Lucy Horsell (right) with her allocated Women In Football mentor Helen Hardy, founder of Foudys
Lucy Horsell, the co-founder of PEBE sports bras, is one of a number of female entrepreneurs utilizing a bespoke Women in Football and Xero Small Business Program – Empower, Mentor, Succeed.
Named after the much-used phonetic sound of the acronym for a ‘Personal Best’, PEBE was founded in 2021 by Horsell together with Charlotte Gill. They now have seven staff and spend much of their time working with county Football Associations, professional sports clubs and visiting schools, running fitting sessions and workshops educating young girls.
Their Gravity Sports Bra was ranked number one for overall control of movement in an independent study by the University of Portsmouth, scoring higher than 435 sports bras designed by major global brands despite having only a fraction of their budget. PEBE’s mantra of “driven by science, created by women” is all about ensuring women feel comfortable in their bras, not just when they play sport, but throughout their life to enable them to always perform to the best of their ability and reduce the risk of suffering from health-related conditions later in life.
Horsell was at Wembley Stadium last week attending the latest session of a Women In Football and Xero program designed to assist female entrepreneurs with a comprehensive package of support. She explained to me the unique challenges of managing breast movement which studies have found could mean breast tissue bounces 11,000 times during a soccer match.
“We design our bras to look at what we call women’s breast bio-mechanics. So how do women’s breasts move, when we move? I always use the analogy of imagine how a woman’s ponytail swings when a woman runs – that’s the momentum which is going through her body. In particular, looking at that natural movement in that figure of ‘8’ is really key for things like ACL-injury risk.”
“We have created a patented contoured layer that deals with the three directions of movement, we have a really strong fabric that anchors the weight properly onto the torso and adjustability that allows for bespoke fit, allowing for varying heights and fluctuations in breast volume. As a result we rank as number one for performance.”
When Chloe Kelly scored the winning goal for England at the UEFA Women’s Euro in 2022, her iconic celebration put sports bras on every front page in the country. But while most saw the moment as a liberating one for women, Horsell saw it as another instance of a female playing top-level sport without the necessary support to perform at her best.
England’s striker Chloe Kelly celebrates after scoring her team second goal during the UEFA Women’s … More
“I watched that moment,” Horsell told me, “like everybody in the country and leapt out of my seat with delight, and then quickly retreated back into my seat with my head in my hands thinking ‘she is not supported’. It’s a really good example of women coming second in terms of kit and ultimately compromising.”
“In that moment, Chloe is not going to be thinking, my boobs are hurting, I’m moving around. She’s probably ignoring it a little bit, and focusing on that goal. We now know through scientific research that her breast movement will be impacting her performance and will definitely not be feeling comfortable for her. She’s probably shoe-horned herself into a bra that’s squished her down, that will be affecting her respiratory capacity, affecting her in loads of ways that she’s not going to acknowledge.”
In a recent interview, the vice-captain of the Lionesses, Millie Bright admitted she had played for years managing constant pain in her shoulders due to ill-fitting sports bras. Such was her discomfort and her reluctance to speak out, she played throughout the last two major tournaments for England wearing two bras underneath her shirt.
Horsell was not surprised having heard those kind of stories from many of the women she has fitted. “We have had so many examples of women whether military personnel and marathon runners, or those working hard to get and stay active, who have back and neck complaints and the moment you fit them properly you just solve it. If they are wearing something that isn’t fitting them right and their breast tissue is being pushed down and they’ll round their shoulders into that. They are going to live with natural challenges with their posture.”
“Whether you are running towards a goal or you are sitting at your desk, the positioning of your breast tissue is really important, so is how you breathe. Humans are typically terrible breathers, if women are in a really tight sports bra, their breathing is going to be even worse. If they are in a sports bra that is too big, which is really common, we find that they puff their chests almost to counter for the size of the bra. The result of that is on their whole abdominal engagement. We talk to women about their pelvic floors, we live in a world of wild pelvic floor dysfunction. Anything we can do to help women engage properly internally is such a huge win for them.”
The Gravity Sports Bra by PEBE
Horsell tells me how the PEBE sports bra is different to others currently on the market. “One of the things that our bras have is this 10cm drop adjustability on the front. What that allows us to do is to fit our bras for different frames. If you look at the Lionesses, for example, even if all those women measure the same bra size, they are all going to wear it completely differently because they have all got different torso lengths and all women have a natural position of their breast tissue on their bodies.”
“If we live in a world where we are just squishing everything down, that’s not solving any of those performance challenges. Often brands are very happy to talk about the right sports bra and what it can do but that’s one of my biggest frustrations. We know that a well-fitted sports bras can improve stride length, it can improve acceleration by 7%, it can reduce ACL injury risk, and then have an abundance of product that is often untested, and unless well-fitted is not actually solving that problem.”
“Unless you are loading that mass properly onto the body and fitting that sports bra for that woman – and being able to adapt it for her fluctuations, so you’re not just solving that problem for one day of the month, you’re solving it for everyday of the month – then you are not fixing what we know to be the challenge.”
The New Zealand-based firm, Xero, has been an official FIFA Women’s Football and England Senior Women’s team partner since 2022. As a small business management platform they have dedicated much of their sponsorship to supporting not only women in sport but also the small businesses that support them. Emilie Watts, the Head of Senior Brand and Marketing Manager at Xero explained to me how the company’s support for the Women In Football and Xero Program came about. “Xero’s purpose is to make life better for small businesses. We saw that there was this opportunity to represent the historically under-served communities and that is definitely women in business and women in football.”
“The partnership with Women In Football was really to establish a mentorship program so we could identify the small businesses and really help them build a community of support around them, put them in touch with each other, because sometimes it can be a really isolating experience being a small business owner. It gives them a bit more of a network to help them along.”
The recent annual Women In Football conference allowed Horsell to approach the CEO of a major club to challenge them over their support of their female athletes. As a result, she has organised a fitting session for PEBE with their women’s players.
Horsell told me “the team at Women In Football, and the people I’ve met, have helped me navigate the world of sport, I would have drowned without them. How partnerships work, how to speak people, meeting people like major CEOs – that has come through being in the right rooms with the right people around me.”
Horsell has met some of the success stories from the initial cohort of the program in 2024, including Kelly Newton, the founder of Nixi Body who encouraged Horsell to join the course. “If we stick together, we have a voice, standing alone in our own little silos, we’ll drown and the world won’t change for women.”
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