01
The CurveLab™ fit pattern.
Our in-house block has been tested on 1,200+ real bodies since 2017 and graded across 14 band sizes and 9 cup depths. We did not scale a straight-size sample up by 18%. We redrew the architecture.
Founded 2014, Brooklyn
The Year Renée Couldn’t Find a Single Bra in Her Size.
A founder’s portrait in seven chapters — from a 200-square-foot studio in Brooklyn to a 42,000-square-foot fulfillment floor in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.
Read Renée’s Story →Fitting band 28–56 · Cup A–K · Shipped to 38 countries
Renée Castillo, founder — photographed 2024.
Chapter One · 2014
A Brooklyn studio, one patternmaker, and a size the industry refused to grade.
Renée Castillo spent the better part of 2013 walking into midtown department stores and walking out again. She is a size 22H. She had been a fit model for three brands, including a tenure in the early two-thousands catalog era that everyone involved had politely agreed to forget. By the time she sat down in her 200-square-foot Williamsburg studio on a February morning in 2014, she had tried on two hundred and forty-one bras in eighteen months, and not one of them had engineered her cup from a real curvy block.
The first patternmaker Renée hired was a retired theater costumer named Tova, who arrived with a tape measure, a French curve, and a working theory that the industry had simply never bothered to grade past a D cup at a 40 band, and that what passed for “plus-size” in the wholesale catalogs of 2014 was, mechanically, a small cup on a larger person. Tova was right. The two of them spent eight months drafting the first CurveLab block — a pattern developed on Renée’s own body, then worn, washed, fitted, and adjusted on eleven other women across Brooklyn, the Bronx, and central Jersey. Six of them were complete strangers who had answered an Instagram call for fit models that Renée paid for in trade credit at a coffee bar on Driggs.
The wholesale call that mattered most in year one came from a small independent boutique in Park Slope called Hourglass, which placed a re-order for twelve units in May of 2014 and then a second re-order for forty in September. By the end of that year Renée had hand-shipped nine hundred pieces from her studio, in reused Amazon boxes, with a printed invoice and a handwritten thank-you tucked into every shipment. The return rate for the first calendar year was 4.1 percent. The industry average for intimates e-commerce in 2014 was just under twenty-seven percent. Renée did not know what to make of that number. She still has the spreadsheet.
A Decade, Four Milestones
The shape of ten years, drawn on a long curve.
We do not think of the company as a list of announcements. It is a single arc — a curve we are still drawing — and these four points sit on it.
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2014
A studio, a tape measure, and 900 hand-shipped boxes.
Williamsburg. CurveLab block drafted. First wholesale account at Hourglass, Park Slope. Return rate, year one: 4.1%.
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2019
Outgrows Brooklyn; opens a 12,000 sq ft fulfillment floor in Mechanicsburg, PA.
Six-person patternmaking team. First hire from the now-fourteen-strong bra-fit specialist bench. Catalog crosses 1,200 SKUs.
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2021
Series A: $6.2M led by Forerunner Ventures.
With participation from Goodwater Capital. Capital is earmarked exclusively for warehouse automation, fit-specialist hiring, and a second WRAP-certified factory program in Sri Lanka.
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2024
$18.4M revenue, 41% YoY. Named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in Retail.
312,000 orders shipped to 38 countries. The Mechanicsburg HQ is now 42,000 sq ft. B-Corp recertification filed on schedule.
By the Numbers
What ten years of fit-first actually looks like.
71,000+
verified customer reviews, averaging 4.8 out of 5 across the catalog.
11.2%
returns rate in 2024 — less than half the 27% industry average for intimates e-commerce.
312,000
orders fulfilled in 2024, across 38 countries, from a single Pennsylvania warehouse.
96%
reported accuracy from the Fit Finder quiz across 84,000+ sessions in 2024.
Figures audited annually; methodology available on request.
How the Fit Happens
Four engineering choices behind every shipment that leaves our floor.
02
The four-question Fit Finder quiz.
An industry-first diagnostic that nails bra size in four questions. 96% reported accuracy across 84,000+ sessions in 2024. It is not a personality quiz; it is a math quiz with a friendlier tone.
03
Fourteen certified fit specialists on chat.
Free, live, and average thirty-eight seconds from question to first human reply. No chatbot pre-screen, no scripted upsell, no offshore call center reading off a script. They will tell you when not to order.
04
A B-Corp supply chain, audited to the seam.
Certified since 2022. 73% of the catalog is now made in WRAP-certified factories. We can name every cut, every trim supplier, and every dye house by the time a shipment lands on a customer’s porch.
A note from the founder
“We did not set out to build a body-positive lingerie brand. We set out to fix a pattern. Once the pattern is right, the body-positive part kind of takes care of itself — and frankly, we’d rather let the fit do the talking than paste slogans on a tote bag.”
Renée Castillo · founder · written for the 2024 annual letter