PEBE Fits the Girls the Sports Bra Market Missed

81 percent less overall breast movement. That is what PEBE’s Gravity sports bra posted on a University of Portsmouth treadmill test, and why the company now ranked No. 1 for movement control among 435-plus bras. The ranking is the credential. The work is fittings.

PEBE was founded in 2021 by Lucy Horsell and Charlotte Gill, the name taken from the phonetic for personal best. In April 2025 it employed seven people. Those staff spend their days in school halls, county football sessions and club changing rooms, because the people who need the bra are often still wearing the wrong one.

The Ranking the Incumbents Did Not See Coming

The Research Group in Breast Health ran Gravity 3.1 as job JC28006PB: size 34D, 12 women, 10 km/h. Testers first ran with no bra so the lab could measure nipple motion against the torso, then ran in the bra. The group ranks products anonymously against every other bra it has put through the same protocol.

PEBE publishes the split. Side to side movement fell 90 percent. Up and down movement fell 80 percent. Forward and back movement fell 74 percent. Overall movement fell 81 percent, which is the figure the brand prints on its homepage.

GRAVITY ON THE TREADMILL

A 2020 paper from the same lab, testing 98 bras, found movement reduction between 36 percent and 74 percent, with a high-support band starting at 63 percent. Gravity’s 81 percent sits above that older ceiling. Portsmouth does not hand the rank to PEBE as a press favour. The same unit has tested more than 700 sports bras on more than 8,000 women and supplies data to start-ups and to the largest apparel companies.

On 8 August 2024 the university marked 10 years of the world’s first sports bra test facility, a lab that has now logged more than one million breast bounces. Brogan Jones, head of the bra testing unit, has urged shoppers to look for the lab’s stamp rather than the words “high impact,” which any brand can print.

Forty-Six Percent of Schoolgirls Avoid Sport

Horsell has said she started PEBE to keep teenage girls in sport. The number that sits under that aim is not a sales chart. It is a 2016 survey of 2,089 UK schoolgirls aged 11 to 18, run by the Portsmouth group and published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

46 percent of those girls said their breasts had some effect on compulsory sport and exercise. The share rose to 51 percent at ages 13 to 14 and to 63 percent among larger-breasted girls. Seventy-three percent reported at least one breast-specific concern in sport. Breast bounce was the most common, at 38 percent. More than 50 percent said they never wore a sports bra in those sessions. Eighty-seven percent wanted to know more about breasts.

WHAT THE SCHOOLGIRL SURVEY FOUND

• Participation: 46 percent said breasts affected compulsory sport, peaking at 51 percent among 13- and 14-year-olds.
• Concerns: 73 percent named at least one breast-specific worry in sport, with bounce the most common at 38 percent.
• Kit: More than 50 percent never wore a sports bra during those sessions.
• Ask: 87 percent wanted more information about breasts and how to support them.

The adult picture is quieter and still ugly. In Portsmouth’s own figures, 17 percent of women named the breast as a barrier to activity, behind energy, time and health. A survey of 1,659 women found 51.5 percent had breast pain, more often in larger-breasted and less active women. The group also reports that over 80 percent of women wear the wrong size bra. Unsupported tissue can move up to 15 centimetres in running.

Professor Joanna Wakefield-Scurr, who founded the research group in 2005 after looking for an answer to her own pain, has put a match-day number on it as well. She has said breasts can bounce an average of 11,000 times in a football match, with an average unsupported bounce of 8 centimetres and forces up to 5G. She has also said high support was linked with a 4 centimetre increase in stride length, which she described as a mile over a marathon.

Fittings Now Travel With the Kit List

PEBE’s school page is blunt about method. Education first, optional fitting second, order home through the school. The company says it has been trusted for workshops in more than 50 UK schools and has worked with more than 10,000 girls. After the talk, 97 percent of the girls it has worked with chose to be fitted. Ninety-one percent said they felt more confident about their sport after the workshop and ordering a bra.

Fittings are optional. Girls can be measured over a school top. They can try a bra with a friend in a private room. The two styles on offer are Cloud for A to D cups and Gravity for DD to GG, including a discreet ice blue meant to sit under a school shirt. Parents are told the session is free because the school has paid for it, and that a sports bra is now on the kit list.

A parent who had worried about a nervous 13-year-old wrote that her daughter “came home buzzing” and seemed comfortable “with all things boobs and bras.” A director of sport described a girl in tears at a fitting because, in that teacher’s words, it had changed what she thought she could do. Sophie, on the road for PEBE at Berkhamsted in November 2025, told pupils the aim was that they could shop for a sports bra and know what to look for.

Shiplake College hosted PEBE on 30 January 2026 for an education session and fittings, and said the visit sat inside its plan for comfortable participation in school sport. Limitless, which supplies sportswear to more than 200 independent schools, added PEBE as a high-impact option beside its own bras. Edwin Doran Sports Tours now bundles PEBE talks and fittings into girls’ tour packages. The commercial motion is not a supermarket end-cap. It is a booked hall, a DBS-checked fitter, and a discount code that closes a few days later.

Wrong Sizes in the Professional Changing Room

The same gap shows up in sides that already have kit contracts. On 23 September 2025, Bristol Bears Women named PEBE the official sports bra supplier for 2025/26, with a first-team workshop, a fitting session, and a talk on breast biomechanics. Daisie Mayes, the women’s general manager, said the educational workshop would give the squad knowledge “on and off the pitch.”

💬 "PEBE's innovative, world-class products set the standard in women’s performance wear, and we’re excited for our players to benefit both on and off the pitch."

We're delighted to welcome PEBE as the Official Sports Bra Supplier to Bears Women for the 2025/26 season 🤝

— Bristol Bears Women 🐻 (@BristolBearsW) September 24, 2025

Horsell used the announcement to say sports bras are like footwear, in that they change how athletes move, and that her team still meets players in bras that do not fit. “Yet we consistently meet athletes wearing sports bras that are ill fitting and not fit for purpose,” she said.

Bristol City Women followed on 10 December 2025, making PEBE the official supplier for a WSL 2 season, with head coach Charlotte Healy calling sports bras kit that has to match the rest of the strip. Sophie Jackson, PEBE’s partnerships lead, said poorly fitting bras were still common and that the answer was tested designs with an individual fit. Gloucester-Hartpury named PEBE official supplier for the same 2025/26 season, again with seminars plus a fitted bra for each player. Scottish Hockey had already signed in March 2024 for education and one-to-one fittings on its senior and pathway programmes. The Royal Ballet School brought PEBE in on 12 March 2025 for a breast-health workshop and personal fittings for female students.

THE 2025 CLUB AND SCHOOL WAVE

• Bristol Bears Women: Official supplier for 2025/26, with a first-team fitting and a biomechanics talk.
• Bristol City Women: Official supplier for 2025/26 in WSL 2, framed by the club as performance kit.
• Gloucester-Hartpury: Official supplier for 2025/26, with seminars and a fitted bra for each player.
• Royal Ballet School: Workshop and personal fittings for female students in March 2025.
• Army staff at Winchester: First in-person fitting with PEBE in December 2024, 90 percent in the wrong size.

The Army number is the one that should end the idea that this is only a teenage problem. On 9 December 2024 the Army Training Regiment at Winchester hosted PEBE for permanent staff after a sports bra service instruction, and said 90 percent discovered they were in the wrong size, with physical training instructors in the room.

Following the recent sports bra ABN, @ATR_Winchester hosted the first in-person sports bra fitting for permanent staff with @TEAMPEBE.

A day of real impact with 90% discovering they were in the wrong size and our PTIs being part of the conversation on sports bras & performance. pic.twitter.com/Xh57J0X4gS

— CO ATR Winchester (@ATR_Winchester) December 9, 2024

The regiment sent the team to Tidworth the next day. A cadet instructor asked, in public, whether the same fitting could be run for female cadets. That is the demand signal. Units that already issue boots and body armour are still finding the bra size wrong when someone finally measures it.

England’s senior women had already had a separate Portsmouth intervention before Euro 2022 and the 2023 World Cup. All 36 players completed pre-intervention surveys. Breast pain was present in 61 percent, and 25 percent had clinically significant pain. After prescribed bras, 91 percent of those who completed follow-up said knowledge had improved and that they had benefited. Chloe Kelly’s shirt-off celebration in the Euro 2022 final showed a bra the Portsmouth team had prescribed and fitted. That was the lab’s work with the Football Association, not PEBE’s SKU. It still explains why Horsell watched that moment and saw a support problem the crowd treated as a photo.

Gravity Is Built Around a Figure of 8

Horsell describes the design job as women’s breast biomechanics, the way tissue moves when the body moves. She uses a ponytail. “I always use the analogy of imagine how a woman’s ponytail swings when a woman runs,” she said. The path is a figure of 8, up, down, side to side and forward-back at once, and PEBE argues that pattern is relevant to how the torso and knee load, including ACL risk.

A 2022 study of 14 female college athletes, published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, found that greater breast support during a double-leg landing was associated with smaller peak knee flexion and valgus angles and smaller peak valgus moments, plus more trunk flexion. The authors linked lower support with knee and trunk patterns that other work has tied to ACL injury. That is a landing study, not a PEBE trial, and it does not prove a bra prevents a rupture. It is the literature Horsell is pointing at when she talks about three directions of movement.

WRAPA is the patented layer PEBE puts under that claim. The company says the underband is the anchor, with two linked triangles that encapsulate each breast so the structure can take load without extra bulk, and so adjustable straps can flex to different shapes and to volume that changes through a month. Gravity is the high-cup version. Cloud is the A to D version, with front-adjusting straps and an adjustable back clasp aimed at growing bodies. Gill, a runner, has said she could not find a small back and a larger cup that did not squash her breathing. The pair built around that complaint.

Horsell has also said a well-fitted sports bra can improve stride length and acceleration and can reduce ACL injury risk. The stride claim sits next to Wakefield-Scurr’s 4 centimetre figure. The acceleration figure is Horsell’s. Treat it as the founder’s pitch, not as a second lab result.

Using our knowledge, we have built a range of services to educate and advise athletes on breasts and bras to enable them to protect their breast health, potentially improve their performance and reduce the negative side effects of not wearing appropriate breast support in sport.

Professor Joanna Wakefield-Scurr, Founder, Research Group in Breast Health, University of Portsmouth

The lab’s own 2025 modelling paper is a useful brake. When researchers simulated a bra that wiped out all breast motion relative to the torso, lumbar joint moments rose. Maximum clamp is not automatically the healthiest load. PEBE’s 81 percent is high support, not zero motion, and the company still has to fit the person, not just win the ranking table.

A Wembley Room That Reached Club Chiefs

The April 2025 version of this story lingered on a mentor scheme. That scheme is real, and it is how a seven-person brand got into rooms with club executives. In 2023 Xero partnered with Women in Football on what is now the Women in Football and Xero programme, built as two halves: seven in-person and online workshops on finance, growth, branding, networking and hiring, then one-to-one mentoring with Women in Football members who already run businesses. The first cohort had 12 founders. A third year opened on 13 January 2026 and runs through November 2026.

Horsell used a Women in Football conference to approach the chief executive of a major club about support for women players, and then booked a fitting with that squad. “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,” she said. “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.”

Xero has been an official FIFA Women’s Football and England Senior Women’s team partner since 2022. The accounting firm’s sponsorship is not a fabric mill. It is introductions. For PEBE, the return sits in the 2025/26 supplier list, not in a television advert against Nike.

PEBE’s Path From 2021 to First-Team Kit

FROM FOUNDING TO THE KIT LIST

1. 2021: Horsell and Gill found PEBE, named for personal best, after Gill could not find a small-back, large-cup sports bra that let her breathe and Horsell watched teenage dropout rates.
2. 8 March 2024: Scottish Hockey signs for breast-health education and one-to-one fittings on senior and pathway programmes.
3. 9 December 2024: ATR Winchester runs PEBE fittings for permanent staff; 90 percent are in the wrong size.
4. 12 March 2025: The Royal Ballet School hosts a PEBE workshop and personal fittings for female students.
5. 23 September 2025: Bristol Bears Women name PEBE official sports bra supplier for 2025/26.
6. 10 December 2025: Bristol City Women follow for their WSL 2 season; Gloucester-Hartpury names PEBE for 2025/26 the same month.
7. 30 January 2026: Shiplake College runs a PEBE education session and fittings for its girls.

The ranking against 435-plus bras is the fact every club release still leads with. It is also the least interesting thing about the company in 2026. Gravity can win a treadmill test and still leave a 14-year-old in a stretched crop top if nobody measures her. PEBE’s bet is that the school, the rugby club and the Army gym will pay for that measurement, and that the girl who came home buzzing is the customer the global brands never scheduled.