Mikoh

Mikoh is a swimwear label co-founded in the late 2000s by Oleema and Kalani Miller, two sisters raised on the Southern California coast. The brand itself has given 2009 as its start in a podcast interview with Female Startup Club, while a 2018 Forbes profile said the label began "a decade ago", which points to about 2008. Either way, it was a small, family-run swimwear business built by two surfers, and by October 2026 its website said that it had closed its online store.

Sisters from the California coast

The Millers grew up by the ocean in Southern California, and surfing is the thread that runs through every account of the brand. A 2018 profile in The Chalkboard Mag followed their mornings in the water, and a brand video posted on Facebook in 2021 made the same point: the founders are surfers, and the brand was built around the water they grew up in.

The two sisters ran the company together. One business directory lists Kalani Miller as chief executive, but that source is of low reliability, and the public record mostly presents the pair as joint founders. Another directory gives Mikoh a founding year of 1993. That date is wrong: the sisters were children then, and the brand's own accounts place its start in the late 2000s.

Hawaii in the 1920s and 1930s

The design reference the brand returned to most often is early twentieth-century Hawaii. In its 2018 profile Forbes described Mikoh's look as drawing on the Hawaii of the 1920s and 1930s, the period when Waikiki surfing was becoming known on the mainland and swimwear was moving from wool tank suits toward something closer to modern cuts.

Forbes treated the reference as a mood rather than a source of literal copies, and nothing in the record suggests the brand reproduced vintage suits. ELLE ran a question-and-answer piece with the designers in March 2015, by which time the label was established enough to be covered by a national fashion magazine in the United States.

Swimwear built for the water

Swimwear sits next to lingerie in construction, and the overlap is useful for this archive. A triangle bra top and a bikini bottom use the same basic patterns as their lingerie cousins, but they have to stay in place when wet, take chlorine and salt, and keep their color in strong sun. The difference between the two garment families is laid out in this encyclopedia's comparison of the bikini brief and the bikini bottom.

For a surf brand, that engineering is the whole job. A suit that slips in a wave is useless however good it looks on the beach, and a label run by two surfers was selling to customers who would notice at once.

Surfboards and a wider offer

By late 2019 Mikoh had moved beyond swimwear. Forbes reported in December 2019 that the brand had added surfboards to its range. It was a logical step for a label whose founders surfed every morning, and it placed Mikoh closer to a surf lifestyle brand than to a pure swimwear maker.

The two-piece suit that Mikoh made its business on has its own history. The modern bikini was introduced in Paris in 1946 by Louis Reard, and the cut took decades to move from scandal to standard beachwear. Mikoh came along long after that fight was over and could design for function first.

The store closes

By October 2026 the brand's website carried a short notice saying that "after many incredible years, MIKOH has officially closed its online store." No products were listed, and customer questions were directed to an email address. The notice gave no reason for the closure and said nothing about the company's future, and no trade report on the closure was found. The page closed with a sign-off about the sun, which fits a label that began on a Southern California beach.

Last updated October 7, 2026