THE FRIDAY INTERVIEW: ANDREW WHITTLE OF BEING WEAR

This Friday Underlines chats to Andrew Whittle founder of Being Wear. This Australian brand designed for people with sensory sensitivities was launched this month (fronted by neurodiversity advocate Christine McGuinness). However this is a very personal story in the creation of a brand – Andrew founded it in 2025 after his daughter struggled to find underwear that accommodated her sensory needs. Available in Australia and New Zealand, what started as a dad’s mission to create a better option has grown into an international brand redefining underwear through comfort, inclusivity and personal freedom.

Life before Being Wear?

Before Being Wear, my world was in marketing and advertising. I began on the client side before moving to agency life, where I spent 15 years as Managing Partner of Dynamix, working with brands like Jack Daniel’s, Samsung, Virgin Mobile and Unilever.

I genuinely loved that chapter of my career, but as I was heading towards 50, I could feel the industry shifting. AI was starting to emerge, client expectations were changing, and I found myself thinking more and more about what I wanted to build for myself. It felt like the right moment to back my own vision and create something from the ground up.

Why underwear?

It wasn’t a category I ever expected to end up in. Really, it found me. My daughter Mads was diagnosed with autism and ADHD at 14, and like a lot of neurodivergent kids she has real sensory sensitivities: seams, tags, anything tight or scratchy against her skin is unbearable. Around the same time she started exploring her identity and asked for a binder instead of a bra. We went looking for something comfortable, age-appropriate and sensory-friendly, and found almost nothing. Brands were either overly sexualised or hadn’t thought about sensory needs at all. That gap, that feeling of ‘this should exist and it doesn’t’, is where Being Wear began.

What’s your brand’s DNA? When did you launch?

We launched in August 2025, after about 18 months of development. Being Wear is entirely gender-free: no men’s or women’s sections, just top or bottom, pouch or no pouch. And it’s sensory-considerate: no tags, no harsh seams, soft eco-conscious modal fabric throughout. Sizing is based on body measurements rather than arbitrary labels, so it works for any body. Every pair also comes with a small daily affirmation card, a reminder that the brand is about people feeling good in their own skin, not just good underwear.

What is different about working in underwear?

Underwear is the layer closest to your skin, so there’s zero room to compromise on comfort. You can’t hide a bad seam or a scratchy label behind clever styling. Because we set out to be genuinely gender-free and sensory-considerate, we also had a harsher testing bar than most brands: every sample had to pass with my daughter, our toughest critic! If she wouldn’t wear it, it wasn’t right, and there were plenty of ‘not rights’ along the way. Designing for that many body types and sensory needs at once is a very different brief to anything I worked on in advertising.

A typical week?

It’s still a genuine mix, which is part of the fun of being a founder in a start-up. No two days are really the same, and as is often the case in start-up life, the day rarely goes the way you’d planned. Priorities shift and change so often.

There’s strategy and planning time, time spent on finance and projections, and time on our advertising account and the numbers behind it. We’re still a small team, so there’s also time spent helping with the pick and pack of orders, plus a fair bit of time still talking directly to customers: answering messages, thanking new followers, hearing how the product has changed someone’s daily routine. Being totally honest, I genuinely enjoy this part and find it hard to let go of.

The split has begun to shift slightly in the last few weeks, from being ‘in the business’ towards being ‘on the business’, as we build the systems and team to grow. And with a proven concept behind us, we’re now entering a seed funding round to bring in some extra cash to scale faster and larger. It’s a time-consuming project, but an essential part of our next stage.

Whom do you admire in the underwear industry?

There’s a brand here in Australia, a little older than us, called Nala. They’re a female-focused bra and underwear label, but they set out to properly challenge the norms of the category: bolder, funner colours, and a real push to normalise the fact that women’s bodies and breasts in particular come in every shape, size and colour, not just the ones the industry has traditionally shown. They took on the incumbents and told women to embrace their bodies rather than feel like something to be ashamed of.

We took a lot of inspiration from brands like that and pushed it a step further, extending that same permission to feel comfortable and seen to all human beings, not just women, creating underwear for every shape, size and gender.

If you were not working in this industry, what would you be doing instead?

Honestly, I think I still would have left advertising. The industry as it stands today won’t look the same in five years. Just before Being Wear, I’d actually been working with a good friend setting up a tech start-up, doing all the branding, naming and marketing for it. I stepped away to build Being Wear because it answered a real problem for my daughter, and so many other people out there, and it was mine to drive forward. If I hadn’t done that, I’d probably still be in that start-up, or something similar.

I love the pace of start-up life: having to task-switch constantly and stay across a dozen things at once. In a lot of ways it’s not that different to agency life. You’re across multiple brands, their challenges, their teams, their appetite for risk. The real difference with a start-up is how much more control you actually have over the outcome.

“we’re not just introducing a new brand, we’re asking people to rethink habits they’ve had for decades”

 

Your greatest challenge?

Two things, really. Capital: we’re entirely founder-funded, so every dollar has to work harder than it does for the bigger players who can simply outspend us on the exact same channels. And behaviour: we’re not just introducing a new brand, we’re asking people to rethink habits they’ve had for decades. The average person buys five or ten pairs in one hit, wears them into the ground until there’s one or two left, and only replaces them when a partner tells them it’s time, usually reaching for whatever’s cheapest and blackest rather than actually thinking about it. In fact our research found, a large portion of shoppers buy the same brand their mum bought for them when they left home.

We’re competing with habit as much as we’re competing with other brands.

Proudest moment to date?

It’s less one single moment and more a collective. The messages make it real, parents telling us their child can finally wear underwear all day without discomfort, adults telling us they finally feel heard and comfortable, people telling us they love our gender-free language so much they’ve started using it at home.

Building a business from scratch is tough. There’s constant self-doubt, imposter syndrome, the lot. As a founder you have to back yourself and shut out the doubting voices. My wife, who’d been through a start-up herself, told me early on to stop and admire what I’d built, because start-up life moves too fast not to. In the early days I didn’t listen; it was always ‘done, on to the next.’ I’ve since learned to take those moments and actually celebrate the wins.

In twelve short months we’ve built a scalable brand already selling into three core markets: Australia, New Zealand and the UK, plus other countries we haven’t officially launched into yet. That’s what I’m proudest of: how fast we’ve built something real, with plenty more ahead.

Worst move so far?

Getting our advertising audience wrong in month two. We launched strongly in August, full of confidence, then appeared on weekend morning television to tell our story (the right thing to do), but we hadn’t prepared our ad account for the extra attention it brought, and it skewed our targeting. We had to do a complete reset in September, which stalled sales for the best part of the month and dented our egos.

The lesson, we didn’t know what we didn’t know. It’s helped us embrace the idea that every day in a start-up is a learning day, if you’re not learning, you’re not moving. It’s a good one to learn, and someday soon we’ll be able to laugh at our own ignorance. Just not yet…

Any other ambitions for the brand going ahead?

Plenty. We’re adding more colours across the range, sampling bodysuits in soft modal, and growing our G-string offering, which is resonating well beyond the audience we originally expected.

The big one right now is the UK. We officially launched Being Wear here at the start of August 2026, and we’re set on changing the way Brits think about underwear, showing them there’s something better than what they’ve settled for. Our partnership with Christine McGuinness has been central to getting that story out: she’s lent us a genuine, credible voice on why comfort and sensory-friendly design matter, and it’s opened us up to an audience we’d never have reached on our own.

Longer term, we want Being Wear to grow into a full basics brand that’s always anchored in comfort, sensory-considerate design and inclusion, and we’re keen to build partnerships with advocacy groups, other neurodiverse-led businesses and health professionals to reach more people who’d benefit from what we make.

Time out?

I enjoy work, but I’m a big believer in balance. I need to reset both physically and mentally. Physically that’s the gym six days a week; I’m an early riser, so I’m usually there by 4.30am and in the office by 7. If it’s not the gym, I’m a keen swimmer and find real clarity in the pool doing laps. My local pool was closed for five years for renovations and only reopened last week, so now it’s back open and as we enter the warmer months in Australia, I’m following the black line up and down again.

Mentally, it’s time with family and friends. Midweek is family time, and the weekends bring the friends into it. We’ve been genuinely lucky to have our family and friends in our corner, there for the ride, picking us up whenever times felt tough.

The one product you couldn’t live without?

I’d have to say my iPhone, or really anything Apple. Coming from agency life, I’m totally indoctrinated into the world of Apple. My phone’s the key one though. I’ve got all our business apps on it, which keeps me across sales and everything else that’s going on while I’m on the move.

Pet Hate?

Brands that aren’t authentic. If you’re going to put a brand in front of a customer, you have to actually be it, not just say it. People can spot the difference in about two seconds these days. There’s too much information at their fingertips not to.

It matters even more in a category like ours. We built Being Wear on being genuinely gender-free, sensory-considerate and inclusive, so we don’t get to fake any of that; our customers would call us out on it immediately. Watching other brands treat purpose as a marketing layer rather than something they actually live by is probably my biggest bugbear in this industry.

 

 

• New research reveals 71% of Brits have felt physically uncomfortable in their underwear due to seams, tags or waistbands, with 61% admitting to secretly adjusting in public*

• Gen Z are hit hardest, more than twice as likely to feel this discomfort daily as the national average

• * OnePoll Research of 2,000 UK adults, conducted 30th July to 3rd August 2026