The Sweat Bib Story: From My Dining Table to Your Glove

The first time I trained Muay Thai, I came home with sore shins, a bruised ego, and a face full of my own sweat. I remember standing in the corner between rounds, peeling a glove off, fumbling for a towel, wiping my eyes, then trying to wrestle the glove back on before the bell. By the time I'd done that little routine three times in a session, I was more frustrated with the sweat than with the punches.

That was 2017. It was also the moment Sweat Bibs started — although I didn't know it yet.

The Tennis Wristband That Wasn't Quite Right

My first thought was simple: tennis players solved this years ago. A wristband, a swipe across the brow, problem sorted. But a tennis wristband doesn't work on a boxing glove. The glove is already there. You can't reach your forehead with a wrist when your hand is wrapped in 12 ounces of padding.

So I sat at my dining table with a pile of old towels, scissors, and a bag of Velcro from the craft shop. I cut, I sewed, I cursed, I tried it on, I cut some more. The first prototype was ugly. The second was uglier. Somewhere around version five, I had something that actually attached to a glove without getting in the way of a punch — and could be ripped off and thrown in the wash without dismantling the glove itself.

I called it the Sweat Bib. Because that's what it does. You jab, you dab. Simple.

The Years of Polite "No"

Designing the thing was the easy part. Finding someone to make it properly was where I nearly gave up.

For a long stretch, I was either ignored or politely told I was too small to bother with. Manufacturers wanted minimum orders I couldn't justify. Some never replied. Others replied once and then ghosted. I kept training, kept wearing my dining-table prototype, and kept emailing.

Eventually I found a manufacturer in Indonesia who got it. They were patient with the fact that I was learning — tech packs, fabric weights, dye specifications, all of it new to me. More importantly, they understood why I cared about keeping plastic out of the product. That mattered to me more than price, and it ended up being the reason we still work together today.

Why It Had to Be Natural Fibres

Once I had the Sweat Bib working, the rest of the brand started to come into focus. Combat sports clothing, especially women's, is dominated by synthetic fabrics — polyester, nylon, blends with names that sound like chemistry homework. We sweat hard. Our pores are open. The research on microplastics shedding from synthetic fabric is still emerging, but enough of it is in to make me uncomfortable about what we're absorbing while we train.

So Sweat Bibs runs on cotton, organic cotton, hemp and linen. The Muay Thai shorts use a small amount of elastane, because anyone who has ever tried to throw a high kick in stiff fabric knows why. The Sweat Bib's logo is embroidered, not printed, because most logo prints are plastic — and we're working toward bringing embroidery across more of the range. The packaging is a cassava-based biodegradable bag. The swing tags are plastic-free. We're not perfect, but we keep finding the next plastic to remove.

Designed by a Woman Who Trains

I designed everything with a woman's body in mind because that's the body I have, and it's the one most combat sports brands forget about. Men have found the Sweat Bib useful too, which I love — but the cut, the fit, the proportions, the small details all start from how *I* train.

Sweat Bibs is still small. Still personal. Still run by someone who remembers cutting up towels at a dining table. I'd like to think you can feel that in the gear.

— Rondah Bibby, Founder