A Little About The Project
For a while we had thrown around the idea for a ftm/masculine-of-center swim top. Years of personal experience with heightened dysphoria during the summer and seeing others struggle to find an appropriate top to wear while swimming and not seeing any adequate options spurred us to create a solution.
Our solution was the Bareskin Binder. We combined the silhouette of a traditional half binder and compression sports bra to create a comfortable top that binds but still lets you get a tan and feel closer to being shirtless than anything else out there. We offer this top in a range of skin tones so that the wearer can have a passably topless "masculine" aesthetic, this is theoretically less visually triggering than wearing a bikini top, sports bra, traditional binder, or shirt and allows for more confidence and comfort. Our Bareskin Binder is also intended to be worn for every day activities not just swimming or summertime.
In November of 2015 we launched our Kickstarter for the Bareskin Binder -- an inclusive nude colored binder that included a range of skin-tones, something that hadn’t been done before. Thanks to 766 backers, we successfully funded our project through Kickstarter in December 2015 (making this the second most funded trans-related project in Kickstarter history) and began selling en masse in October of 2016. Through our kickstarter backers, we were able to gather information from our community about their color, sizing, and fit preferences — leading to over 700 individual stats that we were able to use to create our first prototype. In addition to those backers’ input, we created our binder with over 20 years of binder-wearing experience, 50+ years of bra-wearing experience, 30 years of sportswear experience, chest sizes from AA-G, and even tested prototypes on Breast implants because why the hell not.
Our binder was the first nude range available and the first racerback — 2 innovations that forced the market, in general, to become more inclusive, especially for people of color who were not included in “skin tone” binder options. Though our binder was launched at the end of 2016, we have already made 2 silhouette changes and changed manufacturers all based on customer feedback in the past 8.5 years and plan to continue to improve along the way!
As of 2024, our production is done through a domestic woman-run manufacturing team here in Austin that specializes in sportswear and performance garments. We've always been about supporting local, small, women, and minorities so working with our manufacturer was a no-brainer.
A Little About Our Pricing
Our pricing was chosen very carefully to keep our product competitive while also allowing us to support the people we have through the process. Our tops are manufactured domestically (and locally, supporting a local Austin small business) by an all-female team. Each binder is sewn by hand, so please keep this in mind if you see any stray threads — these should not affect the quality of the binding provided, but are simply a by-product of being sewn by a small manufacturing team. We also sourced high quality and durable materials that are meant to last.
