Naja is an American direct-to-consumer lingerie brand, dated in this museum's records to 2014, founded by Catalina Girald, a lawyer turned lingerie designer, and built around a social mission: its garment factory primarily employs single mothers and women who head their households, and part of its revenue funds education for women in Colombia. It sells bras, underwear and activewear online under the line "Underwear for a Better World".
A Lawyer's Lingerie Company
Girald came to lingerie from law, not from fashion school, and the company she built shows it. Naja's founding documents, as presented on its website, read like a mission statement with products attached. The brand says it wants to change the way lingerie is marketed to women, selling to them as customers rather than presenting them as objects, and it describes its character as a mix of design, "a bit of rebelliousness" and a wish to improve the world.
The name is borrowed from zoology. Naja is the scientific genus of the true cobras. An earlier version of this entry claimed Girald chose it to symbolize shedding an old skin; the company's own pages reviewed for this revision do not explain the choice, so that interpretation has been removed.
The Factory and the Workforce
The center of Naja's model is labor. The company states that its garment factory primarily employs single mothers or female heads of households, pays them above-market wages and provides healthcare benefits. The support extends to the workers' children, who receive books, school supplies, uniforms and school meals.
Previous accounts placed the factory in Medellin, Colombia, a city with a long garment-making tradition. The Colombian connection is clear from Naja's own description of its programs, but the exact factory location is not stated on the pages reviewed, so it is given here as reported rather than confirmed.
Underwear for Hope
Naja's second program is called Underwear for Hope. It employs women living in poor urban neighborhoods in Colombia to sew the fabric bags that Naja's lingerie is packed in, giving them paid work that does not require a factory job. The brand also says it donates 2 percent of its revenue to local charities that provide continuing education to these women.
The design of the program is smart. Lingerie bags are simple to sew, do not need the precision of a bra, and are bought in volume by the company itself, so the work is steady and the brand controls the demand.
How Naja Lingerie Is Made
On the product side, Naja leans on printing and materials rather than lace. Many of its bras carry patterns on the inside of the cups, a hidden print visible only to the wearer, and the company prints with digital and sublimation technologies that it says use less water than conventional dyeing. Some fabrics are made from recycled plastic bottles. Cups are lined with breathable memory foam, and certain pieces use hand-harvested Peruvian cotton.
The range covers bras with foam cups, underwear in bikini, brief, thong and high-waisted brief cuts, and a small activewear line. Named styles such as the Gina and the Adriana remain in the catalog.
The Nude Question
Naja has often been credited with an early multi-shade nude range, and the previous version of this entry described a "Nude for All" collection of seven shades. That collection is not mentioned on the brand's current site, and the details could not be confirmed for this revision, so the specific figures have been dropped. The wider history is not in doubt: in the mid-2010s, a "nude" bra in most stores meant one beige shade, and a handful of small brands began selling several.
Press and Present
Naja was covered widely in the American business and lifestyle press of the 2010s, with features in Inc., Fast Company, Forbes, USA Today, the Huffington Post, Refinery29 and New York Magazine. Most of that coverage focused on Girald as a founder and on the factory model rather than on the lingerie itself, which fits a company that has always put its workforce first in its own description.
The brand is still trading online, restocking colors and adding new ones. Its pitch in 2026 is the same as in 2014: a bra with a print on the inside, sewn by women whose children's school uniforms are part of the deal.