Meet Yvonne Brady of EVB Sport, who is providing real support to Irish women

Yvonne Brady still gets emotional when she thinks about what happened the day of her 18-mile training run for the Dublin City Marathon in 2010.

The engineer and mother-of-three had started exercising after the birth of her daughter that January to lose baby weight. As her fitness, speed and mileage increased every week, so did her self-confidence.

“It was a sense of me again and feeling bullet-proof,” she recalls of her decision to sign up for a 20-week marathon training programme with a local running group.

However, at mile 16 of her 18-mile run on a country road, something completely unexpected happened – she lost control of her bladder.

And with it, her newfound confidence.

“All I could do was run those last two very long miles home as quickly as I could, get into the car, run home and shower – and I didn’t speak to anybody about it,” she says, recalling how embarrassed and isolated she felt after the incident.

“This was a girl who was getting her life back – and it was going to be taken away from me again.”

What Yvonne did not know was what had just happened was actually very common. In fact, one in three women will suffer from pelvic dysfunction at some point in their lives, whether it’s after the birth of a baby, hormonal changes during menopause, or simply as a result of high-impact sports on the body.

But that painful personal experience would also propel her to find a solution with her company EVB Sport.

Yvonne, who is originally from Navan, lives near Monasterboice, Co Louth, with her husband Brian and children JP (13), Sarah Jane (11) and Elizabeth (six).

As an engineer, she has been involved in designing everything from bridges along the M1 motorway to the causeway to Mutton Island in Co Galway – and it was this mindset she brought to EVB Sport.

“I’m an engineer. I suppose we’re taught to look at things differently and to provide solutions,” she says.

“I just saw online forums of women feeling the way I felt and I started to speak to the medical professions and speak to women who had similar issues and realised that something had to be done.”

The idea “simmered in her head” for months, but the catalyst for action came one day when she heard an ad for Enterprise Ireland’s New Frontiers programme while driving home after dropping her husband to the airport.

“I had an application form signed within an hour,” she recalls.

The six-month programme, delivered through DKIT, allowed Yvonne to conduct market research, identify advisers such as physiotherapists and start making some early prototypes – “sewing things together and pulling things apart” in her bedroom.

The next step was qualifying for a €12,000 feasibility fund to produce real prototypes. However, unable to find a manufacturer in Ireland, it took a year until she found a company in Portugal to take on EVB Sport, thanks to a last-minute tip-off – and her powers of persuasion.

“Somebody told me at 10 o’clock at night that a company that worked with Armani and Stella McCartney – really, really top-end manufacturers from Portugal – were coming over,” she recalls.

“The next morning I got in the car, met them in the lobby – they didn’t have a word of English – and I convinced them to take EVB Sport on. I convinced them that we were a huge organisation!”

A lucky meeting with a Late Late Show producer at a networking event led to an invite to launch EVB Sport on the programme, and in April 2013 the first pair of shorts were sold. A later appearance on Dragon’s Den actually saw Yvonne turn down the dragons’ offers to invest, but led to a phone call the next day from Elvery’s to stock EVB Sport in four of their shops. Today, the line is stocked in 16 Elvery’s shops nationwide as well as four Intersport outlets in the UK, with plans to expand in 2017.

Compared to a “sports bra for your core”, the patent-pending technology in EVB Sport’s shorts (€59.95), capris (€74.95) and leggings (€89.95) mimics the action of the pelvic floor muscles to support the core – almost like a “sling”, helping to prevent light bladder leakage, hip instability, lower back pain and prolapse.

Indeed, medical professionals have given EVB Sport products their stamp of approval, with trials showing a 71% pressure reduction on pelvic floor muscles. Meanwhile, ambassadors range from Irish marathon runner Maria McCambridge to British Olympic badminton player Gail Emms MBE.

Not just for athletes

But it’s not just athletes who wear EVB Sport – customers also include everybody from nurses, who wear the shorts under their uniforms during long shifts, to female farmers, who need extra support when doing heavy lifting.

Yvonne and her team – overseen by customer service manager Joanne Allen – are also happy to put women in touch with their network of medical experts, such as women’s health physiotherapists, who can help them to address their problems in the longer term.

“Research tells us that women spend eight years putting up with the problem before they do anything about it,” she says. “So we’re trying to change that.”

And having been awarded HPSU (high potential start-up) status by Enterprise Ireland and raising €500,000 with the help of two investors she met through the Growing For Growth programme, it seems the sky is the limit for EVB Sport.

Yvonne recently signed a €500,000 deal with medical distributors to physiotherapists in the US and Canada, she has exported to Australia, and is currently in talks with a medical distributor in the UK. Meanwhile, 2017 will see the launch of a nude boxer brief, as well as a prenatal product.

Yet Yvonne believes that EVB Sport’s greatest achievement is restoring women’s confidence – and getting them back on the road to living full, active lives.

“We get letters in every single day that we’ve given them a little bit of their life back,” says Yvonne.

“Do you know that feeling when I was on that country road? At mile 16? I felt this isolation and that loss of control and ‘I’m a failure’. It’s such a common feeling. It’s such an emotional pain. Forget about the physical side of things. The emotional pain is much bigger than the physical pain.

“And for those women to be achieving marathons or 5ks or being able to go to the gym because they feel confident and supported – it literally helps change lives.”

For further information or to shop online, visit www.evbsport.com CL