Honeylove

Betsie Larkin, a dance-music singer who started sketching compression garments between tour dates, launched the American shapewear and bra brand Honeylove in 2018. It sells direct to consumers online, and its core idea is a shaping garment built from a few targeted panels rather than one tube of uniform squeeze.

A Vocalist Who Hated Her Shapewear

Larkin's first career was on stage. Her first single charted in the Top 40 in January 2008, and the years that followed were spent touring as a vocalist on the electronic dance music circuit. Honeylove's own telling of its origin is plain and believable: she wore shapewear under stage clothes, it rolled, pinched and slid out of place under the lights, and none of the options on sale fixed that.

So she taught herself. According to the company, Larkin worked on designs backstage in her spare time and went off to learn garment design and manufacturing before starting the business. The company's timeline puts the first sketch of its signature compression panel in May 2016. A first factory prototype followed in June 2017. The first major photo shoot took place in February 2018, and the brand launched that year.

That gap between sketch and sale, about two years, is worth noticing. Founder-led shapewear labels often go from idea to crowdfunding page in months. Honeylove spent its early period on pattern work.

How the Honeylove Panel Works

The category Honeylove walked into was built around Spanx, which since 2000 had sold the idea of light, all-over smoothing in a stretch knit. That approach compresses the whole torso more or less evenly. Push hard in one place and the flesh goes somewhere else, usually over the top edge of the waistband.

Honeylove's answer was to treat the garment as a set of zones. Its pieces use shaped compression panels placed where support is wanted, typically over the stomach and waist, with lighter fabric elsewhere so the garment can move. Earlier write-ups, including an older version of this entry, described flexible boning in the waistband; the brand's own story pages reviewed here talk only about the panel, so treat the boning detail as unconfirmed. The company calls the result comfortable enough to wear all day. That is a marketing claim, but it is the right claim to make, because comfort over eight hours is where most shapewear fails.

The first products were shorts and briefs in the control brief family. The Superpower Short and Superpower Brief are still in the range, alongside the Cami Bodysuit and the Liftwear Cami.

Moving Into Bras, 2020

Shapewear customers buy bras, and in September 2020 Honeylove released its first one. The bra line has stayed close to the founder's original brief: support without hard structure. The Crossover Bra, the CloudEmbrace, the Silhouette Bra and the SoftForm Pullover are all built without underwire, which places Honeylove in the wireless bra market rather than in direct competition with fitted lingerie houses. Adjustable straps and compression-style side panels carry over from the shapewear.

An Everyday Undies line rounds out the catalog. The product list now reads less like a shapewear specialist and more like a full underwear wardrobe, which is the path most direct-to-consumer intimates brands try to take once one hero product works.

Selling Without Stores

Honeylove is an online, direct-to-consumer business. It says its launch drew attention from the New York Times Style section and ABC's Good Morning America, and its marketing has leaned heavily on social media, side-by-side fit images and customer reviews. The company reports that more than three million customers have bought from it. That figure comes from the brand itself and has not been independently audited.

The company has not published revenue, investor names or a headquarters address in the material reviewed for this entry, so this encyclopedia does not report them. Older summaries describing a Los Angeles founding could not be confirmed from the sources available.

Where Honeylove Sits

The shapewear shelf Honeylove joined in 2018 had one dominant name. A year later Skims arrived with celebrity reach and a much louder launch, and the market split into brands selling smoothness and brands selling engineering. Honeylove chose engineering. Its product pages talk about panels and where pressure goes, and that technical vocabulary is the clearest thing separating it from both of its larger rivals.

The brand remains founder-led, with Larkin's name and story attached to almost every product. The compression panel she drew in May 2016 is still the thing the whole range is built around.

Last updated October 7, 2026