Conte Elegant

Conte Elegant is the women's hosiery and lingerie brand of Conte Spa, a privately owned textile company in Grodno, western Belarus, set up in 1997 by the Baiko family and their partner Richard Sherel. Its main product is nylon tights, made at a knitting and dyeing plant that Belarusian press describes as one of the largest hosiery operations in Europe, with sales in about 30 countries.

In Belarus and much of the former Soviet market, Conte is less a fashion name than a household one. A 2016 profile in the Belarusian newspaper Nasha Niva put it simply: the founder's name might be unknown, but most women in the country wear his tights.

Two cars of tights and a washing machine

The company tells its own origin story with some relish. In the early 1990s, as the Soviet economy collapsed, cross-border trade was how many families in the Grodno region, near the Polish and Lithuanian borders, made a living. Three young men pooled their money and brought in two carloads of polyamide tights, then a scarce item. They dyed them by hand in domestic washing machines and dried them in a Grodno apartment.

Valentin Baiko, trained as a primary-school and music teacher, has said he would not have gone into business if schools had paid properly. His father, also Valentin, gave the family trade its first push, and his brother Dmitry later ran construction projects. Family stories mention earlier attempts at selling bananas; to raise the first capital, someone sold a car.

The first German machines

The pivot from trading to making came with two German knitting machines. Belarus had no domestic tights production of note at the time, so the niche was open. Conte Spa was registered in 1997, and from 2001 it began building its own brands for women, men and children, with a network of company and partner stores.

How Conte tights are made

A 2025 factory visit by Belarusian journalists gives a rare look inside. The Grodno plant runs around the clock with about 2,000 knitting machines and roughly 3,500 employees across its sites, about 95 percent of them women. It can turn out some 200,000 items a day.

The polyamide yarn comes from Italy and is fine enough that 10 kilometers of it weigh 8 grams. Workers on the knitting floor are not allowed to wear watches or jewelry in case they snag it. Each leg is knitted as a single stocking and then joined to its pair by machine.

A faster dye bath

Dyeing is where the company claims its edge. It uses Italian dyes and an Italian-origin process that one of the owners reworked in 2014, cutting the standard six-hour dye cycle substantially and using less water, chemicals and power. Conte says the treatment also makes the finished tights stronger and more resistant to snags, and that it has refused offers from Italian and other European makers to buy the method. Every pair is then checked by hand on a lit inspection table, up to 1,000 pairs per inspector per hour.

The current range shows where the engineering goes. Conte Tulle tights use a fine mesh knit, similar to tulle, designed so that a broken loop is stopped by the cells around it rather than running into a ladder.

The brands under Conte Spa

Conte Spa sells under several labels:

Brand	Category
Conte Elegant	women's tights, stockings, lingerie
Conte Kids	children's hosiery, especially cotton socks
DiWaRi	men's underwear and knitwear
Esli	knitwear and clothing

The company has also added jeans, designed in Belarus and made by a contract manufacturer on Mauritius. Conte Elegant itself has grown from tights and stockings into lingerie, sold through branded and partner stores.

Exports east and west

More than half of production has historically gone abroad, chiefly to Russia and Ukraine; Russian Wikipedia's article on Grodno's economy also lists Latvia, Lithuania, Israel, Armenia and the United States. Conte advertised heavily in Ukraine, to the point of hanging a giant banner on Kyiv's Maidan. Its domestic rise came at the expense of cheap Turkish tights in Belarusian markets, a contest Nasha Niva described as won by the start of 2016.

Conte and the Belarusian state

Conte is one of the country's largest private companies, and in 2016 Nasha Niva ranked it second only to the retailer Euroopt among private firms by profitability. During the 2020 protests, its Grodno employees left the government-affiliated trade union and formed a local of an independent one, a move reported in coverage of Belarus's labor movement at the time.

Valentin Baiko is now deputy director for development at Conte Spa and a member of the Council of the Republic, the upper house of the Belarusian parliament. Sanctions have made shipping Italian yarn and dye to Grodno slower and more expensive, and local press reported a net loss for the company in 2025. It is now testing markets in the Gulf, with open-toe tights for the United Arab Emirates, and has sent trial shipments to the United States and Canada. Its main Belarusian lingerie neighbor, Milavitsa of Minsk, makes bras; Conte remains, first and last, a tights company, in a market where Wolford sits at the luxury end and Conte at the everyday one.

Last updated October 7, 2026