Continuing to rack ’em up
Local entrepreneur collecting bras with hopes of setting Guinness record while raising breast cancer awareness
You might expect a story about the longest bra chain in history to be filled with brassiere puns and tasteless double entendres, but that would be just a linguistic booby trap.
Seriously, Jennifer Jolicoeur has been dreaming about putting the city in the Guinness Book of World Records as the home of a 110-mile-long string of bras for a decade. Yeah, there’s Guinness glory in those cups, but also a mission close to the heart of the local sex toy entrepreneur.
“We want to raise breast cancer awareness,” says founder and CEO of Athena’s Home Novelties. “It also gives women a place to send their unwanted bras in a way that will send an impactful message – and make history.”
With help from her troop of “godesses” and “adonises” – her salespeople – Jolicoeur has amassed a mountainous collection of bras that are filling out storage lockers all over the city. There’s even a subgroup of “celebrity” bras that have been signed by legends of screen and song, such as Rod Stewart, members of the band Coldplay, the cast of The Walking Dead, and many more.
Jolicoeur, who calls the bra drive “Athena’s Cup,” has already collected over 195,000 bras – certainly enough to beat the reigning world champs of Bundaberg, Australia. Their record of 166,626 bras, hooked together by a fundraising group called Citizens Who Care, has stood in the Guinness Book of World Records since 2009.
So here’s the hitch: Jolicoeur doesn’t just want set a new record. She wants to flatten the competition. And to do that, she’s going to need a lot more bras.
About 5,000 more would make her feel a bit more comfortable.
Now City Hall is pitching in to give Athena’s Cup a lift. Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt is urging anyone with a spare bra, new or used, to drop it off at the
next Summer Classic Car Cruise event in Market Square, which takes place on Monday.
The mini bra-drive gets underway about 5 p.m. Jolicoeur will be there with her grandfather’s 1958 Cadillac Coupe to accept donations and talk about the cause.
“Assisting Athena’s to achieve this historical record is a slam-dunk for Woonsocket because, as a community, we always come through when called upon,” Baldelli-Hunt says. “That is the Woonsocket way.”
If all goes according to plan, says Joliceour, Athena’s will try to set the new Guinness record sometime this fall. Where it happens is still a question Jolicoeur is trying to figure out with City Hall, since the moonshot for bras will require a lot of space.
A lot, but not as much as it might seem. A string of some 200,000 bras, end on end, would stretch from Market Square to Central Maine, but under the Guinness guidelines, the undergarments needn’t be arranged single-file to make a stab at the record, according to Jolicoeur. The only guiding principle of the contest is that they must be hooked together in an unbroken chain. It doesn’t matter if the chain is looped in concentric rings of overlapping circles, which is what’s more likely to happen.
Since the name of the endeavor was inspired by the America’s Cup yacht races, “Originally, the idea was to do it in Newport,” said Jolicoeur. “But I want to have this record broken in the city I love so much. My hometown, where I grew up, and where Athena’s Home Novelties has been located for 21 years.”
It could happen in a place as compact, say, as Barry Field. Still, the effort would require many hands to assemble the bras into a chain. Or, as Jolicoeur prefers to describe the necessary help, “hookers.”
“We need a lot of hookers,” she says.
Thus far, the progress Athena’s Cup has made in assembling a collection of bras worthy of throwing down the undergarment gauntlet has taken place amid little fanfare, the result of what Jolicoeur describes as largely a “grassroots” campaign. Many of the bras have been brought in by Athena’s home-based sales representatives, the leading avenue through which the company markets its wares. Often, says Jolicoeur, the bras will be delivered with a touching note, or a sad one, about someone’s battle with breast cancer.
“Local folks have shown up with a bag of bras with a note on it saying, ‘I’m going for a double mastectomy. Here are my bras. I won’t be needing these any more,’” says Jolicoeur. “Once a man and his daughter showed up with a bag of his wife’s bras who passed away. She was a Woonsocket High School grad and a friend of mine. We made brownies together. When they came we cried together.”
THOUGH ATHENA’S
Home Novelties is a wildly successful local business, the company operates largely under the radar, seldom getting the same kind of attention as other homegrown winners. Jolicoeur launched the business in a small office at One Social Street in 1998, specializing in what she calls “romance products.” The goods can be viewed online, but check with your doctor first. It can cause heavy blushing.
Today, Athena’s administrative and distribution headquarters is located in a 40,000-square-foot mill building at 640 Winter St. The company grosses over $4 million a year and sells products manufactured all over the world in 45 states. Often, if Athena’s gets any attention at all, it’s not about what the company sells, but how – using a workforce of nearly 1,000 freelance salespeople who take orders at home-based gatherings often likened to the Tupperware Parties of yesteryear.
Jolicoeur, 48, remembers them well. Her grandmother used to host them.
“She’d take out fancy desserts,” recalls Jolicoeur. “All her girlfriends would come over and it was a big deal. I could see the connection between these women. It was a special night. I loved it.”
Jolicoeur doesn’t think she consciously purloined the idea for home parties from Tupperware, but she liked it enough to keep it alive when she started her own business.
For Jolicoeur, Athena’s was conceived as a business with a social conscience, aiming to destygmatize taboos about sex and foster female empowerment. Raising awareness about breast cancer is thoroughly in keeping with the company’s broader philanthropic mission.
A bra chain is a symbolic show of unity against the disease, which is an overwhelmingly female scourge, she says.
“The truth is, breast cancer kills women,” she says. “Men too, but mostly women.”
Jolicoeur got the idea for a bra chain after a close friend developed breast cancer. She and some of her colleagues spearheaded a modest fundraiser, but it didn’t feel like enough. She set her mind to finding another way to lengthen her reach.
Once, after one of the company’s regular sales meetings, she and a group of other female employees found themselves de-stressing by ripping off their bras together. Looking at a pile of bras became something of a ritual until one day, it dawned on her: Why not string them into a chain?
In 2001, Athena’s donated $20,000 to the Gloria Gemma Foundation for breast cancer research, but the coming bra chain will pave the way for another donation to the cause. After making the chain, Athena’s will auction off the sizable collection of celebrity bras to raise the funds, she said.
While Athena’s Cup has toiled in relative obscurity since its inception, all that’s likely to change after Guinness gets involved, said Jolicoeur. When the world authority on records sets about inking a new one its acclaimed ledgers, it usually gets behind the effort with its own advertising campaign.
It might take a small army of hookers, but Jolicoeur is more than ready to take on the Aussies.
“Cancer affects so many lives,” she said. “Creating this chain is a tribute to every woman who has battled this disease and every person who loved or lost someone. Collecting these bras has been quite a journey. Now it’s time to make the chain and send a powerful message out to the world.”