For a long time, pretty lingerie meant suffering. We got tired of that.
Not figuratively, literally tired. Tired of the underwire that dug in by 10am, the lace that looked incredible on the hanger and felt like sandpaper by lunch, the bra that required constant adjusting, re-tucking, re-tightening. Tired of the silent negotiation women had learned to make every morning: do I want to feel good, or do I want to look good?
The assumption had become so normalised that most women didn't even question it anymore. Of course beautiful lingerie was uncomfortable. That was just the deal.
We didn't accept that deal. And Perk by Kate was built on the refusal to.
Kate started PBK in 2012 because she couldn't find a bra that actually fitted her. She assumed she was the problem. She wasn't, and after years in the fitting room with thousands of women, she knows now that she was far from alone.
The lingerie industry had for decades designed beautiful things without fully accounting for the body that would wear them. Beautiful for the hanger. Beautiful in the lookbook. Beautiful for thirty seconds in a fitting room under flattering light. Then you take it home, wear it for a full day, and the seams dig, the straps slide, and the underwire finds the exact spot it's going to remind you it exists every time you move.
Kate's background wasn't in fashion design. Which meant she came to lingerie with a different question than most designers. Not just how does this look? But how does this work? How does this feel at 6pm? How does it behave when you forget you're wearing it?
That question changed everything.
When PBK launched its in-house label in 2014, the category it wanted to create — the padded bralette, barely existed. The market had two modes: heavily structured underwire bras on one end, and unlined, unpadded bralettes on the other. Support or softness. Shape or comfort.
The padded bralette was the answer to both at once: the softness and freedom of a bralette, with just enough structure and padding to give shape and coverage without architecture. Not a compromise — an actual solution. Something that looked beautiful because it was designed thoughtfully, not in spite of it.
PBK claims to be among the first brands in the world to build this category. The response proved the gap was real. Women weren't asking for less beautiful lingerie. They were asking for beautiful lingerie that didn't hurt.
Every PBK piece is developed and tested on real women — not dress forms, not industry standard sizing blocks, but actual bodies in all their variation. This sounds obvious. In practice, most lingerie is not made this way.
Designing on a body means you learn things a dress form never shows you. That a cup seam sitting in exactly the wrong place will dig after two hours even if it looks fine in the studio. That a fabric beautiful enough to justify its price point might behave completely differently against warm skin than it does on a cool mannequin. That the position of a clasp, the width of a strap, the elasticity of a band — all of these are the difference between a bra a woman reaches for every day and one she stops wearing after a month.
This is why PBK describes quality as something that improves over time rather than something fixed at launch. Each collection builds on what real women have actually reported, what held up, what didn't, where fit could be better, where the fabric could be softer. It is not design as a one-way broadcast. It is design as a conversation.
Here's the thing that often gets lost in conversations about comfort: choosing comfort doesn't mean choosing plain.
PBK's collections are not designed to be functional and incidentally pretty. Beauty is part of the brief from the start. The delicate lace trim on the Alexis, the sweetheart neckline of the UPLIFT, the considered colourways developed around real skin tones rather than a generic idea of nude. These choices are not decorative afterthoughts. They are as intentional as the fabric weight and the cup construction.
Because here's what we've learned from years of fitting women: when a woman puts on something that fits and is beautiful, something shifts. Not in a sentimental way but in a practical, observable way. She carries herself differently. The bra she stops adjusting becomes the one she forgets she's wearing, in the best possible sense.
That's the goal every time. Not a bra that looks beautiful in the packaging and feels like a compromise by midday. A bra that still feels like itself at the end of the day — because it was designed to work with a body, not against one.
This is what we want every woman who discovers PBK to understand: the trade-off you've been making isn't inevitable. It was a design failure that got normalised.
You do not have to choose between a bra that looks beautiful and one that you can actually wear. You do not have to tolerate underwire that digs, lace that scratches, or a fit that needs managing throughout the day. Those are problems with specific bras, not with bras in general — and they are solvable.
That's been the Perk by Kate mission since 2012, and it hasn't changed: to build lingerie that earns its place in your everyday life. Not just the drawer. Not just special occasions. Every day, all day, without compromise.
Because comfortable and beautiful were never supposed to be opposites. We just decided to prove it.
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