If you’ve ever wondered what a $22,000 sports bra looks like, imagine a silk racerback number embellished with diamond-eyed gold skulls and an 18-karat solid gold zipper.
If you’ve ever wondered what kind of person would make such a product during a recession, meet Kelly Dooley, triathlete, fashion aficionado and founder of the activewear brand BodyRock Sport.
“New York City is the most fashion-forward yet unfashionable place in the world,” says Dooley, 29. “It’s like a sea of boring. Everyone wears all black, plain makeup, plain hair, plain this and that. You’d think in a place like this it’d be a little funkier.”
Amidst a backdrop of winter grays and blacks, Dooley, wearing a colorful sports bra visible beneath her tank top and hot pink fur coat, clearly practices what she preaches.
It was that take-no-prisoners sense of flair and a twin passion for fitness that inspired Dooley’s startup. The idea hit before her first marathon in January 2009, when Dooley went searching for a sports bra that was sexy yet also offered a pocket to hold her ID and iPod. After fruitless searching, she settled on a New Balance piece.
“Let me tell you, it was uglier than sin,” says Dooley, who also practices yoga and boxes. “After that I was like, I need to create a line of sports bras oriented to women like myself, who love fitness and fashion and don’t want to sacrifice one for the other.”
Not that she had any background in either business or fashion design. Instead, the Southern California native had studied journalism at Boston University and earned a master’s in communication studies at NYU.
But she’d long wanted to start her own company, and credits her entrepreneurial mindset to her parents. Her father had a business manufacturing oil pans and her mother ran a swimming pool supply firm, and Dooley had accompanied both to work from a young age.
So she dove in, with $50,000 in seed money drawn from an inheritance. She started sourcing materials, developing a design gallery and marketing strategy, hiring a legal team and creating a digital storefront. Design ideas often occurred to her while in the shower, or in dreams. There were plenty of less glamorous tasks, such as hauling trash bags filled with finished bras from the manufacturer to her Murray Hill apartment.
The effort paid off in January 2010, when she launched her first collection of a dozen bras, sporting metal studs, Swarovski crystals, animal prints and metallics in bright colors. She got a boost from a wave of press that followed the July addition of a $1,850 charm necklace bra — the world’s most expensive sports bra until she one-upped it with the $22K number. (Both were bids for press, she freely admits.)
Although no one has yet forked over for the latter, women are snapping up her other items, whether they gravitate to the more over-the-top pieces (the $650 faux fur bra, for example) or something more subtle (a $42 scoopneck sans embellishments).
Pumping revenues back into the company in lieu of drawing a paycheck, Dooley has expanded her line to include bottoms, swimwear and a mastectomy sports bra line.
It makes for a busy schedule: On any given day she’ll hit the gym at 5 a.m., then spend the day at showroom or samplemaker meetings, filling orders or pulling items for fashion shoots.
Not that she’s fazed by long hours.
“I could work all day,” says Dooley — who recently enlisted her brother Mike, 31, to help with operations.
With a new showroom secured in the Garment District and her wares placed in 25 boutiques nationwide, she’s aiming to go international. And she’s considering producing menswear: “[Gay men] keep asking me, when will you do bedazzled jockstraps?”
As for the naysayers who think working out in a fur sports bra is a little too “Real Housewives of Orange Country” — sure, negative feedback is a reality. But it doesn’t bother Dooley in the least.
“I always say, if you don’t have any haters, you’re not doing something right,” she says.
Kelly Dooley’s tips for launching a business:
Stick to your vision: Skeptics be damned, Google Analytics can back up your gut instinct: “You’d be surprised how many people search for ‘fur sports bras’ online,” says Dooley.
But listen to your audience: Dooley’s devotion to bling is strong, but in response to demand for less flashy pieces, “I ultimately decided to offer bras without embellishments,” she says. “Trust me — it was hard.”
Be a giver: Invest in your vision and in others, and others will invest in you: “It takes karma — I believe in integrity and paying it forward. And a lot of hard work.”