Nobody had filed a patent for an underwire replacement until McKeen, founder of Evelyn & Bobbie<\/a>, left her Silicon Valley job to try to fix a personal problem. At the end of long work days working at a boutique venture capital firm doing due diligence on consumer health care companies, she would come home with divots on her shoulders and chronic tension headaches after being hunched over her desk for hours on end.\u00a0<\/p>\n While the world was demanding, the culprit wasn\u2019t her workload. It was her bra.\u00a0<\/p>\n But McKeen had zero experience in fashion. She studied medical anthropology and earned her MBA from Stanford. The turning point for her, though, came in a physiologist\u2019s office, where McKeen had been working on her posture, along with regular barre training.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s like, your posture looks great,\u2019\u201d McKeen recalled to Fortune. \u201cAnd I kind of blurt it out: When I stand like this, I get pain from my bra.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The physiologist explained it was a neuromuscular feedback loop, or the body\u2019s automatic response to pain, like a pebble in a shoe.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHere I am doing all this work to carry myself with authority and poise, and my bra, I find out, is totally doing the opposite,\u201d McKeen said. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to tell your body to curl around the pain. It just does.\u201d<\/p>\n She had zero fashion experience. She filed a patent anyway<\/p>\n That realization kickstarted McKeen on a major career switch, costing her a career in VC\u2014but earning her one of the most quietly disruptive brands in women\u2019s fashion (Evelyn & Bobbie is now the fastest-growing brand at Nordstrom<\/a>). She moved to Portland, home to Nike<\/a>, Adidas<\/a>, and Columbia for inspiration from major brands and proximity to new connections.\u00a0<\/p>\n She started tinkering with prototypes in her garage and immediately filed for intellectual property rights. That was based on her VC knowledge that a woman\u2019s company would need that to get funded.\u00a0<\/p>\n McKeen got her first works utility patent (the harder, more defensible kind that covers how something works, not just how it looks) within a year. The brand declined to disclose how much funding it has raised, but now holds 16 international patents protecting its proprietary EB Core technology, which mimics the support and structure of a wire without causing discomfort.<\/p>\n Photo courtesy Evelyn & Bobbie<\/p>\n To put into perspective how critical it was to protect her intellectual property,\u00a0only 12%<\/a>\u00a0of patents in the U.S. were awarded to women, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as of 2019. McKeen has six of them, protecting the unique 3D-sling technology in her bras.\u00a0<\/p>\n The brand McKeen built, Evelyn & Bobbie, was named for her maternal grandmother and her aunt, and operates on a simple premise: a bra that fits well and feels good all day.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted a bra that made me look better in my clothes,\u201d McKeen said\u2014an inspiration reminiscent of how Spanx founder Sara Blakely started her now-$1.2 billion shapewear empire<\/a>. \u201cWire-free bras give you that mono boob\u2014not a nice silhouette. They make your clothes look frumpy. I wanted nice lift, separation, a beautiful silhouette. I could not find that bra. How outrageous, really.\u201d<\/p>\n The average U.S. bra size is 34F. Most brands design for something much smaller<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/W24-146_Him_Salt_Defy_Bra_Wholesale_6812-e1774560084492.jpeg\"\/)
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