Lingerie legend

"PEOPLE come in and say, ‘I want to hide my nipples’. I say, ‘Why? You’d be playing hell if you didn’t have any’.” It is business as usual at the Sadie The Bra Lady shop in Consett, County Durham, and owner Sadie Ayton is never short of a solution.

In this case, it comes in the form of Nipple Daisies (disposable stick on patches to camouflage nipples). “They’re quite nice to stop sunburn, if you’re bathing topless,” she says, somewhat unconvinced.

While Sadie is more than happy to cater for customers looking for some extra camouflage or oomph, she’d rather sell a properly fitted bra than a chicken fillet.

Since launching her business more than 40 years ago, Sadie The Bra Lady has become something of a local icon, gracing the backs of buses and taking the platform at Prince’s Trust events and WI meetings (at one point she was booked up three years in advance). She was named Drapers Lingerie Retailer of the Year in 2000 and again in 2010 and is an official ambassador for the North-East.

She can talk for England, never mind the North-East, and has a brilliant sense of humour and an infectious laugh. She must have a ball with customers, it’s no wonder she sells so many bras.

Born “in a snow storm” en route to Stanhope, Sadie grew up in Consett, County Durham, where she lives. She’s been married to Tom for 53 years, has a daughter, Karen, and three grand-children.

Sadie came from a sales background and flogged everything from school shoes to bedding in the Sixties. “I even had a carpet on my shoulder at times,” she says.

She moved into bras after selling dresses and realising how much better a dress looked when it was worn with a correctly fitted bra. She opened her first shop in 1970 “when the wages were five shillings an hour” and the stock took up two shelves. There were only four cup sizes then, today there are more than 160. Each of the five shops now stock more than 4,000 bras.

She hasn’t served any men since a bloke went in, asked to buy a bra and walked out wearing it under his pinstripe suit. “We are strictly for women,” she says, in a no-nonsense tone. “We don’t sell a bra without it being personally fitted first.”

Sadie struggles to put a number on how many bras she’s fitted, but with 77,000 customers, it must run into hundreds of thousands.

So is it easier selling bras than carpets?

“Well, they don’t weigh as much. Mind you, by the time you’ve lifted the bust on some of them...”

A staggering 80 per cent of women are believed to be wearing the wrong bra which can lead to all sorts of problems from bad posture to neck and backache. It’s a statistic that’s been bandied about for some time (and was the reason she opened the shop in the first place). So are women taking note now or are we still hoisting our boobs into the first bra we find?

Sadie believes there is still a lot of work to be done and blames everyone from the NHS to department stores for using a measuring technique that was designed in 1900 and is now out of date.

“It’s no wonder bras are hanging off and busts are falling out,” she says. “It’s like measuring feet. You’ve got to put your foot in the shoe to see if it fits and you’ve got to put your bust in the bra. There was no give in the bras in 1900, they were rigid, but they’ve improved so much. The only way to tell these days is to try one on,” says Sadie.

“The most common mistake women make is trying to fit the bra onto their bust instead of lifting the bust up and fitting it into the bra.

I’ve had to pick them up off the waist at times.”

At 74, Sadie shows no signs of stopping and still enjoys watching a customer walk out with a different posture. “I had a lady who came in with a walking stick and went out without one.

Whether it was to do with the bra, I don’t know,” she says.

“Another time we had a 92-year-old lady, who was wearing a bra that was eight inches too big. We fitted her properly, put a little stitch in the strap to keep it from moving and she was over the moon.”

“Some girls come in as young as ten. They grow up too quickly these days,” she sighs. “I didn’t know what sex was until I was 17 and even then I didn’t want to try it.”

One of Sadie’s biggest issues is with mastectomy bras which she says are also based on the original measuring guide. “That is something that really frustrates me,” she says.

“They are often too big around the middle so they come away from the body. When I fit them, they’re clamped. I fitted a lady who was a 36F and she went back to the hospital and they said no, you’re a 40C and I had to give her a refund.

You’re fighting the establishment all the time, they don’t listen.”

The shop website features a number of testimonials, including several from women who have had breast cancer. Sadie has also had orders from Spain, France and Canada.

Her only other complaint is personal hygiene.

While most customers are absolutely marvellous, others are “worse than methane”.

“It should be taught in school,” she says.

Over the years, Sadie has also seen an increase in women coming in with boob jobs.

“They look at me and say, ‘what can I do?’,” she says. “These silicone implants don’t fit into the cup properly, they’re too lumpy. We used to shove a sock or two down when we were kids.”

Sadie currently owns four shops in Ashington, Consett, Darlington and Sunderland, along with the latest franchise in Guisborough.

All the shops are franchised which is something Sadie wants to promote further.

“I can’t manage them all myself because I am trying to slow down,” she says. “I’d like to see more people invest in their own business.

I’d like a lot more little Sadies.”

• For further info, visit sadiethebralady.com