Alumni Profile: Sara Falkson, MDE '25

From a young age, Sara Falkson knew something was wrong with athletic apparel and equipment. Dance leotards felt awkward, and sports bras never fit right, even as an undergraduate student-athlete on the Dartmouth College field hockey team.

“I would be in the locker room wearing two sports bras at once, changing in front of friends, and they’d ask if everything was okay,” she said. “It looked crazy, and felt incredibly restrictive because everything was so tight. And it’s not cost-effective. Most people are buying one bra, and girls like us are paying for two. When girls have to invent workarounds just to feel supported, you start wondering if maybe your body isn’t built for the sport, or if you’re the problem.”

Falkson stuck with sports even after finishing her bachelor’s degree in human-centered design, coaching youth field hockey while working as a design engineer for IBM in San Francisco. The more she coached and reflected on her own career, the more she realized there was what she called a ‘gear gap’ – a gap in quality and availability of proper women’s sports apparel and equipment compared to men’s. But where there’s a gap, there’s an opportunity to fill it.

“We can build self-driving cars and scale AI, yet we still haven’t engineered a sports bra that actually supports girls,” she said. “It’s time to change that.”

A desire to combine her interests and shore up her engineering skills brought her to the Master in Design Engineering program, which is co-run by the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Harvard Graduate School of Design. While here, she hosted a Harvard Grid event on inequalities in women’s sports apparel, funding and press coverage. She tailored her academic journey to focus on sports, biomechanics and entrepreneurship, and as a capstone independent research project worked on a prototype sports bra.

“I knew I wanted to do something at the intersection of sports and engineering, so I curated my master's degree to that,” she said. “It was the best two years of my life.”

Falkson, MDE '25, has spent the last six months turning her capstone project into a start-up called Robyn. Named for both her and her mother’s middle name, as well as the bird species known for its colorful breast feathers, Robyn is currently designing two new sports designed specifically for middle- or high-school athletes who might be wearing one for the first time. She hopes to have the bras ready for purchase by Fall 2026, and in the meantime has been building relationships with youth athletic teams in Boston and New York by running body confidence workshops.

“We are driven by the stat that nearly 50% of female athletes drop out of sports by the age of 14,” she said. “So when I’d speak with girls at our workshops, many said it's so awkward to talk about your first sports bra. When I got my first sports bra, it was this big intervention that I felt my mom was having with me, and I was so embarrassed. Our approach by bringing this to teams all at once is that everyone has an equal opportunity to learn about growing up in sport and purchase a really high-quality and functional sports bra as well.”

Currently, Falkson is the only employee at Robyn, and she’s been bootstrapping the start-up while also working full-time. When she’s not running these workshops, she’s iterating on new designs for the bra prototypes. 

"Once we get the samples back from the manufacturer, we’ll move into full wear-testing,” she said.  “We’ll see how it feels to sweat in it, how it sits under a uniform, how it performs. We want honest, detailed feedback from the athletes we’re building with, because our goal is to design for every body and every sport. Coming from a software background, I could mock something up, code it, and deploy it within minutes. With apparel, these timelines are 12-18 months. Remaining patient in that process and embracing that there's a reason for this helps you develop really solid and strong relationships.”

Falkson’s goal is to transition to working full-time at Robyn as she gets closer to bringing final products to market, at which point she also hopes to begin finding outside funding. In the meantime, she’s been able to tap into the network of faculty and former classmates to help solve all the challenges that young entrepreneurs face.

“I’m always reaching out to my advisor, Karen Reuther, and my professors at Harvard, sharing progress, asking questions,” she said. “My classmates came from extraordinary backgrounds across engineering, design, medicine, law, and policy, so no matter what obstacle I face, there’s always someone with the expertise to help. The Harvard community has been a true game-changer in our Robyn body-confident-sport journey."