Lingerie Trends

Seattle’s popular Zovo Lingerie has reportedly secured financing from investors in Seattle and Hong Kong. The money will be used to create a separate lingerie brand, and add new stores. Sadly, no news about possible online sales yet.

According to John Cook’s Venture Blog,

Engle Saez, the former chief marketing officer at Eddie Bauer and the former senior vice president of marketing and category management at Starbucks, has joined Zovo as president and chief executive. Saez’s wife, Victoria Roberts, founded Zovo in 2005.
- Source: John Cook’s Venture Blog

The story behind Zovo Lingerie shows the value of research as a foundation for a new business venture. Zovo Lingerie focuses on ‘female baby boomers.’ Translation: women between the ages of 35 and 54. And – sign of the times – on plus-size lingerie.

Twenty-five years ago, Victoria Roberts had "a lingerie disaster."

She had searched high and low for something to wear, but department stores seemed to her to be “a cattle call.” The mom and pops were either shockingly expensive or “decorated in white shag or silver.”

“I wanted to look sexy, and he said I looked like someone from Ice Capades,” laughed Roberts. “And it wasn’t for lack of trying.”

With the opening of Zovo Lingerie in University Village, Roberts has definitely thawed the ice.

Her wares — silk, lace and cotton in all colors — are hot.

She can explain the particularities of underwires, as well as offer varieties in them (who knew?).

And though her name is Victoria, the secret of Roberts’ store is much more titillating than the industry norm: Silk robes and slippers are placed in each fitting room so the usual crane- around-the-curtain-and-shout-for-another-size can be replaced by a leisurely stroll.

Roberts has found a niche in retail, catering to a (still) underserved market: female baby boomers.

What’s more, Roberts stocks lingerie for larger women, and is expanding her bra line from FF to I.

Her decision is a smart move — last year, the rise in plus-size apparel sales was more than double that of sales of all women’s apparel, according to a study conducted by The NPD Group, a New York marketing research firm.

That same group found that, within the multibillion-dollar intimate apparel industry, sales of lingerie crafted for women between ages 35 and 54 have grown faster than overall lingerie sales.

But since Roberts is the type of 45-year-old who makes women in their 20s want to work out, the shop — and its Spanish bullfighter-themed window — can raise the eyebrows of any generation.

Zovo Lingerie strikes a balance: upscale, but not La Perla.

She did her research: two years of it, most of that on her own time before leaving her human resources position at Starbucks.

(Because executives at Starbucks aren’t supposed to date the rank-and-file, his departure — before they began flirting seriously — opened the door for both of them.)

Saez, who was born in Havana, Cuba, left Starbucks to start his own brand consulting firm, Brand DNA.

But retailing is in his blood: his family owned two of Havana’s most famous stores — Flogar and El Encanto — before leaving for the United States.

And though he may be an executive, a brand doctor and a retailer, it was only after scoring an elk in October, and handing over its antlers to his future father-in-law, a hunter, that Saez got the go-ahead to marry Roberts.

Although she opened the store less than a year after getting married in that elk-hunting camp (she wearing a $5 dress, Saez in a thrift-store tuxedo that was "about a foot too short"), the idea for Zovo Lingerie dates back to her lingerie disaster so many years earlier.
- Source: Summarized from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 18, 2005

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