Eberjey

Founded in Miami in 1996 by Ali Mejia and Mariela Rovito, Eberjey is an American sleepwear and lingerie brand. It started with comfortable underwear and made its name with pajamas, above all the Gisele set in a TENCEL Modal and spandex knit, and it still runs from Miami with Mejia as head of design and Rovito as chief executive.

Two colleagues in Miami advertising

The founding story usually told about Eberjey, that two friends from Venezuela started it, does not match what the founders say about themselves. Mejia was born in El Salvador and raised in Miami. Rovito was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and also grew up in Miami. They met in their early twenties as colleagues in advertising, where Mejia had arrived after an earlier stint on Wall Street.

Mejia had been altering and redrafting clothes since before middle school, and she traces the interest to her mother's European sleepwear and its finishing details. Eberjey began as her side project: sewing samples with a local patternmaker in Miami. Rovito saw a business in the samples, and the two combined forces, with Mejia on design and Rovito on the commercial side. Mejia eventually left the corporate world to run the brand full time.

Where the name comes from is less clear. The company does not explain it on its own pages, and the old story that it was picked purely for its soft sound is not something we could confirm.

The 1996 brief: underwear for the wearer

The founders frame their starting point bluntly. In 1996, they say, most lingerie on the American market was designed around how it looked to a partner rather than how it felt to the woman wearing it. Eberjey's first products were comfortable everyday styles meant to correct that, and Wikipedia's history of the bra places Eberjey among the 1990s brands that pushed soft, wireless bra construction, following Hanky Panky and Hanro in the 1970s and Cosabella in the 1980s.

The pajamas came soon after the underwear and changed the scale of the business. The company calls them the product that took the brand "to the next level", and it is hard to argue: by the 2020s Eberjey's site was built around pajama sets, robes and loungewear, with lingerie as one category among several.

Eberjey's Gisele pajama and the fabric question

The Gisele set is the brand's best-known product. It is made from a blend of TENCEL Modal and spandex, a modal fiber spun from beech wood pulp, knitted into a light jersey with some stretch. Eberjey's homepage quotes a product reviewer who found the fabric lighter, softer and smoother than any other tested, and it markets Gisele as the "it-girl of PJs". It is sold in plain and printed versions and several cuts, and a companion set called William uses the same fabric.

Fabric is the whole argument for the brand. Eberjey does not sell structure, padding or shaping. It sells a hand-feel, and modal is the right fiber for that: cooler than cotton against the skin, with a drape that cotton jersey lacks. The company also sells robes and a washable silk line, an attempt to make silk sleepwear survive a home washing machine. On sustainability it says it is looking for better fabrics, processes and packaging, without much detail beyond the choice of TENCEL fiber.

Who runs it now

The brand's trademarks, including the tagline "For The Softer Side of Life", are registered to World Threads Inc. Rovito is chief executive and sets sales, marketing, finance, operations and supply chain strategy. She is a member of YPO, the network of chief executives, and sits on its retail board. Mejia leads the creative teams.

That makes Eberjey an uncommon thing in American intimates: a brand thirty years old still run by the two people who started it, with no public record we could find of a sale to a larger group. Its wholesale reach has included New York specialty retailers such as Journelle, which lists Eberjey among the labels it carries alongside Chantelle, Hanky Panky and Natori.

The company's own summary of its first quarter century puts a single product at the center. Underwear opened the door in 1996, but it was the Gisele pajama, a modal knit sold by the cut and the print, that made Eberjey's name in American sleepwear.

Last updated October 7, 2026