Under new leadership, L’eggs, the 55-year-old iconic hosiery brand, is anticipating a revival.
Hanesbrands sold L’eggs in October 2023 to Windsong Global, which in the past year has been quietly setting a new strategy for the brand. In the fourth quarter of 2021, Hanesbrands had reached the decision to divest its U.S. sheer hosiery business, including the L’eggs brand, as part of its strategy to streamline its portfolio. In 2019, L’eggs was the second-largest brand within Hanesbrands, behind only Hanes, and the company’s largest hosiery brand.
Known for its clever egg packaging and trailblazing solutions such as graduated compression, memory yarn and run resistant technology, L’eggs tapped into the modern woman as she joined the workforce in droves. By the mid-1980s, in fact, the brand was a mid-nine-figure business selling its products in drug, convenience and grocery stores. Aside from the egg packaging, there was also the catchy slogan — “Nothing Beats a Good Pair of L’eggs” — and the fact that women didn’t have to shop at department stores to fulfill their hosiery needs, which could often be time consuming.
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“L’eggs launched with one goal, to build a brand for the new American woman on the eve of her liberation,” said Charlie Nichols, president of L’eggs. “As women entered the workforce for the first time, L’eggs became the first brand to support her in the new runway — the office. L’eggs continues to deliver affordable and accessible solutions to the mass market, currently owning over a double-digit percentage of the sheer category,” he added.
Cami Téllez joined L’eggs last January as executive creative director and board adviser.
Téllez founded Parade, a direct-to-consumer intimates brand while she was an undergraduate at Columbia University with her business partner Jack DeFuria, who was also an undergrad at the time, with $3.5 million in seed funding. Launching in 2019, Parade established itself as a popular Gen Z and Millennial brand and trailblazer in the intimate apparel industry, and scaled that business to more than $100 million in revenue in five years. In August 2023, Parade was sold to Ariela & Associates International, the largest women-owned intimates company in the U.S.
Last November, William Sweedler, chairman and chief executive officer of Windsong Global, and a longtime friend and mentor, called Téllez and told her they had this opportunity to acquire L’eggs. She was very interested in the opportunity because she felt L’eggs “was a real American icon with heritage and awareness, and tens of millions of women,” she said.
“It also has this broad reach and distribution, and this really rich design archive,” she said. She said she was very excited to come on board “and get a chance to revitalize the brand as executive creative director.”
Téllez spent a lot of time in the L’eggs archive and said it wasn’t about rewriting the story, but reconnecting with the essence that first defined it. “In every stitch, in every curve, in every ad, we found the brand’s original intent in accessibility, boldness, product solutions and desire to support women was waiting to be revived,” she said. “We’re really excited to go back to the original L’eggs heritage around supporting women, around creating innovative product solutions and celebrating the bold design of the iconic logo that really made the brand an enduring American icon,” she said.
Joining such products as Silken Mist and Sheer Energy is a new product that launches Wednesday called 360 Contour Tights that feature engineered panels made to smooth and lift. Crafted with ultra soft recycled yarns, the assortment includes runway-ready colors to size 2X, the brand’s first size extension.
“With 30 years of experience and real feedback from women, we reengineered tights from the ground up to craft 360 Contour. More than 75 percent of women have told us they want shaping legwear so we’ve worked with the world’s most innovative hosiery factories to 3D knit the softest sustainable fibers into panels that tuck your waist, smooth your tummy an lift your butt. The result? The 360 Contour tights, [which is] designed to hug every curve and celebrate your shape with unmatched comfort,” Téllez said.
Right now, L’eggs products are sold in north of 20,000 doors.
“If we really dug hard we can get it to 30,000,” Nichols said. Products are sold across multiple channels of distribution and multigenerations of women, he added.
As part of its initial revitalization, there is new distribution with several major retailers.
The brand will relaunch this fall on target.com, Kohl’s and Lulus, as well as Amazon and on the newly revamped leggs.com, which launches this week. This spring, L’eggs will roll out across 1,800 Target stores nationwide. The brand also sells drug stores such as CVS, Walmart and Walgreens.
“We envision a world where every store you walk into — drug, food, mass — you’re able to find stylish, sustainable fashion basics at a price you love. We’re starting with tights because it’s our DNA, but throughout 2025, we’ll bring our solutions innovation into shapewear, leggings, socks and beyond, Téllez said.
Discussing how the products have improved, Nichols said, “There are opportunities today with more modernized knitting techniques and yarns that have really changed in the last few years. We’re able to build products that combine shaping with legwear and different comfort elements around anatomical panties. They combine multidirectional stretch. There are a lot of things that we’ve been able to bake into this new product category called 360 Contour,” Nichols said.
She said 45 percent of women across all generations are planning to wear more colored and patterned tights this year than in years prior, according to consumer research. She feels this category is becoming more important as a “must-have fashion item.” She built the collection with three black tights, sheer, opaque and super opaque, as well as two patterns, lace and leopard, and red and brown. The tights will retail from $12 to $14.
Nichols said for a long time, the yarns weren’t soft enough, but now with recent technology, they’ve been able to move in a more sustainable direction which is very important to Gen Z and Millennial consumers.
“It’s a very stable category, but most people do not realize this, but the 17- [to] 34-year-old aspect of this is growing,” Nichols said. “Skirts are back in a very positive direction, so the tights and hosiery with that younger consumer are accelerating double digits,” he said.
“During the pandemic, everything that was more dressy-related changed because people were staying at home and they wore more athletic products and more comfort products. As people have gotten engaged more in the world, it’s really bounced back pretty aggressively,” he said.
Nichols was asked why they waited so long to talk about the acquisition.
“It’s been an eventful year,” Nichols said. “We made this acquisition — it’s been about a year — the reason we waited was we had a lot of work to do with onboarding customers, getting our team in place, and we spent a lot of of time working on new products to get them ready to launch.
“We needed a hero product, something to break through the products and give us something distinctive. We took the first year to get ourselves gathered, and do the integration that’s required because it’s a complex business,” he said. He said L’eggs has broad distribution with many sophisticated customers, both retail and digital. “If you don’t execute those replenishment businesses properly…you really have to do those right,” said Nichols, who previously worked on another Windsong investment, Daytona Apparel, which was sold to Centric Brands.
Nichols said L’eggs “is a really nice pickup” for the Windsong business, whose brands include Cloudveil, Atlantis Weathergear, Revive, Tone It Up, Zanella and Carlos Falchi.
According to Circana’s Consumer Tracking Service, for calendar year 2023, sales of tights and sheer hosiery were at $1 billion, flat to 2022.
The pandemic clearly had an impact on overall hosiery sales. In 2020, sales declined 31 percent from the prior year, in 2021, they climbed 36 percent, and in 2022, they were off 1 percent, according to Circana.
Kristen Classi-Zummo, Circana’s apparel industry expert, said, “Tights and sheers are having a moment, particularly with younger consumers. As skirts have become a fast-growing category for the 18 [to] 24 demographic, we’re seeing these consumers turn to tights to complete their total looks. This isn’t the hosiery of their childhood; brands are bringing fresh energy to the category with new materials, comfort and innovative designs. Young consumers are treating tights as an essential part of their style expression.”
