By Ali Cudby
Has anyone else noticed that there has been a lot of focus on tween and teen bras lately? It all started with the media flurry over a new company called Yellowberry.
Yellowberry is a company that’s gotten a lot of press. It’s a crowd source-financed bra company founded by teenager Megan Grassell. It all started when Grassell took her 13-year old sister bra shopping for the first time. As the story goes, the product she found was all highly sexualized, and she decided to “make a better mousetrap” with a focus on colorful, fun bras for the tween and early teen market. After a Kickstarter campaign that ultimately raised $41,000, Yellowberry was born and is now shipping product in the $30-43 range.
Of course, Yellowberry is not the only company making age-appropriate bras for the tween and teen market.
Companies like Hanesbrands have been also been making fun, colorful bras in similar styles – at a fraction of the price. In fact, their prices begin under $10. Royce is another company that has focused on the tween/teen sector.
As Elisabeth Dale points out in her excellent article, Guide to Buying Bras for Tween and Teens, “Yellowberry bras won’t be the perfect first bra for every young girl,” for reasons that range from the biology of development to the size of a customer’s wallet.
So what does that mean the lingerie retailer?
No matter what product you stock, when it comes to these young customers, retailers have a particular opportunity and a significant responsibility to provide these girls with a supportive experience – physically and emotionally.
Girls who begin their bra-wearing lives with positive feelings about their breasts go into the world with a better self-image. Beliefs about bras are intimately connected to girls (and women’s) thoughts about their bodies and – by extension – their thoughts about themselves as budding women. So anything you do to make a girl feel better about her changing body can have a direct impact on how she feels in her skin.
Your role is even more valuable in today’s environment, when the age of puberty is shifting younger. For many mothers of tweens and teens, their first bras came at the same time as early “birds and bees” conversations. These Moms aren’t always prepared for having a conversation about growing up with an 8-year old, when the conversation that is appropriate for a 13-year old getting her period for the first time is much different. These Moms don’t always know what script to follow.
Working with tweens and teens is yet another reminder that the role of the lingerie retailer goes far beyond that of selling bras. You can make a significant impact on the way girls see themselves and their bodies, and that is a tremendous gift you can give these young customers
