Started because a mother and daughter couldn't find lingerie that fit them. Loved by women who are done compromising.

In tech, you learn fast that there are rules. Not written ones. Unwritten ones.

In my first year of university, there were seven women in a class of two hundred. By year two, there were three. The unspoken rule was clear: assimilate. Don't draw attention to being different.

I was twenty years old. I decided I wasn't interested in being invisible. And I responded the only way I knew how: I wore the prettiest dresses I owned to every class.

That habit followed me. Through IBM Research. Through every boardroom. My uniform was a pantsuit. But on business trips to the UK, between meetings with telecom executives, I'd sneak into Marks & Spencer and stock up on their knickers: pretty lace panties with scalloped edges and full coverage that didn't roll down or create wedgies and were comfortable enough for a transatlantic flight. I accumulated dozens of pairs over years of visits. Underneath every pantsuit: gorgeous lace. My secret feminine weapon to slay dragons.

Then came 2020. A beach house. My daughter Noa helping me fold laundry.

"Noa, why can't I find pretty panties like these anymore?"

"You just don't know how to search, mom."

She spent the next few hours determined to prove me wrong.

She couldn't find them either.

Something clicked. Women raised on sexy lingerie had not vanished. They had just grown older. There must be millions of them. Women whose bodies had changed, but not their taste. Women the lingerie market had quietly decided were no longer worth designing for.

Noa and I looked at each other. And off we went.

We had no business building a lingerie company. I have a PhD in computer science and a career in enterprise software. Noa is a marketer. We ordered what felt like a million fabric samples from the internet, none of which made sense for lingerie. We had a seamstress make samples from what we found. When we look at those samples today, we understand how ridiculous they were. We cold-called a lace manufacturer in New York City for weeks. Emails, voicemails, more emails. Until they finally let us in. That manufacturer is still our partner today.

Noa even nicknamed our leakproof line Sneezeproof. It wasn't hypothetical for her. It happened to her too. A mother. A daughter. The same woman at different moments. We both needed this.

Nobody sees them but the wearer. But she, the one stepping into these sexy granny panties each morning, is the most important customer to please.

There is something about looking in the mirror, wearing pretty, feminine, soft and stretchy lace, and thinking: damn. I am still sexy. And I feel great.

That feeling is exactly what we were building toward.

We heard from a woman in her forties who hated wearing thongs but wasn't ready to settle for baggy cotton granny panties. We heard from a woman in her eighties who had kept her old panties for over twenty years, mending them, wearing them until they were threadbare, because she couldn't find anything like them. "They make me feel pretty," she wrote.

That's who Bloomers is for.

The woman the market forgot.

She found us. And she's never leaving.


- Shaula and Noa