Fair warning: you're gonna love her.

Erin Boddy is the co-founder of Alura, the woman behind every product you're currently obsessed with, and also, in our humble and completely unbiased opinion, the coolest girl in the world. When I say this interview is going to be honest, I mean it in the way that only happens when you've known someone long enough to call them out in print.

Here's what you need to know about Erin: she started Alura because she was fed up. Fed up with shorts that rolled, gear that gave up before she did, and an activewear industry that kept making clothes for a version of women who don't actually exist. So she made her own. As you do.

What followed was a lot of late nights, a lot of "is this actually going to work" moments, and eventually, Alura. A brand built for women who lift, by a woman who lifts, with zero tolerance for waistbands that can't hold their own under a barbell.

I sat down with her between coffee and giggles (obviously) to ask the questions our community actually wants answered. She had no choice but to answer honestly. That's the deal when your interviewer knows all the answers to the questions before they're asked.

1. What were you personally looking for in an activewear brand that you couldn’t find anywhere? Was there a specific moment where you thought, “fuck it, I have to make this myself?”

I was super into the gym, specifically lifting, and I just kept buying activewear and being disappointed by it. It felt like I was constantly choosing between leggings with a really obvious, cheap-looking scrunch, leggings that felt amazing for two washes and then completely lost their compression, or leggings that would literally rip.

And on a heavy leg day, I was just never fully happy. I wanted something that made me feel really good and really confident, but that I could also squat in, sweat in, wash a million times, and not have to think about.

Eventually I had this realization of, okay, if I’m having this problem, I’m definitely not the only girl having this problem. And if I think I know how to solve it… shouldn’t I at least try?

I will say, I probably would’ve spent a lot longer just thinking about it if it weren’t for my partner, Will Warwick. I’m very capable of having a huge idea and then being like, “Anyway! That seems difficult!” And he was very much the person saying, “If you can think it, you can do it.” Which was both incredibly supportive and slightly inconvenient because then I actually had to do it.

Luckily for me, he didn't just encourage me from the sidelines - he also stepped up to the plate and took on more late nights than anyone. He's helped build this brand from the ground up and keeps it running every single day. He'll tell you this is my passion project and that he's "just helping", but don't believe him for a second. Nobody willingly spends this many late nights talking about leggings, warehouse shipments, and fabric samples unless they're fully emotionally invested. He just won't admit it.

2. What did the process of actually making the first Alura product look like?

Painfully slow. Painfully.

I think people picture designing activewear as choosing a cute color, picking a fabric and being like, “Perfect, send me 500.” It was probably six months of designing, sampling, changing something, sampling again, washing it, wearing it, changing something else, sampling again…

And sometimes the change would be TINY. Like, something where any normal person would look at the two samples and be like, “Erin, these are literally the same.” And I’d be like, “No. This one is wrong.”

Then you wait weeks for another sample just to move something half an inch.

I wore everything. I washed everything repeatedly. I trained in it. I put it through the wringer because I didn’t want something that looked amazing when it came out of the package and then gave up on you three washes later.

It taught me very quickly that good product development is mostly patience, obsession and being willing to annoy people over millimetres.

3. What’s something you got completely wrong in the early days that you had to unlearn or correct?

I think early on I assumed that if I loved something, everyone else would obviously love it too.

Which is such a founder thing. You’re like, “This is perfect. I have decided.”

And then you get it onto hundreds of different women with different bodies, different proportions, different training styles and completely different preferences, and you realize how much you don’t know.

I’ve had to get much better at separating my personal preference from what actually makes the best product. Sometimes I’ll personally love a detail and enough customers will tell me they want it differently, and eventually I’m like, okay ladies, democracy wins.

And actually, on that same note, at around the same time I learned that, I also learned that I shouldn’t — and physically cannot — do everything myself.

Props to the social media girls out there, because I spent MONTHS taking like six hours to edit a single Reel. I was so stubborn about wanting to do everything myself and eventually I had to take the L and admit that maybe spending an entire workday choosing transitions and moving text around by three pixels wasn’t the best use of my time and that I needed the help of a team.

There’s definitely an ego check that comes with building a company where you realize that being capable of doing something doesn’t necessarily mean you should be the person doing it.

4. Alura’s mission is to “redefine what it means to be strong.” What does strong mean to you personally?

Obviously there’s physical strength, and I love that part of it. There is something extremely satisfying about realizing you’re lifting something that six months ago you couldn’t even move.

But I think strength is so much bigger than that.

For me, it’s showing up authentically and not constantly worrying that you’re going to have “too big of a personality” or make too much of a statement. It’s being willing to take up space, whether that be in the gym, in your career, or in your friendships.

It’s also doing the hard shit that, in the moment, really kind of sucks because you know there’s something better on the other side of it.

And I think strength is how you handle the things you didn’t choose. Life will hand you situations that are completely different from what you pictured, and you can still find something good in the experience.

I don’t think being strong means nothing bothers you. I think it means you can be like, “Well, this is absolutely not what I ordered,” and figure out what you’re going to do with it anyway.

5. The fitness industry has a complicated relationship with women’s bodies. How do you think about navigating that as a brand co-founder?

I think fitness gets really limiting when we make everything about becoming smaller.

There are a million reasons women train. Maybe you want to lose weight. Maybe you want to gain ten pounds of muscle. Maybe you’re training for HYROX, trying to hit a new squat PR, getting stronger as you get older, training because it keeps you mentally sane, or just going to Pilates because it’s the hour of your day where nobody can bother you.

None of those goals are more legitimate than another.

So I don’t want Alura to tell women what their bodies are supposed to look like. I want us to make clothes that support whatever they’re asking their bodies to do.

And as a brand, I’d much rather celebrate things women can do than obsess over a number on a scale. What’s your first pull-up? What’s your deadlift? Did you run further? Do you feel stronger? Did you actually show up three times this week when you really didn’t want to?

Those things are so much more interesting to me.

Your body doesn’t have to be a constant before-and-after project.

6. What’s the piece of customer feedback that has stuck with you the most?

Anything about how someone feels in Alura sticks with me way more than you’d probably expect.

When someone tells us they put something on and felt really confident in their body, I remember it forever. Those messages genuinely fuel future decisions.

But the opposite sticks with me too. If someone tells us something didn’t make them feel their best, I need to know why. Is the sizing wrong? Is it hitting somewhere weird? Is something digging in? Is it not supportive enough? I’m immediately investigating.

We’ve literally changed our waistband height because customers told us it wasn’t hitting at the right place to make them feel held in.

I think sometimes brands view negative feedback as something to defend themselves against. I’m more like, “Okay wait, tell me EVERYTHING.”

Obviously you can’t design one pair of leggings that every woman on Earth agrees is perfect - if someone figures that out, please call me - but feeling confident in our clothing is the whole point. So feedback that tells me we’re missing that goal absolutely influences what we sample next.

7. What surprises you most about the Alura community?

How much they support each other.

Our community has become this mix of weightlifters, bodybuilders, HYROX athletes, runners, Pilates girls, instructors, coaches, trainers - people who on paper might have completely different definitions of fitness.

And somehow the girls with the least in common are sometimes the ones hyping each other up the hardest.

I love that because that’s exactly what I want Alura to represent. Strength doesn’t have one look and fitness doesn’t have to mean one thing.

Also women hyping women will literally never get old to me. I could read those comment sections all day.

8. Where do you want Alura to be in five years? What would make you feel like you’d really done what you set out to do?

I want Alura to be able to follow our community into basically whatever they love doing.

I want us to have everyone’s favorite version of all the core activewear pieces, obviously, but I also want to support more sports and more hobbies. There are definitely things we’re already thinking about there… wink wink.

I want us to keep releasing amazing colors, keep improving the products and, importantly, stay competitively priced. I never want growth to turn into, “Cool, now leggings are $180.”

But the biggest thing for me would be the community.

I want Alura events and meetups around the world. I want us showing up at the events that are shaping fitness. I want women to meet through Alura, train together, compete together, become friends through it.

If five years from now someone says, “Oh my God, I met one of my best friends through an Alura event,” I think that would hit me harder than almost any revenue milestone.

Obviously I also want a wildly successful global company. I’m not going to sit here and pretend I don’t. Both can be true.

9. What’s one thing you wish people knew about Alura?

How much we actually care.

And I know every brand says that, so that sounds incredibly cheesy - but I mean it in a slightly unhinged way.

We’re still at a size where a customer can leave a comment about a waistband and there’s a very real possibility that six months later I’m standing in front of a table of samples with my best friends turned business consultants going, “Okay, remember what those girls said about the waistband?”

There’s so much happening behind every product that customers will never see. Samples that never launch. Colors we redo because they’re slightly wrong. Fabrics we wear and wash over and over. Tiny fit changes. Conversations about a seam being half an inch higher. Me sending someone a photo at an unreasonable hour asking, “Does this look weird to you?”

We’re genuinely trying to build the activewear we want to exist - and every time the community gets bigger, they get a bigger voice in what that becomes.

I think that’s the coolest part of building it.

If you've made it this far, we hope you feel like you got to know our girl and our brand a little bit better. 

Building Alura wasn't a straight line. It wasn't a perfectly executed business plan or a viral moment that made everything click into place overnight. It was a woman who was frustrated, who had a vision, and who was stubborn enough to see it through, even on the days (and there were days) where stubborn was the only thing left.

What I can tell you, as someone who had a front row seat to all of it, is that everything Alura stands for starts with her. The obsession with quality. The refusal to make something that's just okay. The genuine belief that women who lift deserve better -  better gear, better community, better representation of what strength actually looks like.

That's not a brand value written in a boardroom. That's just Erin.

We hope you loved getting to know her as much as we love having her. And if this interview made you want to go lift something heavy, honestly, same. She has that effect on people. 

Now go train. 🖤

xx

Sydney, Alura Brand & Content & Erin's biggest fan (completely unbiased and professionally speaking)