Beauty as Action with Lisa Lindahl - S4E5 (Part 1 of 2)

Lisa Z. Lindahl is an award-winning inventor, artist, author, and entrepreneur best known for transforming women’s sports with her 1977 invention of the first sports bra, the Jogbra. As CEO of JBI Inc. from 1977–1992, she helped shape a global industry, earning ten patents and seeing her invention archived at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and even displayed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art as a “revolutionary piece of women’s undergarments.”

In 1999, she co-founded Bellisse and co-invented the Compressure Comfort® Bra, a breakthrough medical garment now supporting breast cancer survivors worldwide. She has been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (2022), received a U.S. Congressional Commendation, and has long served as an advocate for women’s health, most notably through her leadership roles at the Epilepsy Foundation of America.

She is the author of Beauty as Action (2017), her philosophical guide to practicing “True Beauty,” and the acclaimed memoir Unleash the Girls (2019).

In this first part of our conversation, we talked about:

1. Lisa’s earliest encounters with beauty, from frozen rivers to childhood moments of oneness with nature
2. The story behind the first Jogbra prototype and why sewing “stretch on stretch” is its own art
3. Why the need for the sports bra was far greater than she ever imagined
4. The surprising moment when she realized that “beauty is what really matters.”
5. What she means by true beauty and why she believes it is eternal

To learn more about Lisa’s work, visit:

• https://www.lisalindahl.com/ 
• https://beautyinaction.com/ 

Links Mentioned:

• Beauty as Action by Lisa Z. Lindahl
• Unleash the Girls (Lisa’s memoir on inventing the sports bra)

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust.

Transcript

(preview)

Lisa: When I invented the sports bra, I was just solving my own problem. Because I was just starting graduate school and I thought, "How am I going to earn a living?" I thought maybe it could be a nice little mail-order business on the side—because if I wanted it, I bet some other women did.

Brandon: Right.

Lisa: Well, oh my.

Brandon: Yeah, you didn't think you'd be starting a revolution?

Lisa: No, I didn't.

(intro)

Brandon: I'm Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work—the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust and is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation.

Many of us want to change the world, but what happens if you change the world and still find yourself searching for what truly matters? In 1977, Lisa Lindahl invented the sports bra—a product that revolutionized women's athletics around the world. For that invention, she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, joining luminaries like Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers. But years after building a successful company and achieving the kind of recognition that most inventors can only dream of, Lisa found herself standing by Lake Champlain, wondering why contentment still felt out of reach. Then came a surprising revelation: beauty is what really matters. That insight led her from the world of business to a lifelong exploration of what she calls true beauty—beauty that she sees as not about being glamour or cosmetics, but about harmony, relationship, compassion, creation, and a belief that beauty may be what can truly heal the world.

Lisa is the author of Beauty as Action, which explores beauty not as appearance but as harmony, and a memoir, Unleash the Girls, which recounts the unlikely story of inventing the sports bra while in graduate school—and what it taught her about creativity, resilience, and purpose. Let's get started.

(interview)

Brandon: All right, Lisa, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Great to have you on the show.

Lisa: It's wonderful to be here. I am so excited about this work you're doing. I've been so interested in beauty, what I call true beauty, for so long. When I saw what you were doing, I was just really, thank you. I'm so excited.

Brandon: Well, yeah, thanks for reaching out. I mean, your book on true beauty is really quite amazing. We'll jump into that and talk about that a little bit. To get started, I'd love it if you could share with us a story of an encounter with beauty that you had perhaps as a child or in your early life that you still remember and that takes you back.

Lisa: That's easy-peasy because this is a memory that I've carried with me all my life. We were living in an area that if I walked across my backyard and down the hill, there was a river that went along. And when I was about nine or ten years old, I would walk down — in the winter, this river would freeze. I would walk down and put on my ice skates and get on the river and skate on it where it ended up in a big lake. But there was nobody on this river. One day, I'm on my skates. I'm on the river, skating on it. It's so quiet. Everything was just encased in ice. There must have been a big snowstorm or ice storm. I don't know. I'm skating along. I looked down, and there's a branch of a pine tree that had fallen in the water. The water had frozen all around it. Every needle was encased. The ice was black. It was just the most beautiful piece of art embedded in this frozen water. I stopped. There's nobody around. It was me, the forest, and the river. It was so beautiful. That's my memory. I mean, literally, I have remembered that forever.

Brandon: What about it stayed with you? I mean, yeah, it sounds magnificent. Many of us might have such experiences and we say, "Well, all right. That was nice," and move on. But what do you think has lodged that within you in this way?

Lisa: Well, it was the quiet. It was daytime, and there was no sound other than the creaking maybe. I was aware of no sound other than my ice skates, my breathing. Looking at this, it's like being in a piece — I mean, now this is my later self saying, "Oh, I was like being in a piece of art."

Brandon: Wow.

Lisa: But that's my later self, kind of. I mean, I still remember that. I had an earlier experience also when I was much younger, like maybe three or four, standing on my mother. My mother had a balcony off of her bedroom, a porch. I'd gone out to it. Because I remember the bars of the railing on this little second-story porch were at my nose. It was sunny. It was summer, I guess. I was looking at the leaves being ruffled by the wind and the light on the leaves and their movement. All of a sudden, Brandon, all of a sudden, I was one with that. The minute I became aware, oh my gosh. It was done. The minute that thought, I had a thought. I've differentiated myself again.

Brandon: Right. Yeah, it pulls you out of the experience when you reflect on it, analyze it, and recognize what's happening.

Lisa: Recognize, that was the case here. That never left me, that sense of we are all — I had experienced being one with the universe.

Brandon: Wow. Extraordinary. You do write about this sense of harmony, this sense of connection, in your book Beauty as Action. I want to first actually ask you a little bit about your other book. Most people know you as the inventor of the sports bra.

Lisa: This is what I'm famous for.

Brandon: That's right. That's right, yeah. And you're shaking your head.

Lisa: I had no idea. When I invented the sports bra, I was just solving my own problem. Because I was just starting graduate school and I thought, "How am I going to earn a living?" I thought maybe it could be a nice little mail-order business on the side—because if I wanted it, I bet some other women did.

Brandon: Right.

Lisa: Well, oh my.

Brandon: Yeah, you didn't think you'd be starting a revolution?

Lisa: No, I didn't. Truly, I did not understand for decades—I'm not exaggerating—for decades, how significant the sports bra was, is.

Brandon: Well, tell us about the origin of what led you to invent it. What was the problem you were facing, and then how did this solution emerge?

Lisa: I was in my mid-20s, maybe a little younger, and I didn't have a driver's license. I had a job. I was sitting in a lot, so I was gaining weight. I wasn't comfortable with that. A friend said, "Hey, try this jogging thing." Everybody is jogging. It's what we called it at the time. "If you just run a mile and a quarter three times a week, you'll lose weight." So I went, oh, okay, I can do that. Because it didn't require getting to a gym or anything else. It was being outside which I loved. I liked that idea. This was before there were even necessarily particular shoes for jogging and running. I just put on my sneakers and went out the door. I fell in love with it. I got hooked. I got hooked.

By 1977—we're talking 1977—I was running about 30 miles a week, 5 or 6 miles a day. My bouncing breasts were uncomfortable, and my bra straps are slipping down. Then I had a friend I ran with who was a guy, and he'd be ahead of me. The Vermont summers can get hot. He'd pull off his shirt and tuck it behind in his shorts. I thought, I'm jealous. I got this clangy bra on and sweat. Anyway, it started as a joke. My sister called me from — she was living in California at the time. She called me and said, "I just started running." We didn't call it running then. It was still jumping. She said, "My boobs. I'm so uncomfortable with my bouncy boobs. What do you do?" I said I've tried anything. I don't know. She said, "Why isn't there a jockstrap for women?" We laughed. We thought that was so funny. I said, yeah, same concept, different part of the anatomy, right?

Brandon: Right, right, right.

Lisa: So we laughed and we hung up. I sat down and I thought, "That's not such a silly idea." I was in graduate school at the time, so I had notebooks and pencils around. I sat down and I wrote down all the things that such a bra would have to do. It would have to support the breasts. It wasn't about lifting and separating and making them more attractive. It was about support. It would have to have straps that didn't fall down. It would have no hardware to dig in or chafe. I forget, there's a whole list somewhere. I thought, "Yeah, this is such a product that we'd have to do." But I don't sew. I mean, sewing is not one of the ways I create. I can do a lot of things, but in eighth grade, I flunked sewing. Really, it was, I guess, a home-ec class or something.

My friend, Polly, who was in the same class in eighth grade, she excelled. In fact, when she grew up, she became quite an accomplished costume designer. But that summer, she was doing the costumes for the Shakespeare Festival up here at UVM, at the university here. She was renting a room from me because I lived in Burlington, Vermont. She lived in Manhattan. She had this summer big. So she said, "Hey, can I live in your guest room?" I said, "Sure, of course." So I had this idea. I'm downstairs, and I had this idea about the bra. I walked upstairs to her room and knocked on the door. "Polly. Would you mind?" She just rolled her eyes because neither one—

We went to school together starting in eighth grade, and we would cut gym classes together. Neither one of us were good. We were not into sports at all. So she thought this thing with me running, she just really rolled her eyes. She didn't know what that was about. She said, "Oh, yeah, right. I'm not going to—" I told her what I wanted to do and she goes, "No, no, no." I said, "Why not?" She said, "There's only one thing more difficult to create than a bra, and that's a shoe." I said, why? And she said, "Because it's about different parts of the body. It's not just drape and design. It has to support different parts of the body that are connecting." But I knew my friend, Polly, and I knew that that design challenge is what would hook her. She has no interest in running or anything else. But then she's like, "So how would it—?" We sat down and started sketching. Then we started making prototypes up at the costume shop at UVM. There's even a plaque in the costume shop about the sports bra. First sports bar was made here.

Brandon: Wow.

Lisa: And the prototype that really worked was when — in fact, we went and bought two jockstraps, cut them apart, sewed them back together again. I went running in it and I went, "Oh my God." I mean, that was the wrong fabric and everything else, but we had the concept done. We had the engineering done, if you will.

Brandon: Yeah, wow. Then how did it take off? How did this go from something that you just found was helpful for you to a worldwide necessity?

Lisa: Well, because the need was there. I was right in one thing, in terms of, "Well, if I want this, I bet that other people do." If I had done market research — what I think is really funny is, if I had done market research, I would never have started a business. Because the market research would have told me that bra sales had been flat for decades and that the existing lingerie companies that were making bras were just fighting for market share, grabbing from each other. But there's no increase. In fact, bra sales were declining. Because, let's remember, this was 1977—with all us weekend hippies were not wearing our bras. Actually, there's the whole trope about burning bras, which actually never really happened. But it was an attitude.

So if I had done that market research, I would say, oh, no. But I didn't because it had never occurred to me. Because I was not interested in going into business. I had an art studio. I was back in graduate school, studying education. This was going to be a nice little mail-order business on the side that would help me get through graduate school. Meanwhile, Polly was very clear that she'd help make this and she'd be supportive, but she was not interested in going to business. She had a gig she was going to back in New York. She became a costume designer for Jim Henson in Sesame Street and has eight Emmys at the moment.

Brandon: Wow.

Lisa: So she was clear that she didn't want to go into business, but that she would help from Manhattan. Her assistant that summer was a woman named Hinda Miller. Well, then she was Hinda Schreiber. She was interested in going into business. Because here's the thing that I've recently come to accept. I'm a visionary. I see connections. But then when it comes to turning it into doing this, I want to hand it off. Okay. Liz, go make it happen.

Brandon: Right, right, right.

Lisa: Hinda was great because she just wanted to figure out how to get this thing manufactured. Because we put this little ad in and, all of a sudden, all these orders were coming in. In fact, one was from Macy's lingerie department. I'm going, "No way." So Hinda found — we understood that we didn't want to start a manufacturing business. We weren't going to do that. Cottage industry was out because of quality. We can't. And as Polly was very clear, this is sewing stretch on stretch. It's very difficult. This is, how much detail do you want?

I mean, we found another entrepreneur in South Carolina. There were a lot of mills in that time, but they were all going out of business because production — that was the beginning of production leaving this country. There was a couple who was starting their own cut-and-sew operation, and they were willing. We were one product in three sizes: small, medium, and large, in one color. Nobody who's real business was going to take us on. But this couple said, "Oh, yeah. Great. We'll do that." So we subcontracted out the making. Then my living room and dining room became the warehouse and office, until my landlady said, "No, this is not okay." We had to actually go rent offices. I mean, it was phenomenal how we did it. I mean, we were young.

Brandon: So how long did it take from your initial prototype to recognizing, gosh, there's a huge market for this, and the demand is overwhelming and so on?

Lisa: Not long at all. Within the first year, we knew we had a tiger by the tail.

Brandon: Wow.

Lisa: Then years later, one of our employees did this retrospective. She looked at the sales growth and she said, "Do you guys realize that you've been growing 25% per year?"

Brandon: Wow.

Lisa: What? The other weird thing, neither one of us were really business people or aspired to be entrepreneur. We didn't know things. Like, we didn't realize that the fact that we're profitable every year was unusual. That's the main goal. You have to make a profit.

Brandon: Well, talk about where you see — I suppose maybe one thing I'd love to get your thoughts on is a distinction between invention and innovation. It's one thing to invent something, but I wonder if you see innovation as a distinct process or a distinct phenomenon.

Lisa: Well, it's interesting. Because how does invention happen without innovation? I think the very concept of invention, the creation, I don't know that I've ever separated—

Brandon: See the distinction between those two, yeah.

Lisa: Yeah.

Brandon: I think one way in which people distinguish this is invention as simply having to do with something new, that hasn't been done before, et cetera, and innovation as more having to do with the making it widely accessible, its diffusion, its actual availability, accessibility, et cetera. I wonder if you see those as related or separate phenomena.

Lisa: See, all those things you just said in my mind would not be associated with innovation. To me, innovation is new. It hasn't been before. It hasn't existed in that configuration. It hasn't existed at all or in that particular configuration. Innovation is new. Bras had existed before. The bra is nothing new or different. But how we put it together and its purpose, a need that had not been recognized, that's how I think—

Brandon: I suppose there are a lot of things, a lot of products, where perhaps the novelty, the newness is there, but people still are not seeing a widespread need for it, or are not resonating with it, or it's not meeting an immediate demand, et cetera, or it's not taking off, right? I think there's a lot of tension there. In your case, that didn't seem to be an issue. It seems like very quickly, after you recognize the need in your own life, it resonated with so many women around the world and revolutionized sports.

Lisa: Right.

Brandon: I want to ask you where you see the beauty in innovation. Would you use the word beauty to any aspect of innovation?

Lisa: I have to think about that. I mean, for me, I ran that business for—I don't know—12 years, over a dozen years, before selling it. After I had sold it, I started thinking about what really matters. I had a degree of financial security. I had a new husband. I built a lovely house on Lake Champlain. I felt so lucky. Also, why did I have this feeling inside me: why wasn't I content, I guess? It wasn't that I was unhappy. Because that's not the place at all. But there was this something.

I had also started my volunteer work with the Epilepsy Foundation of America, and I found that very fulfilling and very important. I write about this in my book. One day, I was standing looking at the window in my studio at Lake Champlain. It was a gray day. It wasn't a traditionally pretty day. I was struck by the beauty of the lake and the wind and the leaves. It just hit me. I knew beauty is what really matters. True beauty is what really matters. I thought, what the hell? I mean, in the same moment, I thought, "What the hell does that mean? What? What am I saying? What?" I started thinking about it and I thought, well, it always. There is always beauty. It's eternal. It's eternal. Then I spent a long time thinking about, "What the hell?"

Brandon: Wow. So it's having an insight, but not quite knowing. I mean, you recognize this was true, and yet a part of you is just bewildered by what it means.

Lisa: So I started doing a lot of reading. I had always been interested in philosophy. I read Kierkegaard and all this other stuff. I started looking at beauty, and there was very actually little written about beauty. Then you could say, well, let's change the word to aesthetics. Still, I mean, there's standards of taste and stuff like that. It furrowed my brow. It's like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Why did I think that beauty is what really matters? Part of it was that it was eternal, that it didn't take mankind's interference to create. In fact, often that got in the way. I went back to school. I had never finished my graduate degree because Jogbra, the business, got in the way.

Brandon: Sure.

Lisa: So when I was, I guess, in my late 50s, I was reading sort of what I call a woo-woo kind of magazine. There was an ad for a program that was all about culture and spirituality. I thought, "Oh, that's really—" What it listed and what it was talking about matched all the books on my bedside table, kind of. I went, I'm going to go. So I packed my bed. I did. I applied. I was so amazed. I applied.

Brandon: Where was this?

Lisa: I was living in Vermont at the time. This was Holy Names University in Oakland, California.

Brandon: Wow. Okay.

Lisa: Catholic University.

Brandon: Okay.

Lisa: I packed my bags, went out of my big fancy house on Champlain, and went and lived in a dorm.

Brandon: Wow. How did you feel as you were doing that? I mean, were you just wondering? Were you like, did you have moments of wondering, "What the hell am I doing here," and, "This isn't making any sense?" Or was it very clear to you that this is really some kind of calling? Did you find yourself satisfied in that pursuit?

Lisa: Well, I felt like I found a path. And up until then, I had gone to retreats and meditation centers. I did a few things with Deepak Chopra and his crowd. I found that all very. It fed me, but I was still niggling on this thing about beauty, you know. I was alone. I mean, it wasn't like I had a group of people that I got to hung out with and we all sat around and talked about, well, is beauty really eternal, or what is it? Also, I've written a lot because I have always been a writer privately, mostly. I mean, I did a lot of the marketing stuff for Jogbra and all that kind of stuff, but all my writing had been private. I was reading and writing, but where was the sharing or learning from others? Where were my people? So going back, I finished my graduate degree. It was amazing. I mean, this program had some of the most amazing people come in and speak to us. I did find my people there. But I did have a home and a husband in Vermont.

Brandon: Right.

Lisa: So talk about balancing.

(outro)

Brandon: All right, everybody, that's a good place to pause our conversation. In part two, we'll step beyond products to Lisa's philosophy of true beauty, why she says beauty is harmony, how it relates to compassion and relationship, and what it means to practice beauty in a world obsessed with appearance, speed, and accumulation. See you next time.