Hope Lingerie

Hope Lingerie is a Brazilian underwear and lingerie brand based in Sao Paulo, dated in this encyclopedia's records to 1966, that sells bras, panties, sleepwear, swimwear and activewear through its own stores, a franchise network and an online shop. Its best-known chapter is commercial rather than technical: hiring Gisele Bundchen as its face, and then producing her own lingerie label.

What Can and Cannot Be Confirmed About 1966

Hope's founding story is thinly documented in public sources. The 1966 date and the Sao Paulo origin come from this museum's brand records and are widely repeated, but the company's current website carries no history page, and no encyclopedia entry for the firm could be found in Portuguese or English. An earlier version of this article named a founder and described him as a Japanese-Brazilian entrepreneur. Neither the name nor the description could be checked against a published source, so both have been removed. If the company publishes its own history, this entry will follow it.

What is clear is the shape of the business today. Hope sells through stores carrying its name across Brazil and actively recruits franchisees on its website. The range is wide. Alongside the core bras and panties there are pajamas, a Hope Resort swimwear line and a Hope Fitness line of sports pieces. This is a mass-market Brazilian intimates company, closer in scale and ambition to Intimissimi in Italy than to a boutique corsetry house.

The Gisele Bundchen Years

The relationship that put Hope in international trade press started with a campaign. Brazilian Wikipedia's article on Bundchen reports that Hope's business volume rose about 40 percent after it signed her as its representative. A Brazilian news report from July 2011, cited in the same article, said the arrival of her name had doubled demand for Hope franchises. Both numbers are secondhand and should be read as press figures, not audited accounts. They do show how directly the brand tied its growth to one face.

Gisele Bundchen Intimates

The partnership then went a step further. Hope began producing a lingerie line under the model's own name, Gisele Bundchen Intimates. According to Grazia UK in January 2012, the label was already selling in Latin America, Portugal, Japan and Israel. In May 2015 the Brazilian magazine IstoE Gente reported that the line was profitable.

For a manufacturer, a licensed celebrity line is a useful thing to own. It keeps factories busy, carries a different price and image from the house label, and reaches export markets where the Hope name means nothing. For Bundchen, a model whose lingerie career had been built largely on the runway at Victoria's Secret, it was a way to sell her name in her home market with a Brazilian partner doing the production and distribution.

A Brazilian Lingerie Brand for a Warm Market

Brazil is one of the world's large lingerie markets, and its tastes differ from the European ones that dominate most histories of the trade. Lighter construction, molded and smooth cups for wear under thin clothing, and higher-cut Brazilian briefs are everyday staples rather than niche styles. Hope's catalog follows that market. It sells padded and molded bras, microfiber smoothing pieces and swimwear in the same stores, which reflects how Brazilian customers actually shop: underwear, beachwear and loungewear bought together.

Hope Today

Hope still trades as a Sao Paulo-based retail brand with franchised stores and e-commerce. Product categories on its site run from sutias and calcinhas to conjuntos, swimwear and fitness. The Bundchen connection remains its most cited piece of history, which says something about the brand: outside Brazil, Hope is best known for the model it hired, and inside Brazil, it is known for being on the high street.

The fuller story of its founders and its first factory is one this encyclopedia would like to tell, and cannot yet tell accurately.

Last updated October 7, 2026