Meet the woman who invented the sports bra

Back in 1977, Lisa Lindahl uprooted an industry with her Jogbra
By Abbey Gingras via Dawn Patrol

An amateur runner, Lisa Lindahl, was sick and tired of being uncomfortable while exercising. Bouncing boobs hurt. So she created the Jogbra, launching a $7 billion-per-year industry and knocking down barriers for women athletes around the world. Last week, we caught up with Lindahl, who now lives in South Carolina, to learn more about her first sports bra, jockstraps for women, and running a business with no desire to make money.

The problem

I started running daily and doing about 30 miles per week. I grew up with epilepsy, so my relationship with my body was complex, because my body would suddenly betray me with seizures. But running made me friends with my body again. I loved it, except for the discomfort that my bouncing breasts created. The options were going braless or wearing a regular bra that was one size too small, which still gave me issues with discomfort and straps slipping.

The first sports bra

My sister was the one who said, “Guys have jockstraps. Why isn’t there a jockstrap for women, just applied to a different part of the body?” We thought that was hilarious. But I also thought it wasn’t a bad idea. So I sat down and figured out what a bra designed for running would need to do: The straps wouldn’t slip off, you would eliminate bouncing, and it wouldn’t depend on hardware. I tested a few versions before my husband jokingly put a jockstrap over his chest one day and said, “Hey! Here’s your Jockbra!” But when I did the same thing, I said, “This actually might be something.”

My friend Polly Palmer-Smith was a costume designer, and I asked her to help me. She wasn’t a runner at all, but she likes a challenge, so she started working on it. She said there was only one thing harder to create than a bra, and that was a shoe, because you need three-dimensional support. She found the fabric, which was cotton with Lycra in it—Lycra was a brand-new fabric at the time that was soft and stretchy.

On pitching her product

I was clear that this was not lingerie and that this was not going to be in department stores. This was athletic equipment. I felt it should go into sporting goods stores, but at the time, these were all small, independently owned businesses where the owner was some kind of jock. I would walk into these stores cold and these guys would say, “What? A bra—are you kidding?” And I would say, “Well, you sell jockstraps, don’t you?” I’d ask them how much of the traffic in their stores were women, and that would stop them. A lot of their customers were women, and all of those women would buy this Jogbra. It was an epiphany for them.

I think our enthusiasm and sincerity came through. We were maybe the first—or at least one of the first—women-owned businesses in the industry. There was resistance, like people not believing it would sell, but no extremely negative encounters. It was the right product at the right time.

Demand and impact

If I had been more sophisticated and done market research before I created this product, I might never have done it. The bra industry had not grown at all in decades. In fact, bra sales had been declining, as women just kept the same bras, and women in my generation were wearing fewer and fewer bras. But what happened with the sports bra was that women recognized the need for it, and women all added sports bras to their drawers. With time and perspective, we can see that this launched the whole athleisure look.

It blows me away to this day. I was just solving my own personal need, egged on by my sister. My intention was never to make money or start a company. I just wanted to keep running. I really didn’t understand the impact until the Smithsonian put out a statement crediting the passage of Title IX and the creation of the sports bra with really empowering women and girls to become the athletes that they could be. That really took me aback.