Shopbop

Shopbop is an American online fashion retailer founded in November 1999 in Madison, Wisconsin, as the web store of a local boutique called Bop, and owned by Amazon since 2006. It sells designer and contemporary womenswear, shoes, bags and beauty, and its intimates department stocks lingerie and swimwear from dozens of outside labels. Shopbop makes none of these garments itself. Its role in lingerie is as a buyer and a shop window for other people's labels.

A college-town boutique goes online

The founding story is unusual for a fashion retailer. Shopbop began as the online arm of Bop, a brick-and-mortar boutique in Madison, and its founders were Bob Lamey, Martha Graettinger and the venture investor Ray Zemon. According to the company's history as summarized on Wikipedia, they chose Madison because it was a college town with a large, fashion-conscious student population. The web store launched in November 1999, at the height of the first dot-com boom, when most online fashion ventures were based in New York or San Francisco and many did not survive the next two years.

Shopbop did survive, and it stayed in Madison. Its operations are still based in the city, with around 400 employees reported in 2015.

The 2006 Amazon purchase

Amazon bought Shopbop in February 2006. At the time the retailer was selling 103 lines of high-end clothing. What happened next was less predictable. Rather than folding Shopbop into its main site, Amazon let it run almost completely independently, and for years the two businesses even competed for some of the same customers.

The group later tried a menswear sister site, East Dane, launched in September 2013. It merged back into Shopbop.com in 2021. Beauty was added as a category in 2022.

Shopbop's lingerie and swim edit

Intimates are a small part of Shopbop's range, but the brand list is a good snapshot of the American contemporary lingerie market. Its intimates designer index includes Hanky Panky, the New York lace thong maker; Kiki de Montparnasse, the luxury erotic lingerie label; the British brand Bluebella; Freya for fuller-bust bras and swim; and Cosabella, Commando, Eberjey, Honeylove, Fleur du Mal, Flora Nikrooz, Calvin Klein Underwear and b.tempt'd by Wacoal. Even the lingerie retailer Journelle appears among the brands it carries.

That mix tells a story about who shops there. Most of these labels sell soft, fashion-led pieces: lace thongs, bralettes, bodysuits, slips, smoothing basics. Only a few, Freya and b.tempt'd among them, sell bras in a band-and-cup range that serves fuller busts. Shopbop's customer buys lingerie as part of an outfit or as a gift, and the edit reflects that.

Why a stockist matters to small labels

For a young lingerie brand, a listing on Shopbop does several things at once. It reaches a national and international audience without the cost of a department-store concession. It puts the brand's name beside established designers. And it offers the order volumes that let a small label commit to larger production runs. This site's own history of Bluebella lists Shopbop, with Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom and Revolve, among the stockists the London label had won by 2018 as it moved into the United States.

An Amazon business that kept its own name

Two decades after the acquisition, Shopbop remains an Amazon subsidiary that trades under its own name and runs from the city where Bop opened its doors, having launched in the same dot-com season that took down many of its early rivals. In lingerie, its influence has been quiet but real: it decides which lace thongs, bodysuits and bralettes a large American audience sees next to the season's dresses.

Last updated October 7, 2026