If you’re not sitting comfortably, perhaps Katie Lopes and Nicola Piercy can help you, because their mantra is “nothing great has ever been achieved in uncomfortable panties.”
“You can’t be sitting in a board meeting in your underwear,” says Lopes, 48, who along with Piercy, 47, founded underwear brand Stripe & Stare in 2017. Focusing on creating the latest in comfortable panties, they have now sold over 2 million of them and employ 40 people, with sales of £5.5 million (with a net profit of £181,600) in 2023, up from £1.7m in 2020. Stripe & Stare is stocked in Selfridges (an early backer), Marks and Spencer and, most recently, Nordstrom in the US. Its fans include everyone from Oprah Winfrey to fashion influencer Camille Charrière, with whom the brand collaborated in October 2023.
Now the duo is taking everything they’ve learned as entrepreneurs who spotted a gap in the market for a product that makes women feel comfortable rather than objectified, and channeling it into a new initiative that mentors first-time founders.
The premise of Stripe & Stare was simple: a simple, beautifully designed panty that wouldn’t give the dreaded VPL (visible panty line) and was created with low-impact materials. Arguably none of us need more clothes, but buying new underwear is less negotiable, hence the importance of creating it responsibly.
Lopes’ idea came almost 20 years ago, when she ran the Austique boutiques on London’s Kings Road and Notting Hill with her sister. The stores were favorites of socialites, and their USP imported small, stylish brands like Hanky Panky, a one-size-fits-all lace thong in bright colors that customers scooped up.
“I found fashion really difficult because it changes so quickly and is hard to predict,” says the pragmatic Lopes during a video call from Stripe & Stare’s warehouse in Devon. “We were always looking for ways to increase our margins and I became very interested in underwear. Once women find a brand they love, they return again and again. I loved this brand of thongs because they had several colors in one shape. But as a shopper I thought: ‘This is great, but we’re British and we like trousers, so where’s that great, affordable, everyday pair of knickers?’ She points out that, at the time, there was a “men’s” Victoria’s Secret or “Bridget Jones granny pants.” The idea was to find that “wear your favorite pair of jeans or t-shirt” in a panty “that looks great but is comfortable underneath.”
After his mother sewed the first prototype, Lopes began making small productions during a research and development period of approximately six years. The result was a mid-rise pant with lace trim and flat seams, made from soft, biodegradable Tencel modal (a fabric derived from wood pulp made from controlled wood sources). “[The stitching] It eliminates VPL and prevents it from moving and driving us women crazy,” says Lopes.
The pants were originally sold under a different brand, but after a painful legal battle over branding, the company was reborn as Stripe & Stare in 2017, with Piercy, an old friend of Lopes who had previously been CEO of the cooking school . L’atelier de Chefs, pre-launch addition. They started with a grassroots approach, selling the knickers themselves at the Spirit of Christmas fair, a showcase for independent brands at London’s Olympia, having invested £70,000 to get started.
The brand’s signature is bright colors and lace-trimmed prints, now in a variety of shapes, from high-waisted to thong and hipsters. “We are a company for women by women,” says Lopes, “and that will always be at the center of everything we do.” To do this, they make a “symbolic male boxer.”
The company became a kind of lifeline for both of them. In 2015, Austique went into voluntary administration due to debt, and Lopes and Piercy decided to press ahead with the panties plan. The battle for brands put a damper on that ointment, as did a series of catastrophes in life. Within a week, Lopes says, “my father died on Sunday, on Monday I discovered that my now ex-husband had not been easy with his financial situation.” On Thursday, while attending his father’s funeral, his house was robbed “from top to bottom.” All this, while facing £1.5m of debt and the lack of a stable home. “It was a car accident moment where everything happened at the same time.”
Then, in 2018, less than a year after the release of Stripe & Stare, Piercy’s beloved husband Luke died suddenly, aged 40. “I drowned in [the business]”she says. “That was my being and my purpose for six years. And my lifesaver, really.”
Fortunately, business started well. The pandemic and a quick pivot toward loungewear and pajamas set them up, as did a smart move to sponsor a then-fledgling podcast, Pandora Sykes and Dolly Alderton. The high and lowwith her audience of smart millennial women.
Collaborations have also been key. The first, with LoveShackFancy in 2021, sold out within an hour. More recently, Stripe & Stare has worked with new brand Debute, run by Lisser and Lola Bute’s It Girls Jazzy partnership, while on January 16 it will launch a collection with Rixo, featuring leopard prints, hearts and stripes on panties, bodysuits, baby t-shirts. -soft shirts and bras. Stripe & Stare has been B Corp certified since 2022. “No one is perfect, we certainly aren’t, but we try to do the right thing,” he says.
2022 saw the biggest investment from Stripe and Stare, with £1.5 million of private equity from BGF, as well as rounds from angel investors including Richard Longhurst, co-founder of Lovehoney, and Sam Galsworthy of Sipsmith. For Lopes and Piercy, sharing knowledge about the world of private equity and investing has become something of a personal mission.
“They don’t take you seriously and you have to work twice as hard as men. In [venture capital] In meetings, women are asked very risk-based questions,” Lopes says. “Like, what are you going to do when everything goes wrong? How are you going to prevent that from happening? Whereas men are asked much more growth-based questions. “We have been in those rooms where we are immediately questioned more harshly than a man in our place.”
In reaction to this, Stripe & Stare has developed an initiative to help other women in similar positions, and in September launched the S&S Foundation, a free mentorship program for pre-seed exclusive female founders.
“If women started and expanded businesses at the same rate as men, there would be an extra £250 billion for the UK economy,” Piercy says emphatically, citing The Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship. “Us [also] know [from this] that less than 2 percent of venture capital funding goes to women. “There is a gap on how to take women-led businesses to the next stage.” The mentorship program has already worked with more than 50 founders.
The pair may have solved the long-hated VPL, but they believe their mission is more powerful than just pants. “It’s intimate, so it opens the door to women-led movements, equality and gynecological health. Our underwear sparks bigger conversations,” says Lopes.
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