One thing I did not take into account when I decided to start walk commuting was how stained my clothes would get. After several months I realized that my blouses and blazers had yellow sweat stains that I couldn’t remove! I guess I could have prevented that using special cleaning products but the reality was the stains caught me by surprise as they were not apparent initially. The dry-cleaning lady said there was nothing to do, those stains would not go away.

Urghh... The type of stain I wasn't prepared for.

I was so shocked as I got rid of some of my favorite clothes including a nice pink shirt I had bought from a small store in Paris and a white Armani Exchange blazer that I loved. Again, I brainstormed of my options going forward to prevent that from happening again:

Wear a shirt underneath my work clothes that I would take off when I got to work. Pros? Good protection. Cons: Another layer, so potentially too warm, Had to undress and dress again, twice in the day.
Add some kind of pads to my shirts. I found sticky sweat protection pads but they didn’t work for me. Pros: Small, Removable. Cons: Not good protection, uncomfortable, inconvenient overall
Other market alternatives: Pros: cheap. Cons: flimsy, solution did not work very well, awkward to wear.

So I started thinking of creating my own product and probing the demand by telling my friends about it. My vision was a comfortable camisole that women could wear under their clothes that would be light enough and would provide sufficient protection. My friends who walked to work were excited about the idea. It still took me a couple of years while I continued to study the market, refine the concept, had my second baby, and finally found Factory45 to actually decide to embark on this journey and conceive my third baby, Mode Citron. It has been an amazing journey so far and we can’t wait to start showing sneak peeks of our products.