Selmark Lingerie

Selmark is a Spanish lingerie and corsetry company founded in 1975 in Vigo, Galicia, by Amador Perez. It began as a small sewing workshop and is now run by his son, Rafael Perez, born in Vigo in 1967. Fifty years after its founding, the company makes about fifteen lines of corsetry and lingerie, along with swimwear, and remains a family business in the city where it started.

A Vigo sewing workshop in 1975

Amador Perez opened Selmark in 1975 as a small sewing workshop, according to a 2019 profile in La Voz de Galicia. The paper's account has the company growing through the 1980s, the decade in which it moved from a workshop to a company with its own lines. Spain itself was changing fast in those years, and a domestic consumer market for branded underwear was taking shape. The regional newspaper Atlantico includes Selmark in its list of Vigo companies founded in 1975.

Vigo is better known for its port, its fishing fleet and its car plant than for fashion. Galicia as a whole, though, built a large clothing industry in the second half of the twentieth century, and Selmark is one of the companies that grew up in that setting.

The second generation

Rafael Perez took over the running of the company from his father. Profiles in Expansion in 2022 and El Espanol in 2021 present him as the head of the business, and a Cadena SER report from February 2025 covered the company as it approached its fiftieth anniversary.

In 2015 the business school EOI used Selmark as the subject of a case study, which treated the company as an example of a family firm that had lasted into a second generation and kept its base in Galicia.

Corsetry in the Spanish sense

Spanish coverage describes much of what Selmark makes as "corseteria". In Spanish the word is broader than the English "corsetry": it covers bras, briefs and shapewear, the whole family of foundation garments, rather than laced corsets alone. The difference matters when reading Spanish trade coverage. A corseteria on a Spanish high street is an ordinary lingerie shop selling bras and briefs, not a workshop lacing whalebone, and a corsetry company is simply a maker of foundation garments. El Espanol counted about fifteen distinct lines across corsetry and lingerie in 2021, from everyday bras to more decorative sets.

That breadth puts Selmark in a different position from the Spanish lingerie names best known abroad. Andres Sarda built its name on fashion-led designer lingerie, while Oysho and Women'secret sell through large chains of their own stores. Selmark works more like a traditional corsetry house, with a wide spread of foundation garments under one company.

Forty years, then fifty

The company marked its fortieth anniversary in 2015, an occasion covered by FashionUnited Spain. Ten years later it marked fifty. The 2025 anniversary campaign ran under the slogan "50 anos en la piel de las mujeres", roughly "50 years in women's skin", and was covered by the advertising trade site MarketingDirecto.

Swimwear became a visible part of the anniversary. A presentation filmed in March 2025 showed a fiftieth-anniversary swim collection, bringing the company's pattern-making skills to beachwear. For a corsetry maker the move is a short one: a structured swimsuit can use many of the same techniques as a full-cup bra, including underwires, shaped cups and firm bands, built for water instead of for wear under clothes.

Still in Vigo

Half a century on, Selmark is still owned by the founding family, still based in Vigo, and still led by the founder's son, who was eight years old when his father opened the first workshop.

Last updated October 7, 2026