business - it became suddenly completely clear, in the middle of the night. Restart the sports bra idea; call it Active Liberated.
That's the actual order of events: a casual decision to go study something I was curious about, one early attempt that didn't survive COVID, a few years spent doing something else entirely, and then a specific night in Bali that finally turned into real action. What changed, in the end, wasn't the gap itself. It was that I finally stopped treating The Gap as something I just had to live with, and started treating it as something worth fixing. Today, that's sports and daily bras, made for Asian curvy women, M–4XL across the collection, started as a fashion class project nobody expected to lead anywhere.
If you've got an idea you've been sitting on and not knowing whether you should take the next step, do share. I'd like to hear about it.
Active. Liberated.
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