From Crying at the Checkout to Building a Boutique for a Nation: The Nada Kadasa Story

By Asi EfrosI sat down with Nada Kadasa, founder of Nanaya, Saudi Arabia’s first fitting-focused lingerie boutique, for an exclusive interview for Lingerie Briefs. Her story stayed with me well after our interview wrapped.

There’s a moment almost every woman in this industry can point to, the first time she was properly fitted. For Nada Kadasa, that moment happened at a Bravissimo checkout counter in the UK. She cried. Seventeen years later, she still remembers exactly why.

Today, Nada is the founder of Nanaya, the first lingerie store in Saudi Arabia built around professional bra fitting and, remarkably, the first in the Middle East to combine that with specialized post-mastectomy fitting. Her path there wasn’t a straight line from idea to storefront. It ran through her career as an architect, through years of frustration, and through a level of care for her customers and her team that, frankly, gave me chills reading her answers.

“I Had Simply Been Wearing the Wrong Size”

Nada’s story starts in 2009, a university student wearing a 34HH, still a notoriously hard size to find, who’d spent years believing her body was the problem. Then, on a trip to the UK, she booked a fitting at Bravissimo. “It was, quite literally, life-changing,” she told me. “There was nothing wrong with me, I had simply been wearing the wrong size.”

That single sentence is, in many ways, the whole thesis of Nanaya.

By 2013, now working as an architect, Nada found herself wondering why women in Saudi Arabia couldn’t access the sizes they needed or have that same fitting experience. For years, she waited for existing retailers largely run by men who, in her words, “did not fully understand the problem” to close that gap. They never did. So on January 1, 2024, she registered her own company, and Nanaya was born.

From Blueprints to Bra Fittings

Nada’s earlier career as an architect left fingerprints all over Nanaya. Most recently managing real estate across seven countries and three continents, she learned how deeply environment shapes emotion. “I wanted to create a warm, intimate environment in which a woman could relax and speak openly without feeling judged,” she said of Nanaya’s deliberately rich, maximalist interior — a departure from the pale minimalism most retail spaces default to.

That same instinct for people carried into how she built her team. She lit up telling me about two employees who recently decided to return to university, choosing majors around the futures they imagine for themselves at Nanaya. “That was an enormous privilege for me,” she said, “because it meant they did not see Nanaya as simply a job; they saw a future for themselves within it.”

Building Trust, One Fitting at a Time

Ask any woman what stops her from getting properly fitted, and “hygiene” often comes up as an excuse — even when it doesn’t hold water. In much of the Saudi retail landscape, Nada explained, women aren’t permitted to try on or exchange bras, and the sizes on offer might cap out around 40 — even for women who already know exactly what they need.

Her solution: she ordered every size of what would become Nanaya’s bestselling style and displayed the full range inside the fitting area, reserved purely for trying on. “When we tell customers that we carry more than 200 sizes, the number can be difficult to comprehend,” she said. “Seeing the sizes together allows them to understand just how broad and nuanced bra sizing truly is.”

Privacy mattered just as much. Drawing on her architectural background, Nada designed the fitting area with two full layers of separation, and men are never permitted inside, even accompanying a partner. “I wanted every customer receiving a bra fitting to feel entirely secure, respected, and at ease,” she said.

The sizing itself held surprises too. She’d stocked for 34–36 band, E–F cup sizes, but 30 and 32 bands in F–GG cups flew off the shelves instead. Evidence of “a recurring body structure: a petite frame paired with a fuller bust” that most international brands, which cap out at a 32 band and G cup, simply don’t serve.

Finding the Right Balance

Not every part of this journey has been met with open arms, though the resistance hasn’t come from where you’d expect. “What surprised me most was that I found greater acceptance within the medical community and among the general public than I did within parts of the fashion community,” Nada told me, pointing out the obvious irony that lingerie is, quite literally, the foundation fashion is built on.

Her approach to navigating a conservative environment has been thoughtful rather than combative. She’s careful with imagery, mindful of cultural context, and anchors her advocacy in a principle she returns to often: “There is no shyness in matters of religion” the idea that modesty should never stand in the way of essential knowledge. “I genuinely believe that a properly fitted bra is a matter of women’s health,” she said. “The greatest challenge has been finding the balance between respecting the culture I belong to and gently expanding what’s permitted to discuss in media, business, and marketing. Among women in everyday life, this has never been a taboo subject, it’s simply not something that’s been openly discussed in public or professional spaces until now.”

Filling a Gap No One Else Had Noticed

Perhaps the most striking part of our conversation was about mastectomy fittings. Despite Saudi Arabia’s advanced healthcare system, Nada was stunned to discover that breast prostheses were, to her knowledge, available in only three locations nationwide, all in the capital, with virtually no specialized post-mastectomy fitting services anywhere.

“My vision for Nanaya has always been to support a woman through every stage of her life: from her first teen bra at puberty to sports, work, pregnancy, nursing, and beyond,” she said. “It therefore felt entirely natural and necessary for Nanaya to support women going through breast cancer treatment and recovery as well.” Nada credits Helen Masters with helping make that vision possible. It was Helen’s “Better Bras After Breast Cancer” campaign, run in partnership with Cancer Research UK, that first connected Nada to the training. Backed by that training, Nanaya now offers what she believes is the only combined bra-fitting and post-mastectomy fitting service in the Middle East. “Supporting these women means far more to me than providing a product,” she told me. “Cancer treatment can change a woman’s body, comfort, confidence, and relationship with her femininity. She deserves care that recognizes all of those dimensions.”

Fifteen Years From Now

I asked Nada where she sees Nanaya heading, and her answer was expansive, three pillars: education, charity, and retail. She wants to train fitters and lingerie designers, contribute to broader conversations about women’s health, and eventually build a charitable arm inspired by her mother’s work with Kayan, a charity supporting orphans. On the retail side, her ambition is nothing less than launching the first Saudi luxury lingerie brand, built around Arab body proportions, alongside her own line of breast prostheses in sizes she still struggles to source today.

“I know this vision may sound slightly unrealistic,” she admitted. “But perhaps believing that these goals are possible and working consistently toward them is exactly how that level of success begins to manifest.”

What started as one woman’s tearful moment at a fitting-room checkout has grown into a business rewriting what’s possible for lingerie access, education, and care across an entire region — one properly fitted bra at a time.

Learn more about Nanaya at soon-to-come www.nanayalingerie.com and follow Nada Kadasa’s work @nanaya.lingerie.

Contact:
Nada Kadasa, Founder of Nanaya Lingerie
Website: www.nanayalingerie.com
Instagram: @nanaya.lingerie
Email: nanaya.lingerie@gmail.com

See more Asi Efros interviews at her column Intimate Talks on Lingerie Briefs