True & Co

True&Co is a San Francisco bra company that launched in 2012 with an online fit quiz in place of a fitting room. Michelle Lam co-founded it after a career that began at Bain & Company, PVH Corp bought it in 2017, and since November 2023 it has belonged to Basic Resources, alongside the old American label Warner's.

A Fitting Room Complaint, 2012

Lam's motivation is the least unusual part of the story: she was fed up with trying on bras in fitting rooms. What was unusual in 2012 was her answer. Instead of opening a better shop, she built a questionnaire. True&Co went into beta in January 2012 and launched properly in May. Lam's original co-founder, Aarthi Ramamurthy, left early; Dan Dolgin was later brought in as a co-founder.

The quiz asked about things a tape measure cannot see. How does the current bra fit? Where does the band ride? Do the cups gape at the top or spill at the side? How far apart is the breast tissue, and what shape is it? The answers fed an algorithm that recommended specific styles rather than just a size. Bloomberg Businessweek nicknamed the company "the Netflix of bras", and the comparison was more than a press line. In 2013 its chief technology officer was Brian Emmett, a former Netflix engineering director, and Chris Pouliot of Netflix's engineering team was an adviser.

The Try-On Box

The early True&Co was a retailer, not a manufacturer. It bought from boutique brands, and the quiz told it which of those styles to put in front of each customer. Shoppers received a personalized home try-on kit with free shipping both ways and kept what fitted.

That model mattered for two reasons. It took the fitting room out of the purchase, and it turned every return into data: a bra sent back told the company something specific about how a style failed on a particular body. By October 2013 True&Co had about 20 employees split between San Francisco and New York and had raised $6 million, a $2 million seed round from investors including First Round Capital and Cowboy Ventures, then a $4 million Series A with Crosslink Capital among the backers.

True&Co Turns Designer

With enough answers in hand, the company did the logical thing and started designing its own bras, keeping the design team in New York. The result was the True Body range, a pull-on wireless bra built without seams, underwire or elastic bands and sold in letter sizes instead of band-and-cup sizes. It became the label's best-known product.

Several American start-ups were chasing the same problem at the same time. ThirdLove, founded by Heidi Zak and her husband in 2013, also built its pitch around a fit quiz, but went further on sizing, with half-cup sizes. True&Co went the other way, toward stretch and fewer sizes.

The PVH Years, 2017 to 2023

In March 2017 PVH Corp, owner of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, agreed to buy True&Co. The deal closed on March 30, and PVH's own filing put the fair value of the consideration at $28.5 million. PVH said it wanted True&Co's analytics and its e-commerce reach; True&Co got manufacturing, sourcing and distribution it could not have built alone.

Inside PVH, True&Co sat in the Heritage Brands division next to Warner's and Olga. Its wire-free bras reached mass retail, including Target, where versions of the True Body line have been sold.

Sold With Warner's

PVH changed course in 2022 with a plan to concentrate on its two global brands. On November 13, 2023, it announced the sale of Warner's, Olga and True&Co to Basic Resources, a privately held apparel maker and distributor that already worked with PVH on Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger licenses. The price was $160 million in cash for the three businesses, plus an earnout of up to $10 million tied to 2024 sales.

So the start-up that set out to replace the department-store fitting room now sits in a portfolio with the company that, more than a century ago, bought the bra patent of Mary Phelps Jacob. It still trades from trueandco.com, and the fit quiz is still how it starts a sale.

Last updated October 7, 2026