By Arabella Peterson Entertainment 28.09.2025

"My Swimwear Line Went Viral – Here’s How I Sold Out In Just 24 Hours"

This is how Lyndi Cohen pivoted her career from nutritionist to swimwear founder and turned her purpose-driven passion into a $200,000 launch.

This story touches on themes of body image, dieting, and eating disorders. If you’re currently struggling, please know you’re not alone – support is available through Butterfly Foundation.

Let me paint you a painfully familiar picture. You’re in a two-by-two-metre mirrored room while top 40 music blasts and the chatter of crowds hum. A line of impatient shoppers begins to form just outside the door, and a well-meaning shop attendant interrogates you about sizing choices. Meanwhile, overhead fluorescent lights cast shadows across every (perfectly normal) cellulite bump and stretch mark, and you battle with the idea of dropping a few hundred dollars for something that doesn’t leave you feeling remotely confident.

If you’ve broken out in a full-body sweat at the thought of this scenario, you’re not alone.

It comes as no surprise that women and girls experience the highest levels of body dissatisfaction across all age demographics. In fact, 15% of women will experience an eating disorder in their lifetimes. Naturally, these types of deep-seated anxieties often rear their heads at the beach or pool – less clothing plus public spaces can be a recipe for feeling exposed and uncomfortable. And this experience starts young – a 2023 study by nib foundation found that of the young people interviewed, 45% said their body image stopped them from going to the beach some or most of the time.

Swimwear may not be a cure for body negativity, but it can be a tool. Pieces that enable women to feel more comfortable can help dismantle the idea that only certain bodies ‘belong’ at the beach. For nutritionist Lyndi Cohen, offering women a solution among the sea of ill-fitting options was a decision informed by her personal and professional experience. That passion, combined with entrepreneurial spirit and relentless determination, resulted in Fearless Swimwear – a brand co-designed by herself, her business partner and husband Les, and her community of women of all shapes, sizes and stages of life.

Lyndi was 11 when she began her first diet. Immersed in a world of early 2000s beauty standards and relentless diet culture, those messages became the soundtrack of her adolescence. After all, this was the height of Victoria’s Secret Runway shows, size-zero mania, and tabloid covers scrutinising women’s bodies.

By 21, she realised the damage. “Everything I’d been taught about nutrition was leading me to feel obsessed with food,” she explains. “I thought I’d be brave enough and try the opposite.” That decision became the foundation for The Nude Nutritionist, a venture as Lyndi explains is about “helping women not sacrifice 95% of their life to weigh 5% less. The mission is to teach you to be healthy without getting sucked into the diet trap.”

Designing for the everyday woman

Through her work as a nutritionist, and now as a swimwear designer, Lyndi has witnessed the stifling pressure of unrealistic body expectations. “What I see every day in practice is women hating their body so much it limits their potential,” she explains. “They sit on the sidelines of their life. They say no to going out with friends because they don’t have something to wear that makes them feel comfortable. It makes me really mad. That propelled me to start Fearless.”

As someone who wears a size 12, Lyndi has struggled to find a swimsuit that ticks all the boxes for comfort, support and style. “I’m a mum with two kids… my tummy is soft, I have cellulite and rolls when I sit down. I wanted support and comfort, and I couldn’t find it.” She continues, “Most Australian women are a size 16. If I can’t just walk into a store and find a swimsuit, then the majority of women can’t.”

In Australia, ‘sample size’, meaning the standard template for fitting clothing, is a size 8 – or 6, for many high fashion brands. Once a garment is designed at sample size it’s scaled up using the same pattern, just in a larger cut. Designing for smaller bodies while treating different proportions as an afterthought has long been the industry norm, despite studies showing that only 9% of Australian women are considered ‘straight-size’ (size 4 to 8) and 54% are considered ‘mid-size’ (10 to 16).

The first thing Lyndi and her team did differently was design for an Australian size medium-to-large (12) so the majority of women are catered to from the outset. As she points out, “You can’t just take a small pattern and scale it up and call it inclusive.”

Co-designing with community

Over the years, Lyndi has amassed a following of over 350,000 through her work as a nutritionist. With most of these followers women who want to feel confident in their own skin, there was a community ready to validate, inform, and become Fearless customers. “I run Instagram polls, and within 24 hours I’ll get 10,000 responses from my dream customer, telling me exactly what she wants. My job is to listen,” she shares.

Over 150 women so far have offered to test Fearless swimsuits, sometimes driving hours to help fit-test, provide feedback and shape designs. This audience even chose the name of the company. “I put out 10 options, and Fearless won by a landslide,” Lyndi explains, “I wouldn’t have picked it otherwise, but now it feels deeply right.”

Launching the brand came down to asking the right questions, “I wanted to know from the start: How much bum coverage do you want? Do you want elastic in the straps? Thick or thin? High-rise or low-rise back? High or low hip?” notes Lyndi. “There’s noise in the feedback, but the data is clear.” Iteration is key,” she explains. “Women come into my house constantly to try samples. We’ve gone through over 78 samples already.”

The proof of demand is in the numbers. Of the 15,000 women on their waitlist, 17% have long torsos, so they made long-torso swimsuits. 99% want a one-piece option, so this is their core product. 49% wear a different size top and bottom, so they created Magic Sizing: a world-first one-piece where you can choose different sizes for your top and bottom.

Centring the female gaze

For decades, swimsuit marketing has been filtered through the male gaze: women sprawled ornamentally on the sand. “Crotch shots, boob shots,” Lyndi says bluntly. “It doesn’t help women feel like they can just exist at the beach without being stared at or judged.”

She wants to flip the script. “One thing I want to do differently is show women doing real things – reading a book, playing with their kids, doing cool stuff – not just lounging, waiting to be looked at. Women sometimes tell me they want to feel sexy, but mostly they want to feel covered, cute, and confident. They want to not even think about their body. If I can nullify body anxiety so they can just be, that’s the gift.”

That anxiety, she explains, is woven into the experience of swimwear itself. “Women feel really exposed and vulnerable in swimsuits. It makes them insecure, and they blame their bodies. If you try on lots of swimsuits and none fit, you think, ‘I’m the problem’… but it’s actually the swimsuit’s fault. A swimsuit is the least amount of fabric you’ll ever wear in public, so it’s important to get it right.”

Finding balance and boundaries

Running a business with her husband means work is rarely far from home life. “One challenge is turning off – it’s normal for us to be in bed at 11pm, strategising. Not very romantic. With two kids, balancing family and business is really tough,” she admits. While they aim for boundaries, the reality is blurred: “We try to have healthy boundaries, but they’re rarely kept at the moment because we’re so close to launch and it’s an intense period. It’s constant talk about work or kids – there’s nothing else.”

Still, the partnership works. “We work really well together because our skill sets are separate. He does all the boring, important stuff, and I get to do the fun, customer-facing stuff, which makes an excellent team,” she jokes. “We talk about little problems before they become big problems – that’s a superpower of ours.”

The business itself is lean but growing. Lyndi describes a small team of five spanning legal, operations, social content, UX and CRM: “We’re small and nimble and will try to stay that way, but if this takes off, we’ll probably grow.” The pressure is high – Fearless sold out its pre-order in just 24 hours, forcing the team to place another large order to avoid running out of stock before summer. “Running out would be an excellent problem to have, but it’s also scary when your expenses stay the same and lots of customers want a swimsuit. You don’t want to fail them.”

To manage the stress, Lyndi leans on practical habits. “One strategy I use personally is ‘take care of future me.’ I do kind things for future me – something as simple as putting my plate straight into the dishwasher.” Sleep and exercise are non-negotiables. “I allow myself nine hours in bed to get seven hours of sleep. My kids wake up multiple times a night, so I buffer a big window. With that, I can maintain a high resilience to stress. I also exercise daily. I’ll literally be doing push-ups telling myself, ‘This will help you get through your day.’ If Barack Obama had time to exercise when he was in the White House, I do too!”

Staying productive while avoiding burnout

After a decade of working from home, Lyndi recently took the leap of renting an office. Now, she splits her time between both spaces: “Just last week we rented an office for the first time, but we still split it: half at home, half at the office.” Even at home, she’s intentional about how she works: “I have a desk and a study with a monitor where I try to do most of my work. I try not to work from bed. If it works for you, great, but typically I avoid it.”

Structure is key to her productivity. Despite describing herself as naturally “disorganised, risk-taking, and chaotic,” she says she’s trained herself to be diligent. “My daily to-do list is crucial. I separate tasks into 5-minute, 15-minute, 30-minute, 1-hour, and 2 – 3-hour blocks. Every task gets an estimated duration. If my energy is low, I do 5-minute tasks to build momentum. A 2 – 3-hour task must go in my calendar or it won’t happen.”

To avoid overwhelm, she focuses on priorities: “Each week I decide the three things I need to accomplish. If everything else falls away and I do those three, I’ve accomplished my week.” She also honours the natural rhythms of work: “I’m okay with busy and quiet periods. In a quiet period, if I need to clock off at 4pm and go to the beach, I do that. I let myself, and that’s another way I avoid burnout.”

Redefining success

Gather ten quotes by ten philosophers on the definition of success, and you’ll be left with ten different answers, none definitive. To Lyndi, it’s measured in how she meets the challenge. “A few years ago I would’ve said success is inner peace, and I still believe that. But I also think discomfort is unavoidable, and you get to choose your discomfort,” she observes. “I’m choosing the discomfort of doing a really hard thing, consistently. Sometimes I’m depleted because I’m outside my comfort zone constantly, but there’s huge personal growth.”

“Success now also feels like realising I can do hard things. Doing those hard things feels really good. People often tap out when it gets hard – it’s going to be hard. Expect the hard. Success is feeling scared and doing it anyway.”

For Lyndi, it all comes back to one simple idea: women deserve to feel at ease in their own skin, wherever they are. Find out more about her mission at Fearless Swimwear and through her platform, The Nude Nutritionist.