One Bra at a Time: Helen Masters’ Fight for Better Bras After Breast Cancer

By ASI EFROS

Her Bodywear 

I was so excited to sit down with Helen Masters, an international intimate apparel expert and the founder of Pudding Lingerie. What followed was one of the most moving conversations I’ve had in this series, a story about an entire industry finally learning to see a group of women it had quietly left behind.

Two Decades in the Making

For 20 years, Helen has moved through nearly every corner of the lingerie world, and today she runs Pudding Lingerie, a global consultancy that helps businesses from cherished independent boutiques to household-name brands  find their own version of success. Pudding began, twenty years ago, as a UK retail business. When Helen’s personal life shifted twelve years  ago, so did the company, evolving into the consultancy it is today. But underneath every pivot, one thread has never changed: Helen’s devotion to that unmistakable “wow” feeling a woman gets when she finally finds lingerie that fits her perfectly and her belief that the best businesses are built around delivering exactly that.

Royce

The Women the Industry Forgot

It’s easy to celebrate how far lingerie has come. Fuller busts, petite frames, asymmetrical bodies, gender-nonconforming shapes, so many women once made to feel invisible now find themselves welcomed, even celebrated, on the sales floor. But as Helen spoke, it became clear that one group has largely been left standing outside that progress: women recovering from breast cancer. Behind the recovery lies a physical reality the industry rarely accounts for scarring, lingering pain, limited mobility, lymphedema and a search for lingerie that so often ends in stores that feel sterile, clinical, and cold at the exact moment a woman most needs to feel beautiful again.

It was this gap that led Helen, in October 2024, to launch Better Bras After Breast Cancer.

Evenly

Building Something the Industry Needed

Helen didn’t stop at raising awareness, she built infrastructure. The Better Bras Training Academy, created in collaboration with Cancer Research UK, now trains bra fitters to serve this community with real expertise, and build a strong commercial business. Trainees receive formal certification, a CRUK endorsement, and warm introductions to brands and women who want and need their products and services. Alongside it, she built a public platform: free advice, an easy-to-follow Better Bras Guide, and honest, real-woman product reviews — so that every woman searching, often for the first time since her diagnosis, can find not only the right bra, but the right fitter and the right store to walk into.

Megami

A Ripple That’s Only Growing

In under two years, the ripple has become something remarkable. More than 400 women have been helped directly. Nearly 700 followers now gather across Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn; a genuine community rather than a following. Retailers across the globe, among them leading independents and well known bra fitting experts such as Bravissimo, have opened their doors to specialist training, while brands like Anita, Megami, Royce, AnaOno, Amoena, Evenly, Panache, and Curvy Kate along with the distinctive, innovation-driven Unobra, have lent their support, stock, and expertise to the cause. Ten percent of every pound from training course profits goes directly back to Cancer Research UK. And the women at the heart of it all have become something more than customers, they’ve become advocates, reviewers, and friends to one another, with more than one describing her fitting day, simply, as “a lifesaver.”

Anita

Looking Toward What’s Next

Running a campaign like this, alongside a full consultancy practice and single motherhood isn’t easy, and Helen is refreshingly honest about that. Funding remains her biggest constraint on how fast the campaign can grow. Still, her vision reaches far beyond the UK: more mainstream and emerging brands brought into the fold, more stores trained both in person and online, and a gentle but firm challenge to bigger retailers who’ve dismissed this work as “too niche.” Internationally, she already has a partner in Australia, and is actively seeking collaborators across the US, Canada, and Italy with demand, she believes, soon to follow in markets like India, Africa, and the UAE, which already has Nanaya Lingerie, a Better Bras qualified store.

unobra

Her message to the industry is post-surgery disarmingly simple, and impossible to argue with: “This doesn’t require a total product overhaul”. A pocket added to an existing style. A more affordable post-surgery option stocked on a shelf. One fitter, sent on one training course. As Helen puts it best — “it can be as little as one bra at a time.”

Panache

If you’re a brand, a retailer, a charity, or a woman who’s been through breast cancer yourself, Helen would love to hear from you. Every conversation, she says, is a chance for a win-win.

Contact:
Helen Masters, Founder of Pudding Lingerie
Email: helen.masters@puddinglingerie.com
Website: www.puddinglingerie.com
Instagram: @puddinglingerie