Lively

Lively is a New York intimates and swim brand that Michelle Cordeiro Grant launched online in 2016, selling wire-free bras and bralettes cut to work as both underwear and gym wear. Japanese lingerie group Wacoal bought it in 2019, three years after launch.

A merchant leaves Victoria's Secret

Grant spent about four years at Victoria's Secret, on the digital side of the business, as a director and senior merchant. That was the period when the chain held something like 40 percent of the American lingerie market, and when its padded, push-up house style still set the terms for what a bra was supposed to do. Grant has said she watched customers grow tired of the fitting-room routine and of bras that looked good in a catalog and felt bad by mid-afternoon.

She left to start her own label. The bet was that the athleisure habit, leggings worn to the office and sports bras worn under shirts, had reached the lingerie drawer and nobody had built a brand around it.

How Lively made "leisurée" a category

The word

Grant needed a name for the gap between the sports bra and the lace bra, and coined one: "leisurée", a blend of leisure and lingerie. The term described soft, mostly wire-free pieces with lingerie details such as lace trims and strappy backs, and sports-bra comfort. It was marketing language, but it gave buyers and the press a shelf to put the brand on.

The first product

The launch item was a bralette meant to feel like a sports bra crossed with pajamas, sold at a flat 35 dollars. A single price point was a deliberate contrast with the multi-buy promotions and constant markdowns of mall lingerie.

Selling bras before there were bras

Lively's best-known story is about its mailing list. Grant began with about 250 email addresses and ran a refer-a-friend campaign that gave credit for every sign-up. The list grew to about 133,000 addresses before there was much product to ship. Those early subscribers then became the launch campaign, posting images of the bras on Instagram.

The brand later formalized this as an ambassador program. By the time of its sale in 2019 Lively counted about 80,000 ambassadors, ordinary customers who earned rewards for referrals and content. It shipped to all 50 states within 45 days of launch and reported 300 percent growth in 2017. Before the acquisition it raised about 15 million dollars in venture capital.

Stores, and a buyer from Kyoto

Lively did not stay online-only. It opened its own shops, in New York and Chicago first, and later sold through Nordstrom.

On 1 August 2019 Wacoal International, the American arm of the Kyoto-based group, agreed to buy Lively for 85 million dollars, with up to 55 million more payable over four years if performance targets were met. Some later coverage gives the total as about 105 million. Wacoal said Lively would run as a separate brand with access to Wacoal's design, factory and distribution network. For Wacoal, whose American business rested on department-store fitting rooms, the deal bought a direct relationship with a younger customer.

After the founder

The pandemic suited a brand built on soft bras and lounge pieces; Lively reported that loungewear sales grew about tenfold year on year. Grant stepped down as chief executive in August 2022 and stayed on as founder until March 2023. Her successor, Kristin DiCunzolo, came from inside the group, where she had been vice president of marketing and direct sales at Wacoal America.

In February 2023 Lively began selling in Canada, online only, while running five stores in American cities including Boston, Dallas and New York. The range by then covered bras, underwear, loungewear and swimwear, still sold under the leisurée banner Grant invented.

Where Lively sits in the trade

Lively belongs to the wave of direct-to-consumer bra start-ups of the mid-2010s, along with ThirdLove, Cuup and Harper Wilde, that sold comfort and fit against the Victoria's Secret model. It differs from most of them in one respect. Many of its peers stayed independent or struggled for funding; Lively was absorbed by an old-line manufacturer within three years, which made it one of the first of that cohort to give its investors an exit.

Last updated October 7, 2026