Never having worn a bra, I cannot offer any personal insights as to whether the Ultimo bra lives up to its claims of supreme comfort coupled with "cleavage enhancement."
But the Ultimo has seen impressive commercial success ever since it burst on to the scene the summer of 1999, the brainchild of Michelle Mone, the 33-year-old founder and co-owner of MJM International, the company set up to make the bra.
In October 1996, Ms Mone went to a dinner dance with her husband, Michael, wearing a very uncomfortable "cleavage enhancing" bra. She decided she could come up with a better product.
As she knew nothing about the way bras were made, she bought every one on the market, pulled them apart, examined how they were put together and came up with her own design, a silicone gel-filled bra. The research did not come cheap. By the time she had her prototype for Ultimo three years later she was £100,000 in debt.
"I was so naïve, I didn't realise what I was getting into," said Ms Mone, who will be appearing with the likes of Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev at the Leaders in London international leadership summit later this month.
Having invented what she thought was a unique product, Ms Mone had to get the public's attention. It's a tough life being an entrepreneur. Not only do you have to invent or develop a product, you have to get the word out.
Ms Mone hired nine actors dressed as surgeons for a mock demonstration in Oxford Street. The "surgeons" called for the Ultimo bra to be banned as it would put them out of work.
The police almost arrested the whole group for blocking traffic, but the stunt had the desired effect: a huge dose of media coverage. In another marketing coup, Julia Roberts wore an Ultimo bra in the film Erin Brockovich.
Selfridges was the first department store to stock the Ultimo, quickly followed by Debenhams. How did she get her foot in the door at Selfridges?
"The buyer at the time tried an Ultimo on and fell in love with it. She was small-breasted so I suppose it was a case of being in the right place at the right time," Ms Mone said.
Ms Mone's CV reads like a classic rags-to-riches story. She grew up in a tenement in the east end of Glasgow. At 10 years old, she recruited 12 teenagers to deliver hot rolls in the morning along with the newspapers.
She left school at 15 without any qualifications in order to support her parents - her father was a wheelchair user. Too young to work full-time she got a job as fashion model after working in a fruit shop with her mother.
At 20, she got married and had the first of three children. In her first proper job, Ms Mone worked as an office junior with Labatt, the beer company. By 22 she was running the firm's sales and marketing team for the whole of Scotland. Two years later, just after having her second baby, she was made redundant when Labatt closed its UK operation. She used the redundancy as seed money for Ultimo.
The awards have flowed thick and fast: World Young Business Achiever Award in 2000 and in June she was named by Management Today magazine as one of the top 35 women under 35 in the business world.
Unlike, say, paper clips, the bra business also brings a frisson of glamour as the product is sold through supermodels. The autumn/winter Ultimo catalogue features a picture of Ms Mone alongside Rachel Hunter, who was signed up in February 2004.
Rod Stewart's ex took over from Penny Lancaster, the veteran rocker's current partner much to the delight of the tabloids, thereby ensuring another blast of publicity for Ultimo.
A few months later, Ms Mone signed a deal with Asda stores to launch a collection exclusively for the supermarket's George label called Michelle for George that will put Ultimo bras in 280 Asda outlets in the UK. MJM International now employs 100 staff in offices in Glasgow and Hong Kong and now has seven brands instead of just Ultimo.
Along the way there have been brushes with disaster. Ms Mone said a distributor in the US ran off with £175,000 in cash and stock four years ago, leaving the company high and dry.
The bank called in its overdraft and Ms Mone and her husband, the managing director of MJM, came within 15 minutes of losing everything, including their home. Tom Hunter, the retail entrepreneur and fellow Scot came to the rescue and bailed them out with a £100,000 loan.
There have also been clashes with the media. Last year, Ms Mone was named along with Tesco and Ann Summers as an employer who paid Chinese workers £1 a day. Her response at the time was typically forthright.
"We pay more than the minimum wage and I am not responsible for setting the minimum wage in China. You have to ask will someone pay £50 for a bra made in Scotland when they can buy the same product made elsewhere for £25, and the answer is no."
Currently her company, said to be worth £20m, is embroiled in a lawsuit brought by a 28-year-old call centre employee who alleged she was offered a choice between demotion and a pay cut or an increase in hours after she said she was expecting her second child.
The case has lasted for a year and is a source of exasperation for Ms Mone, who believes it would not have occurred if her company had not been so high-profile.
"It has dragged on, wasting time and money and it needs to stop," she says, pointing out that the company has lots of women with children. She says usually companies find it cheaper to sign a cheque than to fight, but for her it was "this time no more."
Ms Mone says the climate is better now for entrepreneurs than when she went into business nine years ago, a claim that should please Gordon Brown, the chancellor, who is keen for Britain to adopt America's entrepreneurial culture.
But she rails against bureaucracy and red tape. She thinks regulations on employee protection have gone "way overboard" and there are too many rules over the hiring of temporary staff.
While acknowledging the need for health and safety rules, she thinks some of the regulations "pathetic".
"You need a notice warning people they can burn themselves when you put a toaster in the kitchen," she says. "Every week a new rule comes in, we need to slow down a wee bit."
As far as she has come, Ms Mone says she is only halfway to where she wants to be. MJM International is a private company and Ms Mone says it is not up for sale - for now: "Never say never. I take it a day at a time."
