Shortly after launching her new sports bra range – Style TrackHer – Melbourne Victory’s Chelsea Blissett caught up with pfa.net.au to talk about how the idea came to fruition and why the launch of the product is an important step forward for women’s football.

Chelsea Blissett knew it was time for a change “a couple of years ago”.

She had an idea to launch a product that would be an important step forward for not only women’s football but women’s sport as a whole.

After a year of toiling away, this idea soon came to fruition, with Blissett officially launching Style TrackHer this year; a high performance sports bra tailored specifically for women.

The product is essentially a circuit breaker for her and many other female athletes, which would help them perform at an optimal level.

“Professional athletes and even those at the NPL level, use high performance tech like GPS trackers to track performance and to help track loading and I always was thinking… ‘why do we not have our own bras that we can use to slip a GPS pouch on or into’,” Blissett told pfa.net.au

“At the NPL level and even at some A-League clubs we were either given hand me down men’s [GPS] vests or unisex sizes, so they weren’t built for women. They’re either too big, too little, they didn’t have enough sizes to fit everyone properly, so you were either stuck with wearing it over your shirt or you would wear it under your shirt and it was like two sizes too big. It just never quite fit properly.

“You’re wearing an extra layer of material. It doesn’t matter how thin or thick it is. It can still be quite uncomfortable especially if you’re not wearing the right size.

“I really just wanted to create something that was built for women that allowed us to use these high performance technologies in the most comfortable way possible.

“I came up with the idea of creating a really well rounded functional sports bra with all the support and everything that we need in our sports bras and make it in a way that it can be functional for every type of athlete. So whether you are just looking for a really nice comfortable sports bra or you’re competing at a professional level that you need usually high performance technologies, it just comes like an all in one where, you don’t have to worry about whether or not you’re going to get a GPS [vest] that fits or whether it’s too big or too small.”

Blissett started to get the cogs turning on launching the StyleTrackHer around a year ago, where the idea became a tangible product.

“I looked at manufacturers overseas,” she said.

“I was trying to find someone that would be able to kind of bring the idea to life and I was really quite lucky as I found that quite quickly.

“A manufacturer overseas saw my vision and saw what I wanted to implement, when it came to the design of the sports bra itself. Then over six months went through designing the bra… I ended up having two sample bras and just to kind really make sure that the padding was right, the set was right where the stitching, like fit nicely, whether the actual sleeve itself was big enough for the GPS.

“So over 12 months it was just a process of finding the right fit, finding the right style and then making sure that it was like 100% before we went into production and then that then it itself took around three months.”

Blissett launched Style TrackHer while juggling playing A-League Women’s football with Brisbane Roar last season, and eventually moving back home to Victoria, joining Victory ahead of the 2025-26 campaign.

Despite the associated challenges of balancing football and work, Blissett was determined to get her ‘passion project’ off the ground.

“Sometimes it was really difficult [to find a balance] especially when it came to crunch time and then moving from Brisbane to Melbourne and having the launch happen within like a month of all that stuff happening,” she said.

“But this is a massive passion project of mine, and I’m really super proud of it what I achieved, being able to try and create a product that had female athletes in mind.

“And yet there were days where obviously it was difficult to juggle everything, but I think at the end of the day when you want something to be the absolute best that you can make it work.”

So far, the early feedback has “been really good” with some of her current teammates trialling the product. Blissett launched the product on Style TrackHer’s socials alongside fellow Victory teammates Nicki Flannery, Sienna Saveska, Payton Woodward and Kennedy White.

But this is just only the first step for Blissett in her new business venture, with the creation of the female-specific sports bra also another step towards the professionalisation of women’s football.

“I feel like it’s such a female oriented product, and I think it’s showing girls that we care and showing that next step when it comes to growing the game that we are now creating female specific products in the high performance space,” she said.

“My dream would be to see it throughout NPL and to hopefully see it throughout the A-League and other competitions, whether it be cricket or netball or basketball.

“It’s not only about professionalising the game through full-time contracts, it’s about professionalising our game with everything that we do as well.

“With the products that are available to us and not getting hand-me-down ones and these bras have women specifically in mind, so they’re able to perform at the highest level.”

The launch of the product was partially funded by the PFA, through the PFA Craig Foster Scholarship. Chelsea received the scholarship through her work as a passionate advocate for spreading awareness about eating disorders and using her own experiences to educate others at the community football level.

“The PFA Scholarship helps so much, it allowed me to be able to get funding of the design and the first sample of the sports bra, which I actually wouldn’t have been able to do without the PFA Scholarship,” she said.

“It helped me save and help fund my idea, and it was such a blessing to have that scholarship.”

Featured image: supplied