My story. Why I built the Bella Baby tank.

Bella · Founder

1 month after giving birth, I found out my husband was cheating on me. And it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

I know that doesn't make any sense but let me explain.

I was on the couch, half asleep, my daughter finally down for a nap, when his phone buzzed on the coffee table next to me. I wasn't trying to look. I just looked over out of habit. A notification banner, there for maybe two seconds before it disappeared. A woman's profile picture. A name I didn't recognize.

"Who's that?" I asked, trying to sound casual.

"My cousin," he said, not even looking up from the TV.

I didn't think much of it. I was exhausted, running on four hours of broken sleep, and I didn't have the energy to chase a feeling I couldn't even name yet.

But it sat with me. For days. Something about the way he'd said it, too fast, too easy, his eyes already back on the screen before the words were even out.

So a week later, when he was in the shower, I picked up his phone. I don't know what I was looking for. I just knew I needed to look.

It wasn't his cousin.

Messages going back four months. Before I'd even given birth. Pictures I wish I could unsee. A name he'd saved in his phone as a work contact.

And this is where the worst part of that night happened.

I didn't scream. I didn't cry, not yet. I just sat there on the edge of our bed with my daughter sleeping in the next room, scrolling through four months of my husband building a whole other life while I was growing his child.

When he got out of the shower, I was still sitting there. I didn't say a word. I just turned the phone around and showed him.

He tried to explain. Said it meant nothing. Said he was stressed, that pregnancy had changed things between us, that he never meant for it to go this far.

I told him to pack his bag and get the fuck out.

There I was. One month after giving birth. A baby who needed me every two hours around the clock. A husband who no longer lived in our house. And a body that didn't feel like mine anymore.

As it turns out, this is exactly where the best part of my life started because one year later, I had a successful company, a better looking and younger husband who actually loved me and I felt more comfortable and free in my own body than I ever had before. None of it would have happened without the worst month of my life. But let me back up from here because you really won't believe how all of this actually took place.

Besides divorcing my cheating husband, my number one biggest frustration was feeling fat and dealing with postpartum boobs that wouldn't stop hurting.

Every woman who's had this issue knows what I'm talking about. They ached constantly from nursing, swollen and tender one hour, sore and deflated the next. I couldn't do squishy hugs with my own daughter anymore, not without flinching. If she put her knee up into my chest during a feed it hurt so bad I'd have to bite down and wait for it to pass. I couldn't sleep on my stomach, something I used to do every night of my life. Every bra I owned felt like it was fighting me. The band dug into my ribs and shoulders every day. The pads rubbed against skin that was already raw from feeding every couple hours.

And it wasn't just the pain. It was what the pain was doing to me. Every flinch, every wince, every night I couldn't sleep made me feel like I was failing at the one thing I was supposed to be good at now: being a good mother. Like my own body had turned into one more thing working against me, on top of everything else.

One day I decided that today I wasn't wearing a bra, almost by accident. I know that sounds like nothing. It didn't feel like nothing to me. One stay-at-home day, since my boobs had been hurting so badly, I just didn't put one on. And all of a sudden I felt like a completely different person.

My moodiness lifted. I was more patient with my daughter than I'd been in weeks. I actually laughed at something that day. I felt free again, like a better mother, like myself again, for the first time since giving birth. But I couldn't just not wear a bra every day, especially when you're postpartum.

I tried nipple covers first. They lasted about two days before the adhesive irritated my skin so badly I had to rip them off, which hurt worse than the problem they were supposed to fix.

So I tried the famous postpartum seamless bralettes. By the afternoon I was pulling at it exactly the way I used to pull at my old bras. I wondered why they didn't work the way they said in the commercials, and after some digging I found out it was because they're designed by a man...

I tried just not wearing one at all. For about a day. Until I realized I couldn't nurse in public, couldn't answer the door, couldn't do anything without worrying about what was showing through my shirt.

I was alone, sleep-deprived, heartbroken, and now apparently unable to solve a problem as simple as what to put on my own body in the morning. I just needed something that supported me without touching or pressing on the pain.

That night I had an idea, and it turned out that this idea was the one thing that changed my entire life.

So one night, nursing my daughter in the dark because that was the only time I had to myself, I started sketching. I kept thinking about why after giving birth, every bra gave me a cramping and claustrophobic feeling and it hit me: Every bra I owned was built for a body that stays the same size all day. Mine didn't. I was fuller before a feed, smaller after, swollen some hours, soft the next, and the bra wasn't made for the difference in size and soreness my body was going through every couple hours. Same band, same wire, whether I was full or empty. That's why it always ended up cutting into my shoulders and back, no matter what I tried.

Before becoming a mother, I studied design something I completely gave up on after meeting my husband. So I decided to take matters into my own hands and started sketching something built for a body that changes throughout the day. Not two fixed points holding one shape. Support spread across the whole fabric instead, so it could move with me through the day instead of fighting whatever my body was doing at that moment. No band. No wire. No clasp I'd have to reach behind my back for with a baby attached to me.

I found a seamstress two towns over who didn't laugh at me when I described it. It took us six attempts to get it right.

The first time I pulled the finished one over my head, I remember exactly where I was standing. In my bathroom, 11pm, my daughter finally asleep. I looked in the mirror and just... stopped.

No bra lines. No band cutting into my ribs. No strap marks on my shoulders. Nothing digging in anywhere. It was like my boobs were finally just being held instead of squeezed.

I wore it the rest of that night without even thinking about it. Nursing her at 2am, I just pulled it down and fed her, no clasp, no fumbling in the dark. By morning I'd completely forgotten I had it on. Nothing digging in painfully to distract me from getting through the day, just totally functional. For the first time since giving birth, I wasn't thinking about my boobs at all and forgot they even existed. No aching, no bracing myself for the next feed, nothing. I just felt like myself again.

That's when it clicked. If I needed this that badly, other postpartum moms needed it too.

So I made more. I started selling them, just a handful at first, to other moms I met at postpartum yoga, at the pediatrician's waiting room, women who looked exactly as exhausted as I felt. Word spread faster than I expected. What started as something I made for myself at 2am became a real business within a year.

The next part completely changed my life.

I met someone. A customer's brother, actually, who'd come to pick up an order for his sister. We talked for twenty minutes in my driveway. He asked more questions about the company than most investors had. Today he's my husband. The real one. The one who held my hand through launching this and who tells me, almost every week, how proud he is of what I built out of the worst month of my life.

If my ex-husband hadn't cheated, I never would have built this. I never would have met my husband now. I never would have found out what I was actually capable of when I had nothing left to lose.

That's not something I ever expected to be grateful for. But I am.

If you're a few weeks or a few months postpartum and you've been lying awake at night because the band won't stop cramping into you, if you've felt that same ache whether you're full or empty, if squishy hugs from your own kid make you flinch instead of melt, if you've already gone through the nipple covers and the bralettes and the crop tops and none of it actually worked, I built this for you specifically. Not a bra with nicer fabric. Something designed completely differently.

We just restocked after selling out in under 48 hours last time. If you want one before they're gone again, I'd grab it today, not next week.

There's a 30-day guarantee. If it doesn't do what I'm telling you it does, send it back to me, no questions asked.

But I don't think you'll send it back.

I think you'll throw out your bras instead.

That's what I did, along with many other women.

I built this with a broken heart and a newborn especially for women like you, because you deserve it.