Wacoal

Wacoal is a Japanese lingerie company based in Kyoto, founded by Koichi Tsukamoto and incorporated on November 1, 1949. It grew from a small postwar accessories trader into Japan's best-known bra maker and a listed group whose brands include Wacoal, b.tempt'd, the sportswear line CW-X, the Japanese mail-order label Peach John, and the British full-bust specialists Freya, Fantasie and Elomi.

From Accessories to Brassieres, 1946 to 1949

Tsukamoto did not set out to make underwear. In 1946, in Kyoto, he started a trading business called Wako Shoji to sell women's accessories. Sales were slow. In 1948 he switched to brassieres, a garment still unfamiliar to most Japanese women, who had grown up in kimono and its flat undergarments. The following year the business was incorporated as Wako Shoji Co., Ltd., and its bras were shown at a trade fair in Kyoto.

The name took a few more years to settle. Japanese Wikipedia records a new brand identity, Wacoal, adopted in 1952 after a trademark dispute; in 1957 the company itself became Wacoal Co., Ltd. According to the company history summarized on English Wikipedia, the original name meant "harmonizing with Koshu", and the extra syllable added to make "Wacoal" carried the sense of "forever." It is a modest name for a company that would end up dressing a large share of the country.

The Human Science Research Center, 1964

1964 was a busy year. Wacoal listed its shares on the Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto exchanges, and it opened the Human Science Research Center, a department set up to study women's bodies, health and appearance and to feed that research into product development.

The center is the thing Wacoal is known for inside the trade. Western bra makers built their size charts on fit models and grading rules; Wacoal built a standing laboratory to measure real bodies over time, including how they change with age. Earlier versions of this page gave a precise count of women measured and described the center as the most extensive program of its kind in the world. Neither figure could be confirmed in the sources checked here, so both are left out. The research program itself, and its sixty-year run, are not in doubt.

The American arm describes the same habit in plainer terms: its bras are fitted on real women several times during development, and the US range runs from A to K cup.

A Group of Brands

CW-X

CW-X is Wacoal's performance line: compression tights and tops for runners and other athletes, built with panels of firmer knit that brace muscles and joints in the way sports tape does. It is an odd sibling for a lingerie house, but it comes straight out of the same research department, and it shows how the company thinks about the body: as something to be measured and supported rather than dressed up. Wacoal has backed sport in other ways too, setting up a women's track and field team in 1986.

America, b.tempt'd and Peach John

Wacoal launched in the United States in 1985. Its US business sells through department stores and its own shops, with house collections such as Embrace Lace and High Bar and technologies it calls Comfort Wire and Shape Revelation. In 2009 it added b.tempt'd, a younger and cheaper label. The earlier claim on this page that Wacoal bought b.tempt'd as an outside brand is wrong: it was a Wacoal launch.

At home, Wacoal took a 49 percent stake in Peach John, a Tokyo mail-order lingerie company aimed at women in their teens and twenties, in 2006, and bought full control in January 2008. In 2015 it also bought the swimwear and underwear operations of the Sanai Group.

Eveden and the British full-bust labels

The biggest step abroad came in 2012, when Wacoal bought the Eveden Group, a British company dating from 1920. That deal brought Freya, Elomi, Fantasie and Goddess into Japanese ownership, and gave a company famous for precise fit a set of brands built for D cups and up. It was an obvious match on paper and has held together since.

How Wacoal Makes Things

Production is heavily manual. English Wikipedia describes Wacoal products as made almost entirely by hand, with a major factory at Wacoal Vietnam, set up in 1997. The company moved to a holding company structure in 2005 and still trades in Tokyo under the ticker 3591.

The house style follows from all of this. A Wacoal bra is rarely the most fashionable thing on the shelf. Its strength is the cup: smooth, often a molded T-shirt bra shape or seamed for lift, wired to sit flat at the center front, and graded with unusual care across a wide size run. The appeal is repeat business: customers find a style that fits and buy it again for years. Seventy-odd years after Tsukamoto swapped accessories for brassieres, the company is still run from Kyoto.

Last updated October 28, 2026