A couple of years ago, Jenny Nguyen, a chef and entrepreneur in Portland, Oregon came up with what’s turned out to be — to her shock and delight — a million-dollar idea: a women and queer-centered tavern mischievously named the Sports Bra.
Just over a year after opening in April 2022, The Bra, as it’s commonly known among Nguyen’s legion of fans, had pulled in over seven figures in revenue.
For a bar or restaurant, turning a profit in the first year is difficult, and similar businesses often close in their first year.
But Nguyen tapped into two complementary trends: a scarcity of public spaces devoted to women and a rise in the popularity of women’s sports. The Bra took off like a rocket.
Never Miss a Beat
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Nguyen, a lifelong basketball fan who played at Clark College in Washington, spoke with us on a clear and cold day in the City of Roses from her cozy — and so far, very successful — sports bar and restaurant.
LGBTQ Nation: Where did you spend Thanksgiving?
Jenny Nguyen: Oh, man. So, I’m dating this woman who has a family, so we did a double Thanksgiving, where we went to her family’s house and then my family. We had two full-on meals. It was intense.
LGBTQ Nation: It’s common wisdom in business to “Find a need and fill it.” What was the need you discovered that would be filled with the Sports Bra?
JN: I played in this pickup league, women’s basketball. All skill levels, come meet, it was just super casual. And it went on for probably 15 years. But whenever we wanted to celebrate a birthday or just go out for drinks, it was always at a sports bar, and it was always challenging. And those challenges may range anywhere from, you know, getting a game on the TV that was a women’s sports game, to feeling safe.
In 2018, we’d gotten together for an NCAA women’s basketball championship game, probably a group of 12 or 14 of us, and we rolled into this sports bar. Tons of TVs everywhere. Of course, none of them have the game on. So we cobbled some tables together, kind of in the corner of this bar, and we were able to watch this one TV and it ended up being an incredibly dramatic game that was a comeback from behind, a last-second three-pointer to win it all.
Then we were all out in the parking lot just kind of hugging and saying our goodbyes, and I was just like, “God, that was the best game I’ve ever seen.” And one of my friends hugged me and she was just like, “You know, it would have been better if the sound had been on.”
And right then I realized that I had become so accustomed to watching women’s sports as kind of a second-class citizen, as a consolation. So it hit me and I blurted out the words, “The only way we’re ever going to watch a woman’s game in its full glory is if we have our own place!” And the very first name that came to mind was the Sports Bra.
LGBTQ Nation: The name is golden.
JN: (laughing) Once I thought of it, it was just like, “Oh, it’s catchy. It’s funny. It’ll be like an inside joke for everybody.”
LGBTQ Nation: You thought about the concept for a couple of years and in 2020 decided to make it happen. You’ve described yourself as cautious and risk-averse, so what inspired you to take the plunge?
JN: I had the glimmer of an idea and then it started to take up space in my brain. And it took up all the space, where I would wake up and I’d be thinking about the Sports Bra. And I’d go to bed and I would be dreaming about the Sports Bra.
And I thought about if I came into a place like the Sports Bra when I was younger, when I was seven or nine or 13, and then I realized that I had never been in a place where I felt seen, felt fully represented — how that would impact me and how much that would mean to me as a kid? All of those things really triggered something in me that was like, “Okay, I don’t have a choice anymore.”
LGBTQ Nation: What was the elevator pitch to your investors?
JN: Well, I didn’t have any investors. So I cobbled together my savings account and I begged friends and family for “micro loans,” and then I put together a deck and a video for Kickstarter with the same pitch I told you. And the Kickstarter was what really did it.
We launched on Valentine’s Day last year. For the first couple days I was just like, “Oh, I’m never gonna make my goal. But let’s, let’s just hang on.” Three days later, I get a phone call and it’s from Eater PDX, and she’s asking me about what the Sports Bra is and I give her the spiel about the concept and she goes, “Oh, interesting.” Two hours later, I get a text from my mom, and she goes, “Hey, have you looked at the Kickstarter today?” I go, “No, why?” She says, “Just look at it.”
And right as I go to open the Kickstarter, I get a text from Brooke at Eater and she goes, “We just published about the Sports Bra.” I opened Kickstarter and the donor graph went from being flatline to straight up and down like a rocket. And it happened exactly when that article published. And immediately, the phone was ringing off the hook, and we got two or three news crews in here and I got hundreds and hundreds of emails, DMs, all kinds of things from people globally. It was insane. And it’s been kind of nonstop since.
LGBTQ Nation: What was your final total on the Kickstarter?
JN: So we were asking for $49,000, and our final total was just over $105,000.
LGBTQ Nation: Do you have a motto or philosophy that guides your work?
JN: Oh, gosh. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is, “Fake it till you make it.” I mean, we made a million mistakes, you know, right off the bat, right out of the gate. We just made mistake after mistake and it was just like, “Okay, how do we fix it?” “What can we do better tomorrow, or what can we do better in the next hour?” We opened to thousands of people literally outside the door, and so the people who were here working for me, the team, they just hung tough for three days while we just got absolutely handed. I was just like, “Oh s**t, I grossly underestimated everything.”
One of my friends through basketball, who is a successful business owner, I reached out to her and her biggest advice, that I still hold onto to this day, is, “If you have questions, find the person that has the most answers. Ask them to help you, because they can always say no, but they might say yes.”
LGBTQ Nation: What’s the role of merch in your income stream?
JN: Oh my goodness, merch has been awesome. I would say anywhere between five and seven percent of revenue is through merch right now. It’s pretty low-key. We haven’t put much effort behind its creation, but we can see the potential. So we’re going to start doing a lot more merch as we kind of get our hands wrapped around the business. And that includes the Sports Bra sports bra.
LGBTQ Nation: How important has centering women and queer people been in the creation of the Sports Bra, and what are some of the ways that you’ve done that?
JN: It’s interesting, because when I came up with the name the Sports Bra, and it was just an idea, I was just like, “Oh, I know what the motto is going to be. It’s going to be ‘We support women,'” ’cause I thought it was hilarious. And then, you know, when I was writing the business plan, I was just like, “Well, if our motto is ‘We support women,’ it’s not, ‘We support women playing sports on TV.’ It was just ‘We support women.’ How can we live the motto in other aspects of the business?” And so that’s when I’m like, “I wonder how many women-run distilleries are there out there? How many breweries are out there?” And turns out there’s a lot!
A lot of it is intentionality. I thought about this woman that I know who is the CEO of a nonprofit called Girls Build that teaches girls ages seven to 13 to do things like carpentry work, how to use power tools, how to put things together. She said, “We’re definitely into this.” And so they did it as a spring camp where they built out some of our furniture. I almost cried a little bit because it was just so awesome. I had them brand the tables, too, so anyone who sits at those tables, they can see, “Built by Girls Build” and then they can donate.
It just goes back to me thinking about, you know, the seven-year-old me coming in. And so the more we can connect with the community in that way, the more I feel like this whole thing matters.
