Marie Jo

Before 1981 the Van de Velde family had spent sixty years making other people's lingerie. Marie Jo was the first brand they put their own name behind: a Belgian label of fitted bras, briefs and, since 2018, swimwear, designed at the company's headquarters in Schellebelle, a village in East Flanders between Ghent and Dendermonde.

Van de Velde before Marie Jo

Corsets, 1919 to 1945

Achiel and Margaretha Van de Velde founded the business in 1919, and for its first generation it made corsets. Schellebelle, in the municipality of Wichelen, was and still is the home of the company. Ghent is often given as the brand's home because it is the nearest city, but Marie Jo was born in the family's own premises on the Scheldt.

Private label, 1945 to 1980

The second generation widened the range to bras and tights, began exporting to the Netherlands, and built a trade making high-end lingerie under private label for other names. Those thirty-five years are why Marie Jo arrived with a factory's skills rather than a start-up's. When it launched in 1981, the company already knew how to grade a cup and fit a band.

1981: the first own brand

Marie Jo was the group's first brand, and for nearly a decade its only one. Van de Velde describes the label today as elegant lingerie with a strong fit, and says the designs draw on art, interior design and architecture for their details. In practice that means coordinated sets, often underwired, in seasonal colors and prints alongside steady core styles that stay in the range for years.

The fitting-room focus shapes how the brand is sold. Van de Velde recruits lingerie shops as brand dealers, and it later bought fitting-led retailers of its own, so a Marie Jo bra is usually sold with a measuring tape nearby.

Sub-lines

The family expanded the brand in steps:

Year	Line
1997	Marie Jo L'Aventure, the group's third brand
2008	Marie Jo Intense, a sports lingerie line
2018	Marie Jo Swim

Sisters in the same group

Marie Jo's place in the market is easiest to understand next to its stablemates. In 1990 Van de Velde bought the German firm PrimaDonna, whose history goes back to 1865 and which became the group's brand for fuller busts. In 2008 it bought the Spanish company Eurocorset and the Barcelona label Andres Sarda, renamed simply Sarda in 2024 and positioned above Marie Jo in price and fashion. Marie Jo sits between them: more fashion-led than PrimaDonna, more wearable day to day than Sarda.

The group also moved into shops. It opened its first own store in 2002, bought a majority of the Dutch chain Lincherie in 2010, and in 2011 took an 87 percent stake in Rigby & Peller, the London corsetiere founded in 1939. Rigby & Peller's fitting rooms in Britain, the United States and Dubai became another outlet for Marie Jo.

How a Marie Jo bra is made

Van de Velde keeps the high-value steps at home. Design and product development, prototypes and fit models, purchasing, quality control of incoming fabric, cutting, final inspection and distribution all happen in Belgium. Assembly is done at the group's foreign plants, mostly in Tunisia, with some production in China.

This split, Belgian pattern and cutting room, North African sewing floor, is common in European premium lingerie. Van de Velde is unusual in saying so plainly in its investor material.

The company today

Van de Velde listed on the Brussels stock exchange in 1997 but remains controlled by the founding family. It employs more than 1,500 people across Belgium, Tunisia, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States and several other countries, under chief executive Karel Verlinde. Group lingerie turnover was 195.3 million euros in 2021.

The company celebrated its centenary in 2019, and Marie Jo, at more than forty years old, remains the oldest brand the group created itself. Its latest extension, Marie Jo Swim, arrived the year before the centenary.

Last updated October 7, 2026