How Bra Sizing Is Fighting the Gender Gap in Tech
This month at Knix we launched a new feature on our site: we now have a nine question quiz to get you into your best recommended bra size and style. We expect anywhere from 500k-1M women to complete this quiz by the end of 2019. That’s a lot of bras.
At Knix we have given ourselves the mission to reinvent intimates for real life. This means swapping out underwire for patent bonded technology. Ditching the sports bra double-up for the cutting edge in bounce tech. Our bras pack a punch when it comes to improving women’s lives through technology. Building this quiz is another way we’re getting more women into comfortable bras.
I’ve challenged myself to have my work online meet the standard our products have set IRL: be an industry leader, all while keeping the customer as the focus.
Before launching our quiz we realized we had a UX problem. Our sizing was confusing. Let me rephrase: bra sizing is confusing. There is an unfortunate amount of math involved in calculating your bra size.(Add in some causal body-dysmorphia from years of media body shaming and quickly one gives up and stays in that bra your mom bought at Target 6 years ago.) We knew we had a great product, but we knew sizing was getting in the way.
Our CEO decided we needed to build a quiz to help customers figure out your size, without the math. She also decided to leverage our awesome model diversity so once you’ve been recommended a size we show you the product in the model closest to your size on all of our bra pages. Let’s get you in the right size and make sure you feel great about your body the whole time.
So how did we solve an issue about boobs? We used people with boobs. #NothingAboutUsWithoutUs
In building our quiz we sourced support from The Working Group (TWG) who brought forward a powerhouse all women team of a project manager, an account manager, a developer and a designer. The folks at TWG brought some killer expertise to the project and helped us think through the complexities of a 9 question quiz (which has 952,000 different possible response combinations).
When TWG passed off the designs and code we made updates that fell out of the initial scope of the project and ran internal quality assurance. Our developers (two women, one man) crushed the integration tasks and had the quiz looking and feeling as a part of our site in no time (thanks in part to some very clean code from TWG developer Jazz). For QA we pulled together a rag tag group of folks from all our departments to try and break this thing before our customers could (eight women, one man).
Then we refined it even more.
And then we went live!
Then we refined it even more and we’ll keep refining it as we listen to our customers and hear what they think about it and how they engage with it.
When we hear about “women in tech” we so often picture a lonely meek woman in a room full of men talking over her and while this isn’t a story about toppling the tech industry’s deeply entrenched sexism, it is a story that might show you the tides are turning and women hold a seat at the table.
Accountability Checkpoint: Could we have done a better job at including more WOC? Yes; if you’re a WOC who dug this story, check out our job board and email me julia@knix.com, I’m not a hiring manager but I’d love to chat and help advocate for your work. Could we have done a better job of including LQBTQ2A folks? As a queer lady myself, I feel like we did alright (I’m writing this article afterall) but I’d also like to hear what you think too!
