Twelve years in, Naked Wardrobe, which has built its business on moderately priced stretchy bodysuits, leggings and skin-tight tops and dresses worn by Kim, Kourtney and Khloé Kardashian as well as Jennifer Lopez and Selena Gomez, is switching gears.
Today, the growing Los Angeles company, started by three sisters, is unveiling a new brand identity, elevating the Naked Wardrobe with innovative fabrics, more spandex and sophisticated styles.
“Our biggest transition is going from a fast-fashion brand to a luxury apparel brand,” said Shideh Kaviani, the company’s president and one of the three founding sisters. “We always felt we were luxury at an affordable price point. We’re so vertically integrated with design development, developing textiles and our own trends, an in-house pattern team and sample room.”
As part of the new brand identity, Naked Wardrobe’s logo, hangtags and website are being redone and the label’s Sculpted Streetwear collections will be taking a dominant position in the company’s product lineup. Instead of weekly drops of merchandise, new products will appear monthly.
As part of the rebrand, a new collection under the Sculpted Streetwear umbrella has been introduced. Called Fluid Sculpt by Naked Wardrobe, it offers styles made of 15 percent spandex and 85 percent nylon. Designed with maximum compression and shapewear-inspired basics, Fluid Sculpt brings power to the female form with a product designed to minimize bulges and imperfections.
The collection currently consists of various tops, dresses and bodysuits selling for $62 to $78. That is up from the $40 most of its merchandise sold for five years ago.
As the company moves forward, the Sculpted Streetwear concept will incorporate more fashion with outerwear that shapes and hugs and solution-based denim constructed with an adjustable waist. “We’ve been in a transition period where we figure out how to take basics to the next level,” Kaviani said. “Over the past few years, we have been developing different layers to our elevated core, which is our vegan leather, vegan stretch crocodile and our power mesh, and develop them for a night on the town. We’ve prided ourselves on being 10 steps ahead of our competitors.”
Naked Wardrobe is a brand that was out there way before Skims was founded in 2018 or the many other bodywear labels that blossomed when the country’s workforce was staying at home.
The company started when Shirin Kaviani, the chief executive and the oldest; Shida Kaviani, the vice president and the middle sister; and Shideh Kaviani, the president and the youngest; launched Naked Wardrobe with only $7,500, working out of their parents’ house in Woodland Hills, a Los Angeles suburb. For the first two years, the three siblings kept their overhead low and concentrated on getting everything right with goods manufactured mostly in Los Angeles.
Eventually, they moved to a 15,000-square-foot office/warehouse in an industrial park not too far away in Northridge and had 25 employees on the payroll. The company has been growing ever since. During the COVID-19 shutdown, gross revenues soared in 2020 to their highest on record, Shideh Kaviani said. At the time, the Naked Wardrobe product line fit in with women’s desire for comfortable clothing, and the brand was ahead of the e-commerce curve by selling online from the beginning.
In the last year, revenues at the company have grown 25 percent over the previous year, the sisters said, although they wouldn’t reveal total revenues. But business has been good enough that Naked Wardrobe last year bought a 90,370-square-foot warehouse in Calabasas, Calif., for $18.25 million. Currently, it is being renovated to accommodate the 75 employees who will be working there.
These days, Naked Wardrobe is manufactured in China, Turkey and Los Angeles. And it has several wholesale accounts. Nordstrom carries the brand as well as Asos in the United Kingdom. It is also sold at three American Rag stores in Dubai, and the sisters said they just signed a deal with the biggest retailer in Europe. “Our strategy next year,” Kaviani said, “is really to tackle the Middle Eastern market, the European market and the Canadian market.”
