Our history
In 1989, Dr Michaël Prüfer conducted a thesis on the problems of venous return in athletes. After several years of scientific research with top athletes, the multiple record holder, World champion, Olympic speed ski champion and another vascular doctor invent and develop a new concept of revolutionary compression/compression socks, designed to significantly improve muscle recovery and performance.
Formula 1 puts pilots under physical strain, between the series of turns at speeds of up to 290 km/h, the centrifugal force similar to that encountered by a fighter pilot (2.5G) and a temperature of up to 50°C in the cockpit.
After inconclusive tests with hunting drivers wearing anti-G pants, Alain Prost offered his services as a "famous tester" and ended up wearing the products by himself. He wore BV Sport clothing to drive at the Grand Prix races in his Ferrari.
"When I started using BV Sport equipment, I won up to a tenth of a second per circuit". Alain Prost.
Jean-Marcel Ferret, a doctor with the French football team in 1997, was convinced that in-depth prevention work was needed to limit the fatigue associated with the intensive sequence of matches and training.
The co-founder of BV Sport told him about his invention at a sports medicine congress. This is the beginning of a great story with the French football team.
At the '98 World Cup, all the French international teams used the first BV Sport recovery socks, specially created for the event.
During the Soyuz TM29 flight, the Franco-Russian mission will wear the BV Sport socks. Jean-Pierre Haigneré, a astronaut and Bernard Cornet, a astronaut doctor, are convinced:
"We used the BV SPORT socks for the first 8 days after landing, and even longer in the sports sessions. No malleolar edema has appeared, although this happens very often after long flights."
Adept at recovery socks, Odiah Sidibé, bronze medallist in 4x100m relay at the 2001 Munich European Championships, convinced the women’s and men’s relays to test the BV SPORT concept.
The technical and medical staff as well as the athletes unanimously declare that the BV Sport concept allows them to limit the risk of injury, accelerate recovery and improve their performance.
In order to meet the demand of athletes wishing to keep their socks or remain barefoot in their shoes, BV Sport then created a new market by transforming the compression sock into a new concept: The Booster sleeve!
Salvatore Corona arrives from the building where he just sold his company "Corona Etanchéité". An ambitious entrepreneur from Saint-Etienne wishes to take on a new challenge.
He heard about BV Sport, whose products were very popular until Clairefontaine, but whose financial results were disappointing. He then decides to return to capital and becomes a majority shareholder.
He draws on his past experience as a business leader by setting up a new working method that will prove to be profitable. In just a few years BV Sport has increased its turnover from €150,000 to €6 million.
In 2013, Salvatore won the "Commercial Dynamics" award from the Chambre des Métiers et de l'Artisanat de la Loire and in 2016, the "Victoire des autodidactes" trophy from the Rhône-Alpes region.
Until then, sock production was outsourced to a garment factory in northern France. Eager to bring this know-how back to Saint-Etienne, Salvatore Corona invested in circular knitting machines and created its own production unit and obtained the label "Made in France".
BV Sport went from 3 products to 50 references and established itself as the French market leader.
After 2 years of research, the implementation of 5 technical and scientific innovations, the Booster Elite combines the latest innovations in the field of intelligent textiles, with numerous validations and scientific studies BV Sport.
Quickly becoming BV Sport’s bestseller, the Booster Elite has sold more than 230,000 copies since its release.
Constantly innovating and one of the guidelines of BV Sport. In 2014, BV decided to enter the women’s sport market with an innovative product: a sport shorts able to reproduce thanks to muscular movements, the massage technique "Palper rolling".
This technology is then patented and scientifically proven.
The BVSPORT R&D Centre has demonstrated through its extensive scientific work that the pressures transmitted to the lower limbs vary depending on the type and thickness of the living biological tissues that make up the lower limbs. These tissues behave as pressure absorbers (muscles and fat) or on the contrary are incompressible (bones and in a lesser way tendons and nerves).
These innovative parameters have allowed us to design mesh with variable stiffness (flexible/semi-rigid/rigid) that are integrated in 2015 on the CSX shorts to respect the anatomy, the physiology of athletes and the moving muscle biomechanics.
BV SPORT has been chosen by the Medical Commission of the French National Olympic and Sports Committee to equip the entire French delegation for one of the world’s most popular events: the Rio Olympic Games.
No less than 1200 members of the French delegation (including 400 athletes) each received a set of products adapted to the physiology of high-level athletes. and derived from BV SPORT’s patented technology.
As in 1998 with Zinedine Zidane, the players of the French team achieved the feat 20 years later, to win again a world cup. The medical staff as well as the French players have once again trusted the BV Sport compression products to put all the chances on their side to win this world championship.
VEETS is a French brand founded by a sportsman and shoe expert: Steve Brunier. Having sold Chinese models for several years, he decided to offer his customers, the first running shoe made in France with an eco-responsible upper.
In order to stand out from the big brands of running shoes, he decided to develop sole geometry that would promote a more natural and less traumatic running posture for the body.
In 2020, the brand continued its development and reached a new milestone by joining the BV Sport group. This acquisition allows the brand to benefit from the strengths of a major French brand established for more than 20 years in the world of running with more than 2500 points of sale in France and internationally.
With nearly one million pairs sold in the last three years, the French and local manufacture of these products seemed obvious, just like our range of compression products. It is now a reality with a collection entirely imagined and manufactured in our production unit in Saint-Etienne. From innovation to packaging, design and production, everything has been worked on locally.
This French production allowed BV Sport to collaborate exclusively with artists like Matthieu Forichon with the collection Des Bosses Des Bulles and Fabio "Binho" cerqueira with the collection NHOBI.
BV Sport reinforces its brand image by adopting a new visual identity: new logo, new Baseline, new colours.
This new brand identity reflects our current and future ambitions: to gain new market share and to confirm our leading position in the sports compression market.
More assertive, this visual identity brings a new impetus to the brand with a style deliberately refined to focus only on the essentials: the performance and efficiency of our products serving athletes.
