Why We Just Rebuilt Hundreds of Product Listings

If you’ve browsed our shop before, you might notice something different this week: there are suddenly a LOT more product listings.

No, we did not secretly make hundreds of new products overnight. We’ve spent nearly a year rebuilding the way you shop the collection we already have. That has meant hundreds of new product pages and new photos, with every colour and style getting its own listing. It has also meant new models, a much wider range of bodies, and a truly enormous amount of photography, cataloguing, editing, writing, and back-end work.

This update is about making it easier to see what you’re actually buying. But it’s also about a question that we’re constantly trying to address: who gets to see themselves represented in the photos when they shop with us?

Why We Changed Every Product Listing

Before this update, each garment lived on a single product page, with every colour tucked into a dropdown menu. It worked, technically, which is perhaps the least enthusiastic compliment you can give a website.

If you wanted to see a specific colour, you had to click through a pile of photos and figure out which image matched which option. As we added more colours and photos, those pages became cluttered, slow, and harder to navigate. 

You’ve told us for years that it’s hard to imagine how a garment might fit you when every photo shows the same few models that we worked with. And with gender-affirming garments, you’re not just deciding whether you like a shirt. You might be trying to figure out how much coverage a gaff offers, how a binder sits on a larger chest, where a waistband lands, or whether a cut feels like something you could actually imagine yourself wearing.

So we broke it all apart.

Every product and colour combination now has its own page. A black Mesh Racerback Binder has its own listing. A Plum one has its own listing. The same goes for all the rest of our gaffs, undies, bras, and binders. We can’t promise everyone will find their exact body double in our photos. But it will give you a lot more useful visual information before you buy.

We’re Also Working Hard to Expand Our “Nude” Binders

“Nude” is only useful as a colour description if the garment might actually disappear against someone’s skin. And human skin (inconveniently for the fashion industry) comes in more than one shade.

Every nude tone we offer in our Lycra binders now has its own clear listing, photographed in consistent, accurate lighting so you can search for specific shades, compare them, and get a much better idea of how they might actually look on you.

Right now, we offer three Lycra nude tones. We know that isn’t enough.

We’ve been working hard to source more, particularly darker shades, but finding the right colours in the high-quality Lycra we need has been frustratingly difficult. We’re not giving up. Expanding our nude range is a priority, and we’ll keep searching until we can offer more options across a much wider range of skin tones.

What Does “Diverse Representation” Actually Mean?

We want the people in our photos to reflect the enormous diversity of our community. That sounds simple. In practice, it gets complicated very quickly.

There are so many things we could consider when choosing models: body size and shape, race and ethnicity, trans and non-binary identities, disability, gender presentation, age, and all the ways those identities intersect. Our community is so beautifully diverse, and we want more customers to see bodies that actually represent them. 

But in practice, representation can get very strange, very fast, when real people start being treated like boxes on a casting checklist. We don’t want to hire someone because we need “one of each.” That isn’t meaningful representation. It’s turning a human being into a diversity requirement.

There isn’t a perfect formula for getting this right. We’re trying to be intentional without turning people into tokens, and honest about the fact that those two things can exist in tension.

How We Choose the People You See in Our Photos

We hire fewer than 10 models in most years, so no single photoshoot or year of photography is ever going to represent every person in our community. When we choose models, we work with queer and trans people from our community in Montreal, especially people with intersectional marginalized identities. 

We’re a small brand with a very small photography budget, so we often offer free products in exchange for participating in a photoshoot. This helps us work with people who may not have professional modelling experience yet, while giving them a chance to build that experience and receive gender-affirming garments for free. It also means the people you see in our photos are often the same people we make our clothing for: members of our own queer and trans community.

We look for people who have historically had fewer opportunities in mainstream modelling because of transphobia, racism, fatphobia, ableism, and all the other ways the fashion industry has decided which bodies belong in front of a camera. The goal isn’t to manufacture a mathematically perfect grid of identities. It’s to make sure we’re not repeating the same patterns of exclusion that have shaped the fashion industry for decades.

Sometimes, the People Missing From the Photos Are Missing for a Reason

It’s also important to remember that visibility is not equally safe for everyone.

Being photographed in a binder, a gaff, underwear, or another gender-affirming garment, and then having those images live publicly on the internet, is complicated. It can sometimes make someone vulnerable to harassment, transphobia, racism, fatphobia, fetishization, or abuse. For people living at the intersection of several marginalized identities, those risks can multiply.

Finding people who feel safe being photographed in such intimate garments and having those images shared publicly can be difficult. So if we can’t find someone from a particular community who feels safe taking on that visibility, our response cannot be to pressure someone into doing it for the sake of our representation.

So sometimes, instead of only asking, “Why isn’t this identity represented here?” we also need to ask, “What has made public visibility so unsafe for people with this identity?” Representation matters. But so does the safety of the actual people being represented. We won’t sacrifice one to perform the other.

What This Update Means When You Shop

We’ve uploaded hundreds of new photos and dozens of new product listings. You can now go straight to the exact product and colour you want, search by colour name, and see far more images before you order. You can compare fit and coverage across different bodies, and get a better sense of which nude tone or colour might work for you.

The site is also much bigger than it was before, and we’re still working out the kinks. If you spot missing photos, a colour that’s difficult to understand, a fit question our photos don’t answer, or something that makes browsing harder than it should be, please tell us. We’re always happy to hear your feedback, so we can keep making things better!

What’s Next

From now on, new products and colours will launch this way from day one: with their own dedicated listings, full photography, multiple views, and a broader range of bodies whenever possible.

We don’t see this update as a finished diversity achievement that we get to check off and move on from. We’re going to keep photographing, listening, and making changes when things don’t work. A website is built for real bodies and is never going to be “finished,” because our community isn’t static either.

Thanks for Being Here

Thank you to everyone who gave us feedback, stepped in front of our cameras (models, you are AMAZING!!!), took the photos, edited them, catalogued products, wrote listings, uploaded pages, and survived nearly a year of turning one website into several hundred more pages.

Access is about more than making a website easier to shop. It’s about being able to see enough information to make a confident choice, finding a body that helps you imagine how something might fit yours, and having a way to access the garment even when cost is a barrier. 

(If cost is standing between you and a gender-affirming garment, our Community Program works with partner organizations across five continents to distribute gender-affirming garments for FREE.)

We know there will always be people who don’t see themselves represented enough, and barriers we haven’t solved yet. Our job is to keep paying attention to who is missing, keep listening when you tell us what isn’t working, and keep doing what we can to make this space easier for more people to find themselves in.

As always, thanks for being here while we keep evolving.