Ubras

Ubras is a Chinese underwear brand founded in Beijing on March 23, 2016, by Tou Ya, a former manager at the Beijing lingerie company Aimer. Its operating company, Biyue (Beijing) Technology, is based in the 768 Creative Industry Park in Haidian District, and the brand is best known for its "size-free" wire-free knit bra, which made it one of the top-selling underwear labels on Tmall within a few years.

From Aimer to a Haidian Start-Up

Tou Ya came from inside the old Chinese lingerie business. Aimer, where she had held a director-level post, is one of the established domestic brands of the department-store era, sold through counters and fitters. Ubras was built as a deliberate break from that sales model and from the structured, wired bra that dominated it.

The timing was good. From the mid-2010s, younger Chinese shoppers were moving away from push-up padding toward softer, unstructured bras, and they were doing their buying on Tmall and JD.com instead of in department stores. A cohort of new labels grew up on that shift, including NEIWAI in Shanghai and Bananain in Shenzhen. Ubras was the one that went furthest on sizing.

The Ubras Size-Free Bra

The idea is simple to state. Instead of band and cup sizes, a size-free bra is a stretch knit that covers a broad range of bodies in one or a few sizes. Ubras's Chinese encyclopedia entry dates the brand's creation of the size-free category to 2018; trade coverage treats it as the product the company was founded around. Either way, it became the house signature.

How it works

A size-free bra is a wireless bra built from a dense, high-elastic jersey knit. There is no wire and usually no hook-and-eye back. Many styles add removable pads for shape, and the fabric's recovery, not hardware, provides the hold. The design solves the online-shopping problem neatly, since a customer cannot pick the wrong size if there is barely a size to pick. It is less good at heavy support, which is the price of the concept everywhere it has been tried.

None of this was new as an idea. Triumph International sold a stretch One Size bra in the 1970s, and True&Co's True Body line made a similar argument in the United States. What Ubras did was sell it at a scale that neither of them reached.

Tmall and Singles' Day

The sales record is where the brand's reputation comes from. Chinese trade reporting has Ubras sitting behind Maniform, Bananain and NEIWAI in Tmall's underwear rankings in late 2019, passing them in the first half of 2020 and then holding the top spot in the platform's real-time underwear sales ranking. Western coverage noted that it outsold Uniqlo, then the platform's leading underwear seller, during the 2020 Singles' Day festival.

Reported figures for those years vary widely between sources, so we leave them out. Two numbers are more stable. The company claims more than 50 million pieces sold by 2023. Baidu's entry records that Ubras ranked second in Tmall's underwear category on Singles' Day 2025.

Livestreams and ambassadors

The growth was built on Chinese platform marketing. Ubras products featured in the biggest livestream selling sessions of 2020, and the brand signed the actress Ouyang Nana as an ambassador in October 2019 and the model Liu Wen in September 2021, the latter for its "skin-base wear" layering line.

Funding and the Lab

Ubras raised money from Today Capital in April 2018, then a round led by Sequoia Capital China in September 2020, and further investment in 2021. A B+ round of several hundred million yuan followed in 2022.

The company presents itself as a textile developer as much as a brand. It says it holds more than 250 patents, runs a joint materials research center with Donghua University in Shanghai, and in 2020 issued its own enterprise standard for size-free knitted bras. In 2021 it added a "soft support" technology aimed at the support gap that size-free bras leave, and the range now runs to skin-base wear, soft-support bras, homewear, sportswear, maternity wear and shapewear.

The brand that set out to abolish the size chart now publishes a technical standard for its own product category, which is about as established as a Chinese lingerie company gets.

Last updated October 7, 2026