Paige DeSorbo joins our Zoom in her robe, a chic-looking Parisian hotel room in the background. “Sorry, I just got out of the shower,” she deadpans. The American reality TV star turned influencer is getting ready for Victoria Beckham’s Spring/Summer 2026 show. “This is my first time at Paris Fashion Week,” DeSorbo says excitedly.
DeSorbo has always been into fashion. And she’s always wanted to build a brand. Before departing from Bravo reality show Summer House after seven seasons (which she announced in June), she started to do so. “I knew I should take advantage of that platform and come out with a product,” she says. DeSorbo weighed up a few options, but settled on fashion. “A couple people had approached me for a skincare line, a shoe line — but nothing felt right in my gut.”
DeSorbo says she was hesitant at first because of her lack of design expertise and fashion brand know-how. At the end of 2023, she connected with the team at Concept Brands, a Los Angeles-based venture company that invests in and helps to build consumer brands. They officially partnered in June 2024, and a year later, she launched pyjama and loungewear line Daphne (named after DeSorbo’s cat). “Paige represented everything we look for in a partner: authentic influence, cultural relevance and an intimate understanding of her audience,” says Concept Brands CEO Chris Kim, adding that Daphne aligns with its own goal to build brands both aspirational and accessible.
DeSorbo is entering a tough market. Post-pandemic, loungewear launches came hard and fast, typically via existing brand pivots in response to the ‘new normal’. More loungewear-specific brands have been born in the years since (Cou Cou Intimates is leading the charge), while the Alos of the world are building empires predicated on comfort and wellness. It’s a crowded space, but one where demand persists. On global fashion search platform Lyst, demand for nightwear, sleepwear and loungewear was up 14 per cent in July to September, versus the same period in 2024. The most searched for product within this category is “sweats”, followed by “pyjamas”, “T-shirts”, “jumpsuits” and “robes”.
Also crowded is the influencer-founded brand space. But DeSorbo believes she has a clear point of difference tied to her TV persona. As fans of Summer House will know, the influencer loves lounging at home. Throughout the series, she and co-star Hannah Berner (the pair also co-host the Giggly Squad podcast) became known for sitting in bed. “It was almost like the fans had given me this sleepy girl persona, which I totally aligned with,” DeSorbo says. “And I was like, wait, this is perfect because people already know me as this. So [pyjamas are] a product that [aligns] so seamlessly.”
DeSorbo launched the brand as pyjamas, but she wanted the clothes to be wearable out of bed, too. “As a girl who has worked a nine to five, I hated buying [separate] work clothes, comfy clothes and going out clothes,” she says. “With the world where it’s at, so many people work from home, I wanted the pyjamas to have the potential to look like, ‘Oh, I could go on a Zoom, or I could be on a FaceTime.’ And you [can] wear them out.”
The brand, which launched in June with a limited 12-item drop, reflects this. The ragdoll dress, a cotton mini with a bow at the front, looked at home on the West Village streets this summer. DeSorbo wore a tie-front navy Daphne set with heels on a recent morning talk show. And before the weather turned, customers layered stripy boxer shorts over bikini bottoms in snaps at the beach.
DeSorbo gained confidence in this approach when she saw more luxury brands blurring the lines of formalwear and loungewear. “I saw a curve in fashion in general, where big designers were doing more loungey pyjamas, but on the runway. All the girls at YSL in those little silk sets, those are pyjamas,” she says, referencing Hailey Bieber, Zoe Kravitz, Charli XCX and Rosé’s silky looks at Saint Laurent’s SS26 show. Meanwhile, in the beauty and wellness space, good sleep is becoming a status symbol.
DeSorbo’s goal is to offer something that sits between luxury and high street. “I felt like you could either buy a $200 pyjama top, or a $15 pyjama top — and there was nothing really in the middle,” she says. Daphne’s prices run between $58 and $120. The collection is made in the US, Türkiye, Ukraine and India, with fabrics spanning 100 per cent pima cotton, French terry fleece and cotton modal. The brand declined to share early revenues, but is projecting to double its target for the current fiscal year.
For the brand’s autumn collection, launching 8 October, the clothes are cosier, with soft long-sleeve co-ords in a new cotton-jersey fabric and classic pyjama sets updated with front-tie bows. “Our first collection was very summer pyjamas. It was very light, very easy to wear over a swimsuit,” DeSorbo says. “This collection is way more cosy as the weather’s changing.”
Brand interest was baked in early on, thanks to DeSorbo’s influencer status (she has 1.6 million Instagram followers). Before Daphne’s first release, over 100,000 customers were already signed up and waiting for the drop, per Klaviyo, the CRM tool Daphne uses to manage its customer data. Tens of thousands of customers have subscribed to be notified when the 16-piece collection goes live, the brand says.
But DeSorbo is intent on growing Daphne beyond your classic ‘influencer brand’ — in keeping with the broader trend of influencers founding brands with the intention of the brand surpassing their own influence. As TikTok algorithms churn content faster than ever, influencer status is easier to attain but more difficult to maintain. Those at the top are thinking about how to translate their current status into longer term gains. To do so, influencers are building brands to outlast their own buzzy moments, by partnering with experts in how to build successful brands. An influencer’s strength lies in their taste, as well as their ability to communicate this to their followers, and convince them that they should buy into that same taste.
“I know what I hate and I know what I like,” DeSorbo says of making decisions about Daphne’s collections in design meetings.
Beyond influence
DeSorbo knew she had a ready audience for a brand when she set off on her podcast tour last year. If Summer House helped her cultivate a following, it was the extra hour a week her podcast listeners spent engaging with DeSorbo that she feels strengthened viewers’ — and listeners’ — ties to her. “That relationship with the Gigglers [podcast fans] was what gave me the confidence that I didn’t have a couple years prior to come out with a product,” she says, “because they know me and they know that I love fashion and they know that I love taking an insult and twisting it.” (The insult being the amount of time DeSorbo spends in bed.)
The listener reach was wider than she realised. On her 60-city tour, DeSorbo was surprised by the amount of teens that showed up with their mothers. She launched Daphne with the view that she would be selling across these demographics. “I say that Daphne is for the hardworking woman, whether she’s working hard in high school and college, or she’s working hard being a mum or at a job in her 40s, 50s, 60s — that’s also very sleepy.”
DeSorbo’s fans may know (and love) her, but Daphne isn’t merch, she says. “When I started meeting with people that I was thinking of hiring and partnering with, one of the first things I said was, ‘I don’t want this to feel like an influencer brand. I don’t want to be in all the photos. I don’t want someone coming to the site just because they know who I am.’” DeSorbo knows she’s in the public eye right now, but if she’s not in five to 10 years, she still wants Daphne to be standing.
The challenge for influencer founders is to parlay their taste (and momentum) into their own scalable fashion businesses — especially as the landscape becomes more crowded. Influencers including Morgan Stewart and Aimee Song have also launched fashion brands in recent years. Stewart commented on DeSorbo’s Instagram post advertising her collection drop on 8 October: “Our launch dates are so close and chic.” (Stewart’s Renggli has a collection dropping the following day.)
DeSorbo is focusing on building solid products. DeSorbo knows she’s not a designer, and says Katie Serva, who has worked at Proenza Schouler and Club Monaco and now leads Daphne’s design, is her most important hire. “To be able to connect with her and be like, this is what I’m thinking — and her be able to put it on paper, that symbiosis is probably the most important for Daphne,” DeSorbo explains. The campaign photos don’t star Paige and her friends — DeSorbo hired “real models”, so as not to box Daphne into the PDS/Summer House/Giggly Squad universe.
That said, on Daphne’s Instagram, imagery of DeSorbo modelling the pieces is indeed peppered between campaign shots of ‘regular’ models. DeSorbo knows that, especially in the brand’s early days, her face (and name) is, at least in part, the selling point.
DeSorbo may be seeking to go beyond her existing fan base, but the brand remains very much social-first — in marketing messaging and in feedback. After Daphne’s first drop, the reviews came flooding in, not just via the brand’s website, but also on TikTok. How much attention does DeSorbo pay to this feedback?
“A lot,” she says. “The brand is for the consumer, so if they don’t like something, I have to take that into account because it’s a business, and if they’re not buying it, then we can’t pay all the employees at Daphne.” The brand group chat is filled with screenshots, she says, capturing what consumers loved — and what they didn’t. If a waistband, for instance, isn’t a hit, they’ll look at how to change it.
She’s thinking in terms of socials, too. Regarding potential product expansion, DeSorbo likes the idea of expanding into bedding (to match the pyjamas). “There are so many girls that go away to college, and it’s so stressful to think about decorating your room — and everyone’s putting it on TikTok now,” she says. “I’d be so stressed if that was me. So there is a world where maybe we come out with a comforter and matching shams [pillow covers] for the girl going away to college, and then she has a pyjama set that matches.”
As for Daphne’s retail strategy, for the first year, the brand will remain direct-to-consumer (DTC). For now, the brand is exclusively in the US, with international expansion in the works. The team has looked into various retail partnerships, and are keen on the idea of retailer-specific collections in the future. But in DeSorbo’s ideal world, a physical pop-up will come before any wholesale tie-up.
“I’ve been trying to brainstorm what the pop-up would even look like,” DeSorbo says. “Maybe we do a place in the city [where] you can nap.” One can only imagine the line around the block as every Daphne customer takes a 20-minute nap post-shop.
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