
So here's the thing: starting a business right now is tricky. Right?!
Manufacturer's are overwhelmed. They can't have as many employees in their warehouse as they typically would. They were shut down for months and are backed up. And when it comes to prioritizing production, they're going with their most loyal, consistent customers, and not a scrappy startup with a product they don't understand.
Suppliers are similarly backed up.
But we're tough mothers. And we're determined.
We've been working on Maia bras for two and a half years now. It started with sleep-deprived, angry mama texts together about how pissed off we were with all kinds of mom bullshit, especially nursing bras.
Frances was working on a capsule collection for school and wanted to have a collection of normal clothes that you could nurse in (because nursing clothes suck too, seriously, the flaps and snaps and ruffles combined with more flaps and clips for nursing bras made us crazy, not to mention they look like nursing clothes).
And this is when we began to design our perfect nursing bra.
I was a couple months from starting my Design Strategy MBA at California College of the arts and we were accepted as one of the three fellows in an accelerator for entrepreneurs. It was an amazing journey of post-its and sharpies and lots of mind-stretching questions and ideas. At the end of it, we gave our pitch and we knew that we had something fucking fantastic. The audience could feel it, the judges could feel it, and we could feel it, like butterflies and goosebumps.

Since then we've designed and redesigned. We've tested it on more than a dozen moms. We ordered yards and yards of sample material to test the stretch and return, softness and sheen.
Things have been slow because we were both in school (Frances for Fashion Design) while momming, but we've finally gotten to the place where there's no more excuses, no more prep, nothing left but to get these bad bitches made!
Finding a manufacturer is hard. Finding one nearby has been nearly impossible and we spent more than a year trying to work with the wrong one.
We've had the materials for over a year and have finally found a fantastic manufacturer who's willing to give us a shot (probably out of the goodness of his heart). All we need to do is wait for our window in early March, and then it's go time.
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