Fifteen years. Two sisters.
Curating Desire, since 2011.
We started Naughty Knickers in 2011 because Sarah couldn't find what she was looking for.
The great French ateliers — houses that had been dressing women with genuine artistry for generations — weren't being presented here with any real understanding of what they were. And the directional, design-led brands doing something new with the category weren't being taken seriously alongside them.
Sarah thought someone should change that. She decided it should be her. She went to Paris. She built the relationships. She introduced many of these houses to a new audience here.
Maison Close — now one of the most recognised names in directional lingerie — was virtually unknown in the UK when Sarah first encountered it. Sarah became its exclusive UK distributor long before it became internationally recognised. Cadolle, the oldest couture lingerie house in the world, founded in 1889 — the house that invented the bra — is available in the UK exclusively through us. Fifteen years of relationships built one conversation at a time.
Emma joined in 2016. Between us, we share the buying — every brand decision, every season, every piece that makes the final edit is a conversation between two people who care about this in equal measure. Emma also runs our operations with the kind of quiet, exacting competence that means everything happens when it should, the way it should, without fuss. The business works as well as it does because of her.
In 2023, Naughty Knickers won E-Tailer of the Year at the Stars Best Shop Awards by Underlines Magazine — an award that cannot be applied for, only given.
We are not the largest lingerie retailer in the UK. We have no interest in being. What we are is the most considered — a deliberately small selection of brands chosen because we believe in them, not because they're famous, not because they're easy to come by, but because they represent something genuine about how beautiful this category can be. Every brand we stock, we have a relationship with. Every piece we carry, we have thought about.
That is the edit. That is the point.
The woman we buy for knows what she likes. She doesn't need to be sold to — she needs to be shown something she hasn't seen yet, by someone whose taste she trusts. We hope, over time, to have earned that trust.
— Sarah & Emma
Naughty Knickers was founded in 2011 in Newcastle upon Tyne and is now based in Chelmsford, Essex. We are proudly independent, family-run, and entirely independent. We ship across the UK and internationally.