Yandy

Yandy is an American online lingerie and costume retailer, founded in 2007 in Scottsdale, Arizona, by the brothers Chad and Evan Horstman and now run from Phoenix. It sells lingerie, swimwear, hosiery, shoes and, most famously, "sexy" Halloween costumes, and it calls itself the largest sexy lingerie catalog online. It has changed hands twice: Playboy Enterprises bought it in December 2019, and in April 2023 it passed to ASP Retail Group, a company led by Yandy's former chief executive Aras Koktas.

A warehouse business in the Arizona desert

Yandy belongs to the generation of lingerie sellers that grew up with e-commerce rather than moving onto it. There was no flagship store and no department store concession to protect. The model was a large catalog of inexpensive, quick-turn pieces, photographed cleanly and shipped from a warehouse. Chad Horstman served as chief executive from the founding until 2017 and stayed on the board after he stepped down.

By 2018 the company employed more than 80 full-time staff and worked out of a 30,000 square foot warehouse. Those are modest numbers next to fast-fashion giants, but large for a business that sells mostly babydolls, teddies, bodystockings and garter belts. Arizona made sense for the operation: space was cheaper than in Los Angeles or New York, and an online retailer needs shelving more than it needs a shop window.

The lingerie side of the catalog is broad and mostly playful. Babydolls, chemises, mesh bodysuits, corsets, robes and teddies sit next to stockings, garter belts and wigs. The house lines visible on the site today include Yandy Exclusive Costumes, a Yandy swimwear collection and a lingerie range called Twilight Petals. Much of the rest comes from the same wholesale world as costume and novelty-lingerie makers like Leg Avenue and Dreamgirl.

How Yandy turned Halloween into a lingerie season

The move that defined the company came in 2010, when Yandy began selling its own branded costumes. Halloween costumes had long been a side category for lingerie retailers. Yandy treated them as a design problem with a news cycle attached. Its costumes riffed on pop culture, memes and current events, often within weeks of a story breaking, and the speed was the point. A costume that referenced something everyone was talking about got attention far beyond the people who bought it.

In 2016 the company took the idea to New York Fashion Week, staging what it billed as a Halloween costume fashion show with 39 looks. It was a publicity exercise, and an effective one. It also made a serious point about the business: for a lingerie retailer with a costume line, October can behave like a second Valentine's Day.

The following year Yandy became the official swimsuit sponsor of the Miss USA pageant, a sign that its swimwear, which the catalog sells in bikinis, one-pieces and micro bikinis, had grown into a real category rather than an afterthought.

The 2018 "Brave Red Maiden" costume

The same instinct for topicality produced the company's best-known controversy. In September 2018 Yandy listed a costume called "Brave Red Maiden," a short red dress with a white bonnet that plainly drew on the handmaids' uniforms in "The Handmaid's Tale." The television adaptation of Margaret Atwood's novel was at the height of its popularity, and the red cloak had become a protest uniform at demonstrations over women's rights. Turning it into a sexy costume drew wide criticism in the press and online.

The episode showed the risk built into Yandy's method. A business that turns headlines into costumes will sometimes pick the wrong headline, and a costume can travel as fast as a joke.

Ownership: Playboy, then ASP Retail Group

In December 2019 Playboy Enterprises acquired Yandy for an undisclosed sum. The deal fitted Playboy's strategy of the time, which was to earn money from consumer products under its own control instead of relying on licensing alone. The renamed PLBY Group went on to buy the sexual wellness retailer Lovers in 2021 and the Australian lingerie chain Honey Birdette the same year, which briefly made Yandy part of a small group of intimate-apparel businesses under the rabbit-head logo.

That arrangement did not last. In April 2023 Yandy was acquired by ASP Retail Group, led by Aras Koktas, who had previously run Yandy as chief executive. The sale returned the company to management that knew it from the inside, at a time when its former parent was cutting back.

Year	Event
2007	Founded in Scottsdale, Arizona, by Chad and Evan Horstman
2010	Begins selling its own branded costumes
2016	Halloween costume show at New York Fashion Week, 39 looks
2017	Official swimsuit sponsor of Miss USA
2019	Acquired by Playboy Enterprises
2023	Acquired by ASP Retail Group

What the catalog looks like now

The Yandy site today still reads like a warehouse with good lighting. Lingerie, costumes, swimwear, clothing, hosiery, shoes and accessories each have their own deep menus, and costume subcategories run from fairy tales and animals to villains and professions. The site offers free shipping on orders over $40, and the price points stay low. For collectors and historians, Yandy's significance lies less in any single garment than in its timing: it showed how quickly an online-only retailer could turn the costume aisle into a year-round lingerie business, and how much publicity a well-timed (or badly judged) costume could buy.

Last updated October 7, 2026