If you’re not sitting comfortably, perhaps Katie Lopes and Nicola Piercy can help, because their mantra is “nothing great was ever achieved in uncomfortable knickers”.
“You can’t be sitting in a board meeting with a wedgie,” says Lopes, 48, who alongside Piercy, 47, founded the underwear brand Stripe & Stare in 2017. Focusing on creating the ultimate in comfortable knickers, they’ve now sold more than 2mn of them and employ 40 people, with sales of £5.5mn (with net profit of £181,600) in 2023, up from £1.7mn in 2020. Stripe & Stare is stocked in Selfridges (an early supporter), Marks and Spencer and most recently Nordstrom in the US. Its fans include everyone from Oprah Winfrey to the fashion influencer Camille Charrière, with whom the brand collaborated in October 2023.
Now the duo are taking everything they’ve learnt as entrepreneurs who spotted a gap in the market for a product that makes women feel at ease rather than objectified, and are channelling it into a new initiative mentoring fledgling founders.
The premise for Stripe & Stare was straightforward: a prettily designed, simple knicker that wouldn’t give the dreaded VPL (visible panty line) and which was created using low-impact materials. Arguably, none of us needs any more clothes, but buying new underwear is more non-negotiable, hence the importance of it being created responsibly.
Lopes’s brainwave came almost 20 years ago when she was running the Austique boutiques in London’s Kings Road and Notting Hill with her sister. The shops were a socialites’ favourite, their USP importing stylish small brands such as Hanky Panky, a one-size lace thong in bright colours which customers would buy in armfuls.
“I found fashion really tough because it changes so quickly and it’s hard to predict,” says the pragmatic Lopes over a video call from Stripe & Stare’s Devon warehouse. “We were always looking at ways to boost our margins and I got super-interested in underwear. Once women find a brand they love they go back again and again. I loved this thong brand because they would do multiple colours in one shape. But as a buyer I was like, ‘this is great, but we’re British and we like a pair of pants, so where is that cool, affordable, everyday pair of knickers?” She points out that, at the time, there was either “male-gazey” Victoria’s Secret or “Bridget Jones granny pants”. The idea was to find that “throw on your favourite pair of jeans or T-shirt” in a knicker “that looks great but has comfort at its heart”.
After her mother sewed the first prototype, Lopes started doing small production runs over about a six-year research-and-development period. The result was a mid-rise pant edged with lace attached with flatlock stitching, made from soft and biodegradable Tencel modal (a fabric derived from wood pulp made from controlled wood sources). “[The stitching] eliminates the VPL and stops it moving around and driving us women nuts,” says Lopes.
The pants were originally sold under a different brand name, but after a painful legal battle over the trademark the company was reborn as Stripe & Stare in 2017, with Piercy, an old friend of Lopes’s who’d previously been managing director of the cookery school L’atelier de Chefs, joining prior to the launch. 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 taken £70,000 in investment to get going.
The brand’s signature is bright colours and prints with lace trims, now in an array of shapes — from high-waisted to thong to hipsters. “We are a company that is for women by women,” says Lopes, “and that will always be at the heart of everything we do.” To that end they do a “token men’s boxer short”.
The company became something of a lifeline for both of them. In 2015, Austique was put into voluntary administration due to debt, and Lopes and Piercy decided to get going on the knicker plan. The trademark battle put a fly in that ointment, as did a slew of life catastrophes. In one week, Lopes says, “my father died on the Sunday, on Monday I found out my now ex-husband had not been straightforward with his financial position”. On Thursday, while at her father’s funeral, her house was burgled “top to bottom”. All of this while also dealing with £1.5mn of debt and no stable home. “It was a car crash moment where everything came at once.”
Then, in 2018, not quite a year after the launch of Stripe & Stare, Piercy’s beloved husband Luke died suddenly, aged 40. “I drowned myself in [the business],” she says. “That was my being and purpose for six years. And my lifesaver, really.”
Happily, the business got off to a good start. The pandemic and a quick pivot into loungewear and pyjamas set them up, as well as a clever punt on sponsoring a then fledgling podcast, Pandora Sykes and Dolly Alderton’s The High Low, with its audience of smart millennial women.
Collaborations have been key, too. The first, with LoveShackFancy in 2021, sold out in an hour. More recently Stripe & Stare has worked with new label Debute, run by society It girls Jazzy de Lisser and Lola Bute, while on January 16 it will launch a collection with Rixo, featuring leopard, heart and striped prints in knickers, bodysuits, baby T-shirts and soft bras. Stripe & Stare has had B Corp certification since 2022. “Nobody’s perfect, we’re certainly not, but we very much try to do the right thing,” she says.
The year 2022 saw Stripe and Stare’s biggest investment, with £1.5mn from BGF private equity as well as rounds from angel investors including Richard Longhurst, co-founder of Lovehoney, and Sam Galsworthy of Sipsmith. For Lopes and Piercy, sharing insight into the world of private equity and investment has become something of a personal mission.
“You don’t get taken seriously, and you’ve got to work twice as hard as men. In [venture capital] meetings, women are asked very risk-based questions,” says Lopes. “Like, what are you going to do when it all goes wrong? How are you going to stop that happening? Whereas the men are asked much more growth-based questions. We have been in those rooms where we are immediately questioned harder than a man would be in our shoes.”
As a reaction to this, Stripe & Stare has developed an initiative to help other women in similar positions, and in September it launched S&S Foundation, a free mentorship programme for pre-seed sole female founders.
“If women started and scaled businesses at the same rate as men, there’d be an additional £250bn to the UK economy,” Piercy says emphatically, citing The Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship. “We [also] know [from this] that less than 2 per cent of venture capital funding goes to women. There’s this gap about how we get women-led businesses to the next stage.” Already the mentorship programme has worked with more than 50 founders.
The pair might have solved the long-loathed VPL but they believe their mission is more powerful than just pants. “It’s intimate, so it opens the door to female-led movements, equality and gynaecological health. Our underwear leads to bigger conversations,” says Lopes.
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