Cami Téllez, cofounder of Parade underwear, wants to revive this 55-year-old hosiery brand

In 2019, Cami Téllez started the underwear company Parade from her dorm room. It was a distinctly 21st-century operation that grew into a $200 million business by tapping into the DTC zeitgeist. Now, Téllez is working with a new undergarment company—one that has a storied, and largely offline, heritage.Téllez is joining L’eggs, the 50-year-old hosiery brand that was acquired from Hanes by Westport Connecticut-based private equity firm Windsong Global. As part of the acquisition, the company named Téllez its new creative director.Vintage L’eggs advertisements [Photo: L’eggs]Under Téllez’s leadership, Parade became an underwear brand beloved by Gen Z, largely due to the way it marketed itself. The company tapped micro influencers with several thousand followers to post about the brand in exchange for free products. Téllez also brought new innovations to her industry, creating her garments out of recycled cotton and partnering with TerraCycle to launch an underwear recycling program. As the company grew, Téllez also became a ubiquitous media presence in her own right, popping up at industry events, on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and on WWD’s 50 Most Powerful Women in Fashion.[Photo: L’eggs]At its height in August 2022, Parade was valued at $200 million. Like other direct-to-consumer startups, the company burned through cash quickly, and five years in did not have a path to profitability. At the time, Téllez wrote to staffers that the company had struggled because it overspent on inventory and launched wholesale later than its peers. It was eventually purchased by lingerie manufacturer Ariela & Associates for what a former employee described to Business Insider as “peanuts” in a last-ditch sale. As part of the sale, Téllez was forced to leave the company.[Photo: L’eggs]Téllez has said that she started Parade because she felt “out of touch” with how stores represented femininity, frequently citing Victoria’s Secret as a company—with its more restrictive view of gender and sexuality—that stood for everything hers did not. Téllez is bringing that same point of view to L’eggs. “I am a creative director, and I love image making and building cultural movements. I think that the ideas of timelessness and legacy and working with an archive was something that has been very exciting to me for a long time,” she says of her appointment. [carousel_block id=”carousel-1730235579296′′]Téllez recently rebranded L’eggs, looking to the brand’s history for inspiration. The company worked with Brit Cobb to design and update the company’s logo without changing it too much. Some of the company’s original design language—its packaging is featured in the MoMA—include the original L’eggs typography, designed by Roger Ferriter, which features lower-case Gs shaped as chiclets that inspired Cobb’s new work.[Photo: L’eggs]L’eggs’s new packaging is heavily inspired by 1990s fashion photography, featuring authentic painted muslin backdrops. “Part of what we are doing is sort of bringing the brand to transition between online inspiration and streetwear and bridging the gap between the fast pace of social media and the timeless appeal of true fashion,” she says.[Photo: L’eggs]A storied brandL’eggs, which was founded in 1969, was originally marketed to women entering the corporate workforce. The company was also the first to commercialize graduated compression, memory yarn, and run resistant technology now common in hosiery. “Everyone has a L’eggs story, whether it’s their mom wearing them or a memory of the iconic egg packaging. The brand has this legacy that coincides with a growing interest in the [hosiery] category across all genders and all generations,” Téllez says, adding that in a survey conducted by the company, 45% of women across generations plan to wear more colored and patterned styles this year than in years prior.The original L’eggs packaging. [Photo: Hanes]In her new role Téllez is also reimagining some L’Eggs products; one of the company’s first new launches is 360 Contour Tights, which feature uniquely engineered panels made to smooth and lift. As with Parade, the new yarn is made from recycled material, and the tights, which come in several colors, have sizing up to 2x. “Gen Z has become somewhat disillusioned with trends and disposable culture,” she says “They want deeper lasting connections with brands that have real stories to tell.” Just as Parade rolled out in 400 Target stores in March 2023, L’eggs will launch in 1,800 Target stores this spring. The brand is also relaunching in Kohl’s and Lulu’s, and is already available in 30,000 stores. But unlike at Parade, Téllez is not in charge of the retail strategy, or of running L’eggs’s financial operations. Téllez says she plans to stick with L’eggs for the long term. “We’re not just building a brand for the next five months,” she says. “We’re building a brand for the next 55 years.”