BonPrix

In May 1986 the Otto Group launched Bonprix in Hamburg, a German low-price fashion retailer that began as a 32-page mail-order catalog. It now sells almost entirely online, in more than 25 mostly European countries, under labels it owns itself. Lingerie, nightwear and swimwear are an everyday part of its range, sold on price and on size: the UK site offers womenswear in sizes 6 to 32, with maternity and plus-size collections alongside.

Otto's experiment in cheap mail order

Otto, the Hamburg mail-order house, already dominated German catalog shopping by the 1980s. Bonprix was its test of a cheaper, leaner model. The first catalog, in 1986, ran to 32 pages. Hans-Joachim Mundt and Michael Newe set the company up, and Josef Teeken joined the management in 1988.

The formula was to keep the books thin, the prices low and the merchandise in-house. Bonprix sells "almost exclusively" its own brands, which lets it control cost and markup in a way a department-store catalog carrying national brands cannot. Over the next three decades the catalogs grew to more than 200 pages, and the company followed its customers into new markets.

From Hamburg to Warsaw and Moscow

Expansion came early and pointed east as much as west. Bonprix entered Poland and France in 1991, Italy in 1992, the Czech Republic in 2004, Russia in 2006, Ukraine in 2008 and Romania in 2010. In Central and Eastern Europe, where catalog shopping had a long reach outside big cities, a cheap mail-order brand with German backing found a ready audience.

Revenue passed one billion euros for the first time in 2010. In the 2023/24 financial year it was about 1.52 billion euros, with roughly 2,500 employees. German Wikipedia gives a lower figure for the most recent year, about 1.1 billion euros and around 1,400 staff, which suggests a business that has shrunk since its peak.

The catalog goes online

The German web shop opened in 1997, early for a European retailer. A mobile shop followed in Germany in 2011 and an app in 2016. Today online and mobile account for about 90% of sales. The printed catalog lasted for decades after the web shop opened, but it is no longer the center of the business.

Bonprix also tried physical retail. Its first store opened in Hamburg in 1999. A restructuring began in 2016, most stores were closed by 2020, and the last one, a "Fashion Connect Store," shut in 2023.

Venus, the American swimwear detour

In July 2009 Bonprix bought a majority stake in Venus Fashion, an American swimwear manufacturer and catalog business. It was an unusual move for a European value retailer: Venus brought a US customer base and expertise in swimwear, a category where fit and fabric matter more than in most cheap fashion. Bonprix sold Venus in August 2025.

What Bonprix lingerie looks like

Bonprix is not a lingerie house, and its intimates should be judged as what they are: practical, inexpensive garments for a mass customer. This encyclopedia records about 882 Bonprix products. The bulk are everyday full-cup bras, multipacks of briefs, soft wireless bras, lace sets and nightwear, plus swimwear for the summer season. The wide size range is the selling point. A retailer that sells a size 32 dress has to sell a bra and brief to go under it, and Bonprix does, at prices well below specialist full-figure brands.

Next to a German lingerie maker such as Triumph, with its own fit research and decades of corsetry, Bonprix offers less engineering and more volume. Its bras are made to a price and sold by mail, so the customer does her own fitting at home and sends back what does not work.

Sustainable fibers by 2030

Since 2017 Bonprix has run a sustainable materials program. By 2021 about half of the fibers it used came from sources it classed as sustainable, and it has set a target of 100% by 2030. For a business built on low prices that is an ambitious promise, and a hard one to audit from the outside.

A brand without a story, by design

Bonprix has no founding designer, no signature garment and no famous campaign. That is the point. It was built inside a large group to sell cheap clothes efficiently by post, and it has kept doing that through the shift from paper to screen. Its lingerie is a by-product of serving the whole wardrobe for women across a very wide size range. Since the sale of Venus in 2025, its swimwear has once again been simply one more section of the shop.

Last updated October 7, 2026