Bravissimo

Bravissimo is a British lingerie and swimwear retailer for women with larger busts, founded in 1995 by Sarah Tremellen and Hannah Griffiths in Tremellen's flat in Twickenham, London, and owned since September 2024 by Wacoal Europe. It sells bras, swimwear and nightwear in D to L cups through its own shops and website, and it built its reputation on a fitting service that does without a tape measure.

A Twickenham flat and a 10,000-pound loan

The company started with a practical complaint. Pregnant and unable to find bras that fit, Tremellen teamed up with Griffiths, took a business course and borrowed 10,000 pounds from a bank. The first Bravissimo was a mail-order catalog sent to a mailing list of about 75 people.

Press did the rest. After the Daily Mail covered the venture, the pair received around 1,000 requests for the catalog within a month. That response showed how badly the market had served women above a D cup in the mid-1990s, when department stores often stopped at a DD and treated anything larger as surgical or matronly.

From partners to a family firm

The business moved out of Twickenham in 1996. About a year later Tremellen's husband, Mike Tremellen, bought out Griffiths' stake, and Bravissimo became a husband-and-wife company for the next quarter century. Sarah Tremellen was appointed MBE in 2009.

Bravissimo's shops and the fitting room

Mail order came first, but the shops made the brand. The first one opened in Ealing, west London, in November 1999. The chain grew to 26 UK stores, and the head office settled in Warwick, moving to a new site on Athena Drive in 2022.

The shops exist mainly for fitting. Bravissimo's method skips the tape measure and has a fitter judge size by trying bras on, an approach the company contrasts with measuring formulas that tend to put women in bands too large and cups too small. The retailer claims that 92 percent of women wear the wrong bra size, a figure it uses as much as a sales line as a statistic. Its staff training paid off in trade recognition: the company won Customer Service Provider of the Year at the UK Lingerie Awards in 2018, and it appeared repeatedly on the Sunday Times list of Best Companies to Work For between 2007 and 2020.

What Bravissimo sells

The range runs from D to L cups in lingerie and swimwear. The shelves mix Bravissimo's own label with partner brands built for the same customer, and full cup and balconette shapes dominate its racks. Supportive, wired, and cut with deeper cups and wider wings than a high-street bra, these are the styles where fit matters most.

For several years the company also ran Pepperberry, a clothing line with shirts and dresses cut for a fuller bust, solving the gaping-button problem that follows women out of the fitting room. Pepperberry was discontinued in 2021. At various points Bravissimo also sold accessories, from jewelry to mugs and water bottles, before narrowing back to its core.

The Wacoal sale and a hard twelve months

In September 2024 the Tremellens sold Bravissimo to Wacoal Europe and stepped away from the business entirely. The buyer was a logical one. Wacoal Europe already owns full-bust labels such as Freya, Fantasie and Elomi, so it acquired a specialist retailer that had long sold the same kind of product.

The months after the sale were rough. Bravissimo closed its US store in October 2024, ending its American retail experiment, and in June 2025 a fire hit the company's warehouse. The UK shops kept trading under the new owner.

Why Bravissimo matters to lingerie history

Bravissimo did not invent the large-cup bra, but it changed how British women with larger busts were sold to. Before 1995, the choice was a narrow rack of beige and white in a corner of the department store. Bravissimo treated the same customer as a fashion shopper, gave her color and print, and trained staff to fit her properly. The rest of the British full-bust market, including brands such as Panache, grew up alongside it. Thirty years after a catalog sent to 75 addresses, the company is part of a Japanese-owned group whose full-bust brands it once bought in.

Last updated October 7, 2026