Figleaves

Figleaves is a British online lingerie retailer founded in 1998 by Daniel Nabarro and Michael Ross, a former McKinsey & Co manager. It is generally credited as the first internet retailer to specialize in lingerie. The company was based in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, sold bras, briefs, swimwear and nightwear from other brands and under its own label, and was bought by the Manchester catalog group N Brown in 2010.

Figleaves.com and the 1998 bet

In 1998 selling bras online looked like a bad idea. Bras are the garment women most often want to try on, sizing varies from brand to brand, and returns are expensive. Nabarro and Ross bet that the opposite was true: that a website could stock far more sizes and styles than any shop, and that many women would rather buy underwear at home than in a fitting room.

The name did a lot of the work. Figleaves.com was short, a little cheeky and easy to remember, an advantage in the years when most shoppers typed a web address from memory. The site sold lingerie, swimwear and nightwear, and by the time the company described its business publicly, lingerie made up about half of sales, swimwear about 40% and nightwear the remaining 10%.

Growth without profit

Figleaves grew in the familiar way of dot-com retailers, on investors' money. In 2002 it expanded into the United States. In 2005 the venture firm Balderton Capital bought a stake of nearly 40%. Julia Reynolds, formerly an executive at Tesco, ran the company as chief executive from 2008 to 2011 before leaving for Blacks Outdoor Retail.

Sales rose, but profit did not follow. Lingerie bought online is often sent back, and every return eats into the margin on a low-priced garment. In 2010 N Brown Group, the Manchester company behind JD Williams and Simply Be, bought Figleaves for £11.5 million, a modest price for a business with its name recognition. The first UK profit came in 2012, fourteen years after launch.

What N Brown wanted

The fit was logical. N Brown's Simply Be brand, launched in 1999, was built around women in UK sizes 12 to 32. Figleaves brought a specialist lingerie site, a known name, and a customer base that already bought bras online. Its own-label products were also sold through JD Williams, Amazon and eBay, and the company employed more than 200 people, with a warehouse and customer service center in Haverhill, Suffolk.

The website closes

In 2016 Miriam Lahage, an executive with experience building multichannel retail businesses in the United States and Europe, became chief executive. The company's later years are less well documented than its early ones. In February 2021 the closure of the stand-alone figleaves.com website was announced and its customers were moved to SimplyBe.co.uk. Figleaves' own-label products had already been sold through marketplaces and other retailers, but the pioneering single-category website of 1998 no longer operates in its original form.

Exact figures for Figleaves' sales in its later years, and for what became of its staff and warehouse after 2021, have not been published in a reliable source, and this article does not estimate them.

Why Figleaves matters to lingerie history

Figleaves proved the idea that later online lingerie businesses took for granted. A website could carry the full range of band and cup sizes, from a full cup bra in a large size to a balconette in a small one, without the shelf space a shop would need. It showed that customers would order bras by size code and send back what did not fit. American direct-to-consumer brands such as ThirdLove and Adore Me, founded in the 2010s, built their whole model on that behavior, adding fit quizzes and home try-on to the formula Figleaves had tested more than a decade earlier.

Figleaves also showed the limits. Being first did not make it profitable, and a lingerie specialist ended up as one brand inside a larger catalog group. In the history of how lingerie is sold, it belongs with the mail-order catalogs that came before it: a new channel that changed shopping habits faster than it made money for its owners.

Last updated October 28, 2026