Ep 013: Swimwear that Fits Like Underwear with onewith

Today on The Heart-led Brand Podcast, we’re chatting with Hayley Segar of onewith!

Before starting onewith, Hayley, like many women, didn’t really enjoy shopping for swimwear. Nothing seemed to fit well and squeezed her skin, even the suits that were advertised to be “figure flattering”. One day while hopelessly trying to find a swimsuit to take on a beach trip, she thought to herself “Why can’t bathing suits be more like my favorite seamless underwear that actually fits my body and makes me feel good?” That lightbulb moment led her to design her own patent-pending swimwear that’s dig-free, elastic-free and edgeless.

Episode Highlights:

On the first steps she took to design her MVP and launch onewith:

“I knew the first thing, like my knee jerk reaction, was I have to try to make this myself. So, I remember, and I still have the receipts from it, going out and like buying swim fabric, making patterns off of literal wrapping paper on the floor of my condo, cutting out swimwear patterns, to cut and sew my first prototype. And the second I put that really, meager, really crude prototype on my body, I knew I had something! It was just a total, a total ‘click’ moment.

Again, I was just trying to get that lay flat, dig free, raw cut look of no show undies embodied in a swimsuit. If I can do that on my living room floor, I have to figure out how to do this at scale. So it took me a year, but I finally figured out kind of my next steps and that was hiring a technical designer to help me bring it to life and help me find factories to help me produce.

And I was debating, do I go back to school? Do I take classes at Parsons or RISD? I live in Connecticut, so I'm like literally flanked between two of the most massive design schools in the world. So I had options. Like, what do I do? And I finally realized nothing would give me the access and the experience that a technical designer could afford me. So that's what I did. Basically the second I got money to do that, I did that.”

How Hayley handled rejection during product development:

“I was also told several times by the technical designers, ‘Oh, that's just not possible.’ And I was like, great. That's how I know that you're not the person for me to work with. I don't take that as an answer in general. I knew that there was a way. Harder things have been done, and we figured it out. So I found it to be a kind of density in thought, density in operations of companies as to why this hadn't been created yet. And obviously, we have four patents pending, so we had to do an insane amount of research to make sure that we were the first to do it. And it felt really good to finally realize it and bring it to life.”

What launching looked like for onewith:

“I'm a huge, huge, huge fan of ‘launch fast and adjust’. It took me two and a half years from conception of the idea to actually launching.So April 2019 to November 2021 is the time span in which it took me to launch this product.

And if I wanted to tack on another 6 to 12 months, I could have done intensive focus groups. But I didn't. I chose to make the general public my focus group and launch with my MVP. And that is so important, and that's what I would really implore other founders to do. You can spend so much time spinning your wheels and I've got to test it with this group of people first or, you know, whatever. And obviously we did garment testing and internal testing and stuff like that. But in terms of worrying about product market fit and stuff, I knew we would have product market fit. That was something I was really, really confident in. And I also knew that this was a product that needed to exist. And I knew that the best way for me to iterate was to just launch.

And with that minimum viable product, it was three months after we launched that we went viral for the first time. So that was a massive pop, a massive learning moment. We were getting feedback. We were getting requests for new things. And so it's really been a constant game of iterating.

You know, focus groups, test groups are great. And I think they're totally and completely necessary for a lot of different kinds of products. But for swim, it's so subjective and it's so personal to women. I was like, ‘Let me hear what they have to say. Let's get this out to women at large’.

The main thing Hayley regrets from her early days as a founder:

“Pre launch, I wish I had listened to myself more. Beause there were some things that just didn't sit right with me and I was listening to “people who knew better than me” on paper, but my gut was saying, ‘I don't know about that…’ I wish I had listened to that and now, I'm so steadfast in listening to that.

I would say a lot of the mistakes in the early prelaunch time was from me not honoring what my gut had to say. For example, I remember the first order that we placed with the factory and I was being told that I should place the highest concentration of our order on size small. But I was making this product with midsize people in mind. I had been up and down in weight my whole life. When I was designing onewith, I was fluctuating anywhere between like a 4 and an 8/10? That's been my body my whole life. And I was like, really? Placing emphasis on size small? And I was told that's what everyone does. You know, that's the way. And I ended up with a lot of size smalls, and we were sold out of mediums because, big surprise, medium and large is our best seller, right?

So again, just little things like that I wish I had honored more. But yeah, I think so many mistakes can be boiled down to not listening to your gut.”

Thoughts on social media + tips for founders on growing a community:

“I would say that the platform that we focus on the most is definitely Instagram. I really did not want to subject my pure, innocent baby brand to TikTok. I was really stingy with it at first and my friend, Julia, sent me a voice memo and she was like, “Yeah, no, you gotta do it!” So I did it and it turned out to be really, really wonderful for us in terms of us going viral. But I would say in terms of sustained growth and community, what aligns most with onewith and me as a founder and the person heading those accounts is Instagram.

I jus like that community so much more. There's just more meaning behind it. Like TikTok, you can scroll so quickly to the next thing, hop to the next brand or user or whatever. And to me, the people who stick around on our Instagram are like onewith lifers, you know what I'm saying? So it just feels like there’s more depth here to me. BI am so grateful to Tiktok for amplifying my brand in the moments that we have gone viral. I definitely have a sometimes fraught relationship with it, just from like a mental health perspective of TikTok and just social in general. You've got to kind of pick your battles, so I've taken two six month breaks off of TikTok since starting onewith, and I really recommend founders to do what they feel aligned with.

If you know that social media is not your strong suit at all, do not try to fit a square peg into a round hole. Hire someone who loves your brand enough to create really killer content that you can influence with your verbiage and your knowledge of the brand. But forcing yourself to do something that doesn't feel aligned with you is just not gonna click.”

Follow onewith on Instagram, Tiktok or go shop their products on onewithswim.com!