Triumph International

Triumph International is a family-owned lingerie company founded in 1886 in Heubach, in the Swabian Alb of southern Germany, by the corset maker Johann Gottfried Spiesshofer and the merchant Michael Braun. It has been headquartered in Bad Zurzach, Switzerland, since 1977, and its two global brands are Triumph and sloggi.

Six Machines in a Heubach Barn

Spiesshofer & Braun started small even by nineteenth-century standards: six sewing machines and six employees working out of a barn. Corsets were the product. Within a few years the workforce had grown to about 150, and by 1892 the firm was exporting to England.

The partnership was also a family affair. Braun, born in Heubach in 1866, married his partner's daughter, Anna Helena Spiesshofer, which tied the two founding families together a generation before the company left Germany. Braun died in Heubach in 1954, an honorary citizen of the town; the bells of the parish church of St. Ulrich, which he and his wife donated, still ring in their memory each October 29.

Why "Triumph"

For its first sixteen years the business traded under the founders' surnames. In 1902 they registered the Triumph trademark, a name chosen because it called to mind the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. The "International" was added later, once the company really was one. A German corsetry firm borrowing prestige from a French monument tells its own story about where fashion authority sat in 1902.

Triumph International Between the Wars

The company put its first bra on the market in 1922, at the point when the corset was losing its grip on European dress. The 1930s brought the corselette and bras with changeable straps. In 1933 Triumph opened its first foreign branch and factory at Zurzach in Switzerland, across the Rhine from Germany, and by the middle of the decade it was the largest corset manufacturer on the continent.

That Swiss foothold mattered more than anyone could have planned. After the Second World War, production restarted and the company spread quickly across Western Europe, with offices in Belgium, Britain, Sweden, Norway and Austria. In 1959 it staged a lingerie-only fashion show at the Berlin Hilton, an early sign of how hard it intended to sell. Asia followed: a Hong Kong sales office in 1960 and Japan in 1963. By 1965 Triumph products were sold in 92 countries, and in 1977 the headquarters moved permanently to Bad Zurzach.

Synthetics, Molded Cups and the One Size Bra

The postwar catalog tracks the arrival of new fibers. In 1966 the company launched the Doreen line, made with polyamide and elastane. It was a line built on the new stretch fibers rather than on whalebone habits. In 1967 Triumph developed a process for molding seamless cups, the kind of construction later standard in the smooth T-shirt bra.

The 1970s brought the Nude Bra, the Butterfly Bra and a stretch One Size bra, an early attempt to solve the fit problem by elasticity instead of by size charts. Half a century later, Chinese labels such as Ubras built entire businesses on the same idea.

sloggi, 1979

The more lasting launch came in 1979, when the company introduced sloggi, a range of stretch cotton briefs sold on comfort and price instead of glamour. Triumph called it a cotton revolution, which is a large claim, but sloggi did become its second global brand and later added men's underwear and swimwear.

Scale and Family Control

At its peak the group was enormous. Figures cited for 2009 put it at about 37,500 employees, sales of roughly 1.7 billion euros and a presence in some 120 countries. In the 1990s it hired supermodels including Naomi Campbell and Helena Christensen; in the 2000s it toured a "Dreams on Stage" roadshow through about 30 Chinese cities.

Ownership never left the founders' descendants. After a period with publicly traded shares, by 2011 the company was described as wholly owned by the Braun and Spiesshofer families, which is rare for a lingerie business of this size. Today the group trades as Triumph Intertrade AG, and its brand portfolio includes the Swiss retailer Beldona and the Japanese label AMOSTYLE alongside Triumph and sloggi. The contraction of recent years is visible in Britain, where Triumph closed its standalone stores in 2017 and moved to department-store concessions and online sales.

Few lingerie companies can show a continuous line from a corset barn to a global underwear group without once changing hands. Triumph can, and the Heubach church bells are part of the paperwork.