Penti Lingerie

Before it sold a single bra, Penti, the Turkish hosiery, underwear and swimwear company, was a nylon stocking business, founded in 1952 by the brothers Mois and Yasef Kariyo and built up in Istanbul. It took the Penti name in 1984 and today sells through more than 300 stores in Turkey and about 106 abroad, mostly in the Balkans, under the legal name Penti Giyim Ticaret A.Ş. Its range runs from women's tights and socks to bras, briefs, loungewear and beachwear.

Nylon stockings, 1952

The business began with the product that defined mid-century legwear: the nylon stocking. Nylon had reached consumers only in 1940, and through the 1950s stockings were still a prized item in many markets, made on specialized knitting machines and sold one pair at a time. The Kariyo brothers set up as stocking manufacturers in 1952.

For its first three decades the company was a hosiery maker, not a fashion brand. In 1970 it adopted the name Öğretmen Çorap, which means "Teacher Stocking" in Turkish, a homely, trustworthy name for a product sold to working women. The following year, 1971, it opened its first proper production facility in Bayrampaşa, an industrial district on the European side of Istanbul.

From Öğretmen Çorap to Penti, 1984

The switch to the Penti name in 1984 marked a turn from manufacturer to brand. The word is short, easy to say in many languages, and free of the schoolroom associations of the earlier name. It gave the company a label it could put on packaging and, later, over shop doors.

A decade later Penti built a major factory in Çorlu, in the Thracian industrial belt west of Istanbul, opened in 1994. In 2006 the company was ranked among Turkey's top 1,000 industrial enterprises, a list that measures manufacturing scale rather than fashion profile.

The franchise network

Penti's move into retail came late in the century. The first franchise store opened in Istanbul in 1999. It was the start of a network that changed what the company sold. A stocking maker supplying other shops can live on legwear alone. A chain with its own stores needs enough product to fill them, and Penti filled them with underwear, sleepwear, loungewear and swimwear alongside its hosiery.

The website penti.com launched in 2007. By the time Turkish Wikipedia last summarized the company, Penti was present in 60 Turkish provinces and 29 other countries, with more than 300 stores at home and roughly 106 abroad, most of them in the Balkans.

The Carlyle partnership

In 2012 Penti entered a partnership with the Carlyle Group, the American private equity firm. The museum could not confirm the size of the stake or its later history from the sources it read, so this entry does not describe the current ownership split. In 2013 the company redesigned its logo and corporate identity.

What Penti sells now

Penti's product lines, as listed by Turkish Wikipedia, cover:

• women's hosiery
• socks for women, men and children
• underwear
• loungewear and sleepwear
• swimwear and beachwear

On the lingerie side, Penti works at the accessible end of the market, the kind of everyday bralette, T-shirt bra and brief that a mall chain sells in many colors at a low price. The museum has not checked Penti's current underwear range style by style, and makes no claims about specific bra constructions or fabric blends. Its legwear heritage shows in the breadth of tights and socks still sold in its stores, a category most lingerie chains treat as an afterthought.

The comparison with a European chain such as Hunkemöller is useful. Both sell underwear through hundreds of mall stores. Hunkemöller started as a lingerie retailer and added legwear. Penti started as a stocking factory and added lingerie. The shelves end up looking alike, but the order of arrival still shows in each company's strongest category.

A family firm turned chain

More than seventy years after the Kariyo brothers knitted their first stockings, Penti remains rooted in manufacturing, with its own factory at Çorlu and a store network across Turkey and the Balkans. The museum's archive holds 15 product records filed under Penti Lingerie, kept private like every product record on this site.

Last updated October 7, 2026