Making bladder leakage sexy

What do get when you combine two Kiwi ski-racing enthusiasts, one an urban planning PhD, the other a fashion designer? A company looking to take a slice of the $5 billion a year global incontinence market. What else?

WHEN JOAN RIVERS died in September 2014, fellow celebrity comedian Whoopi Goldberg had an unusual take on her friend’s talents.

“You always left Joan with wet underwear,” she told the New York Post.

Goldberg has been taking the piss (so to speak) out of the issue of incontinence since 2010, when the then 55-year- old became the poster girl for Kimberly-Clark’s Poise pads.

Her catch phrase: “one in three like me” was a reference to Kimberly-Clark’s claims that a third of “vibrant” women experience some form of light bladder leakage. That’s a big market. Fast forward to 2012 in New Zealand, and two young ski-racing enthusiasts started working on a new business venture – designing a high-absorbency fabric to make into underwear for high performance (male) athletes to take moisture away from the skin and prevent a recurring problem: chafing.

As Mark Davey (urban planning PhD) and Frantisek Riha-Scott (fashion designer/ photographer) mulled over the project, they started receiving another message.

“Family and friends – grandmothers, sisters, wives of friends, people in excellent health – were saying (quietly), ‘Have you thought about developing a fabric for the incontinence market?’” Davey says.

“When we started doing research, we discovered how huge the market is, and how little competition there is in terms of functional, reusable fashionable underwear.”

It’s worth being blunt here. Over 75% of the incontinence market is what is attractively known as ‘light bladder leakage’ or ‘stress incontinence’. It affects women more than men, mostly women who have had children, mostly when they reach

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