BRA BRANDS AND SMALL BRA STORES
A fascinating fact about premium bra brands is that they are almost all sold only in small bra stores.
To many of you these brands are well known but for those of you who are learning about bra brands, where to buy bras, or how a bra should fit (if you are thinking, “is there a bra that fits?”, this is for you!) knowing these brands and their availability will help you find the right bras that fit you.
Finding a brand that makes a bra that fits you, makes all the difference.
The classic brands have been around for over 100 years. Prima Donna (1865), Anita (1886), Marie Jo (1919) or over 50 years like Empreinte (1946).
We analyzed all the bra stores in Canada. We checked their website, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest to see what brands they sold. This list is not exhaustive, stores carry more brands than they advertise. This is very informal, but a good baseline of bras in Canada.
We excluded the Direct To Consumer bra brands like Knix or Third Love. We also excluded mall brands like La Senza, La Vie en Rose, Change Lingerie, or Victoria’s Secret. This is only a look at small bra stores and not the whole lingerie Canada market.
The five brands we found in most stores are :
Four of the top five brands (Anita, Prima Donna, Marie Jo, and Empreinte) are not sold in department stores (The Bay, Nordstrom, Simons). Chantelle is the only department store brand on this top five list. Most bra brands do an excellent job of keeping us shopping local for bras in Canada.
We catalogued 138 brands in small bra stores, of those, only 32 sell in department stores. The other 106 brands can only be found in your local lingerie store.
The top 20 bra brands found in stores are:
In the online bra world in Canada, these bras may not sell in department stores, but online, they might as well.
When we go online to look for a bra we might as well walk into a bra-mart. The inner-workings of the internet make it so. Searching for a bra online brings the big players to your screen, the small store is buried deep in the search results. Bra stores in Canada suffer from low online visibility.
You might say; but I see the bra store near me in my Google search results. Yes. You see the two or three stores closest to you, stores you most likely already know. You can shop them without the help of Google, but if you are looking for bras through Google, there is a reason. Maybe your local stores don’t carry your bra size. Maybe they don’t carry your favorite brand. Whatever reason drove you online bra shopping, Google as your guide will funnel you to the bra-marts. The ones that rig the system. Where your money goes to a boardroom instead of a living room.
If you’ve dealt with bras online, bought bras online, you know the challenges involved.
Knowing what bra brands are available, and which brands fit you, opens your ability to buy bras from small stores across the country. When you engage a small store to buy a bra, even if it is far away, you get more knowledge and service. And your money does good.
There is a reason great bra brands are almost all sold in small stores. The best brands know you need knowledge to sell bras. They want their products sold by trained, experienced fitters. Bra fitting takes years to master. Even the most novice bra fitter goes through months of training before working one-on-one in a bra fitting.
There is no substitute to shopping for a bra in person. No argument there. But sometimes, you can’t. Sometimes you live in a remote place. Sometimes your local store doesn’t stock what you like. Sometimes you are confined to your home. We support buying bras in person, but we empathize with real challenges that exist for some people to get to a bra store.
Get advice. Get service. Get the expertise you deserve, the products you love, and do good with your purchasing power.
If you are going to buy a bra online, buying from a small bra store in Canada is the best choice. We encourage you to shop local from anywhere.
Go to our STORES and use the filter to find the stores with the brands you want.
Here is a full list of the brands we found and their in-store availability.
