She wrote four words in a notebook on a family road trip. They turned into a million bras.
Four words, scribbled in the back seat of a moving car: “bras for Asian Americans.” Jaclyn Fu kept a notebook for ideas she thought might one day make her a founder. That one stuck.
Today Jaclyn Fu is co-founder and co-CEO of Pepper, the direct-to-consumer brand that builds bras for small chests and refuses to apologize for it. The company she started with Lia Winograd has sold more than a million bras, grown into eight figures of revenue, and done the whole thing without a single retail stockist. Everything runs through the website. Everything runs through the customer.
The premise is almost insultingly simple, which is usually the sign of a good one. For decades the bra industry designed for a 36C fit model and then scaled the pattern up or down. Scale a 36C down to an AA and you get gaping cups, sliding straps, and a garment engineered for a body that isn't yours. Fu lived that gap. So she closed it.
What makes Pepper unusual is not the engineering, though the engineering is real. It is the posture. Pepper does not promise to lift, boost, or fake. Its motto is four words long and points the finger back at the industry: “Made to fit you. Not fix you.” The implication is that nothing about a small chest needed fixing in the first place.
Before she was selling bras, Jaclyn Fu was selling software. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley, then spent years in San Francisco and New York running product marketing at tech companies you have heard of - Mozilla, Etsy, and Conversocial. It is a useful resume for a founder. You learn how products get explained, how communities get built, and how a brand earns trust one message at a time.
The personal half of the story is older than the career. Growing up, Fu disliked her 32A chest. She stuffed her bra with socks. She fought a quiet, daily war against cups that gaped no matter what she bought, and she absorbed the message that “flat-chested” was an insult rather than a description. None of this was rare. Almost everyone she eventually surveyed had the same complaint and assumed it was their own fault.
In 2017 she noticed something. The lingerie industry was finally innovating for larger sizes, expanding its idea of who deserved a good fit. But the small end of the spectrum was still being handed shrunken versions of someone else's bra. Fu validated the hunch the cheap way - she asked her friends and family how they felt about their bras. The answers were unanimous and unhappy. That was the market research. That was enough.
“Where have you been all my life?”
— strangers, finding the Pepper Kickstarter in 2017
Pepper launched in April 2017 as a Kickstarter campaign for one product: the “All You” bra, designed from the ground up for AA, A, and B cups rather than scaled down from anything. The goal was $10,000. The campaign hit 100% of it in ten hours. Fu quit her job that same day.
By the end of the run the campaign had blown past the target by 370 percent, with more than 950 backers. The money went where it needed to: fulfilling the first thousand pre-orders and finishing the product. What surprised Fu was not the math but the messages. Strangers were finding the page on their own and writing things like “Where have you been all my life?” She had built a product. It turned out she had also found a congregation.
The company stayed disciplined about how it grew. Pepper sells direct-to-consumer and has, to this day, zero stockists. When it tested television, Fu put roughly $15,000 into Hulu advertising - a fraction of the $50,000-plus such buys often run - and treated every dollar as a lesson rather than a launch. Shorter manufacturing lead times kept inventory flexible. The bras are made in Colombia, at a facility that prioritizes hiring single mothers and heads of household. The values are not a press release. They are in the supply chain.
Made to fit you. Not fix you.
I’m focused on the same thing I was focused on when we started: designing products and building a community that allows all women to feel that they’re enough just the way they are.
We spend a lot of time listening, and it shows in our engagement and sales numbers.
When you feel powerful in your own skin, you inspire others to do the same.
Pepper is not a solo act, and Fu has never pretended otherwise. She built it alongside Lia Winograd, an NYU Stern MBA, and the two share the chief executive title - a genuine co-CEO arrangement, not a courtesy. Both landed on the same Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2020, and both have been recognized for turning an overlooked corner of retail into a real business with a real community behind it.
That community has a name. Pepper calls its customers “The Committee,” and treats them as co-creators rather than a mailing list. It is a fitting structure for a brand whose entire origin was a founder asking everyone she knew what was wrong with their bras and actually listening to the answer. The listening never stopped; Fu credits it directly for the engagement and the sales.
For all the body-positive language, Fu is clear-eyed about the commercial reality. Small chests were an underserved market worth billions, ignored not because the customers lacked money but because the industry lacked imagination. Pepper supplied the imagination. The mission and the margin, in this case, point the same direction.
Fu is a registered yoga instructor, once based in Denver - the kind of detail that explains a founder who plays the long game.
Pepper’s bras come from a facility that prioritizes hiring single mothers and heads of household.
No department stores, no shelves. Pepper has always sold entirely direct-to-consumer.
Built specifically for AA, A and B cups - not shrunk down from a 36C like everyone else’s.
Pepper’s customer community is treated as co-creators, not a CRM list.
Her early Hulu ad test ran at a fraction of the going rate - resourcefulness as a founding habit.
The whole company started on a road trip, in a notebook, in four words. The lesson isn’t to carry a notebook. It’s to write down the idea that embarrasses you a little - the one that sounds too small to matter.