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What do you wear when you want undies more comfortable than luxury lingerie, but chicer than throwaway basic panties? Rose Colcord wants the answer to be Cou Cou.
The idea for her intimates brand sparked when Colcord’s boyfriend asked her why she didn’t have any nice underwear. She pointed incredulously to her drawer full of Agent Provocateur and La Perla. “He meant daily underwear,” she says.
London-based Colcord polled her friends; their answers mirrored her own. Those living in the UK bought their daily underwear from Marks Spencer; in the US, Target, maybe H&M. “It wasn’t even Victoria’s Secret anymore. It wasn’t Calvin Klein,” Colcord says. Nothing was hitting the mark.
“I realised there was no go-to brand for me or my friends for daily intimates — let alone a product that bridged the gap between the two drawers of our lingerie and daily underwear,” she says. “I felt that represented the choice that we had to make every day in terms of our identity: whether we’re going to be beautiful and uncomfortable, or comfortable but not sexy and not feeling cute.”
Colcord had identified a significant gap for a generation that curates all aspects of their lives, from the matcha they drink to the Nabu lamps on their desks. “We’re so intentional about everything that we buy,” she says. “Why not our daily underwear?” The development of the product is careful and focused. At launch, three products were available — thong, high-rise undies and cami, all in a soft, pointelle fabric. “It was a great go-to-market fabric,” Colcord says. “They became hero products and gained us recognition.” The cotton pieces can be composted once worn out.
Two years on, growth is going strong. In 2022, Cou Cou raised funds in a small, undisclosed pre-seed investment from a handful of independent investors, including model and activist Natalia Vodianova. Now, the brand’s revenues are on their way to £10 million. In 2023, revenue was up 300 per cent. For 2024, the brand is anticipating 350 per cent growth.
But while it fills a gap, Cou Cou still faces intense competition. Colcord name-checks Skims and Parade, but there are also smaller-scale but popular offerings like Cuup, Love Stories, and Dora Larsen. These brands share a similar promise: comfortable, cool intimates that sit outside of traditional, limited industry offerings.
Colcord is confident that Cou Cou’s value proposition sets it apart. She intends to build steadily, cultivating a community of brand fans to buy into her growing roster of hero products — and the brand content she’s putting out alongside them. “Cou Cou isn’t just a machine of product: it’s about the focus on community,” she says.
A new go-to
Over 85 per cent of Cou Cou’s sales come from DTC — good for margins, Colcord says. The brand keeps certain items exclusive to its website to draw wholesale customers to DTC. Another advantage of DTC is the opportunity to tell its story properly. “Nobody’s going to tell the Cou Cou story the way we do,” she says.
Wholesale, meanwhile, helps to hit the minimum quantities required by factories (a challenge for small brands). It’s also a great marketing vehicle. Cou Cou has 16 stockists, including Selfridges, Fwrd and Net-a-Porter China.
Now, Colcord is building out with a new drop of cotton jersey basics — the first departure from the brand’s initial focus on pointelle fabric pieces. It’s a bid to capture a wider range of consumers seeking chic, sustainable underwear.
Colcord is taking inspiration not from fashion but from beauty brands. Glossier’s model encouraged her to build out hero products that consumers will return for. “Lash Slick, Boy Brow — you knew them. From the beginning, Cou Cou was always about offering seasonless, classic essentials. We were creating those same kinds of categories,” she says.
She’s since introduced bras for those who wear bras every day (Colcord doesn’t). Customers requested a longer cami (she obliged). Last month, cotton jersey was added to the product range for a baby tee, quickly dubbed “peerless in its category” by Laura Reilly’s Magasin, an influential fashion shopping newsletter.
Colcord’s key learning is not to lean into every product possibility but to stay focused on speciality pieces. “That’s when brands get lost — when they forget who they are and why they’re in that space,” she says. “You have to be a lot more intentional in development and expansion.”
Community-first
On socials, the brand hosts Cou Cou Talks: a series of lo-fi, long-form videos on a topic of the host’s choosing. The closest comparison is, once again, Glossier, Colcord says. She envisions Cou Cou Talks slotting into a still-to-materialise Cou Cou content platform — editorialised offering, like beauty blog Into The Gloss is to Glossier. A safe space for women to connect and explore their interests threaded together through the Cou Cou brand universe.
It reads as an antidote to the sleek, ultra-curated worlds that Nineties and Noughties lingerie brands cultivated. Since their heydays, brands of this era have come under scrutiny for their embrace of only ultra-thin models and the perpetuation of unrealistic beauty standards. Since, save for Fenty (and now Skims), there have been few large-scale alternatives offering lingerie designed for women to wear — not for men to look at. “Brands shift cultural narratives,” Colcord says. “Especially intimate brands have a responsibility because we’re showing bodies, and bodies are so sensitive in terms of how we identify ourselves.”
Colcord wants Cou Cou to be different. The brand recently hosted a first salon event in New York — part dinner, part discussion (attendees read Ynestra King’s essay, The Ecology of Feminism, beforehand) and part book exchange. “It was a safe space for women to open up and relax,” Colcord says.
On and offline, it’s about creating common threads that bind a community together. This is how to create a legacy brand, insists Colcord. “For Cou Cou, it’s creating that alignment of values — so that when you see a girl wearing Cou Cou, you know what she’s interested in and passionate about.”
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