Lingerie startup lifts up women

The UpTake: Catalina Girald has built a successful lingerie brand by taking sex out of the branding.

C atalina Girald has traveled far and wide, and her adventures have led her to the world of ladies’ underwear.

Naja.co, which Girald founded in May of 2013, sells lingerie at “mid-market” prices while spending a portion of its profits to teach single mothers in Colombia how to sew. With products launching last December, Girald projects $500,000 in revenue by the end of the company’s first year in business. Naja has already shown promising signs of growth, with a 70 percent sales growth in July and similar growth in sales for just the first half of August.

This doesn’t surprise Girald, who interviewed nearly 600 women before starting Naja.co and found that not only was there room in the lingerie industry for another competitor, there was definitely an opportunity for a brand that portrayed women in a different light.

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“I realized a lot of (the women I talked to) were really uncomfortable with lingerie,” she said. “When you look at Victoria’s Secret, their ads are very over-sexualized and they do nothing for lifting the women up. I really do believe that your own self-esteem impacts how you as a woman relate to other people in your career. Fashion doesn’t lift women’s self-esteem at all.”

To that end, Naja has emphasized using models that could be “the girl next door” and posed them in non-sexualized positions.

“A lot of the feedback we get from our female customers is that they related to (the models),” Girald said. “Because of this, what we managed to do is build a brand in a short period of time with a customer base of women who are incredibly loyal.”