Measure Twice, Cut Once - Interview with Lida Orzeck, CEO of Lingerie Company Hanky Panky

In 1977, a New Yorker designed and sewed a bra and bikini set from hand-embroidered handkerchiefs and gave it to her friend as a birthday gift. The designer was Gale Epstein and the birthday girl was Lida Orzeck, and 32 years later, they parlayed that design into Hanky Panky, a multimillion-dollar lingerie company located here in Manhattan and Queens.

Since then, Hanky Panky has grown to 130 employees. But that growth was slow. In 1986, Epstein designed the first 4811 Original Rise thong, which came to be known as the “world’s most comfortable thong.” In the pre-Internet world, word of mouth built slowly, until 2004 when that buzz reached a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. After a story about Hanky Panky and their thong hit the front page, women across the country clamored for the comfy undergarments. In one year, sales of the 4811 doubled to $24 million, and the company kept growing from there. Recently, executive editor Daria Meoli sat down with Orzeck to discuss manufacturing in New York, managing slow growth, and what keeps her up at night.

Daria Meoli: Before founding Hanky Panky, you had a background in social psychology. How were you prepared to start an apparel business? How did you learn about selling, manufacturing, and the other details of running a business?

Lida Orzeck: Gale [Epstein] has always been a designer, but she was working for other companies. I had absolutely no experience in the area. But if you have some common sense and some intelligence, you figure things out, and that’s precisely how we learned manufacturing. First of all, we started very small. It wasn’t a manufacturing shop; it was one seamstress. In fact, the very first order was made by Gale for Lord & Taylor, and I delivered it. It was 12 bras and 12 bikinis for each of the 12 branches of Lord and Taylor, so 144 tops and 144 bottoms, and Gale made them all. I packed them up in 12 boxes, put them in my car, and delivered them to the Lord & Taylor loading dock right in the middle of the city, because that’s the way it was done then.

DM: Can you describe your growth from selling to a few department stores and Gale filling all the orders to becoming a national brand? Was it meteoric or was there a tipping-point product?

LO: Gale and I had no delusions of grandeur. We wanted to have a company; but we didn’t really talk about how we wanted the company to grow. It was just a synergy in our visions and our personalities that we wanted to move slowly, carefully, and intelligently. The company grew every year, but it grew slowly and solidly. In fact, we never had to borrow a lot of money because our sales were fueling our growth for the most part. But yes, there was a tipping point.

A lot of buzz began about our product, particularly after Gale designed our very well-known thong in 1986. A lot of people don’t realize that this style has been around for so long. Fast forward to 2004 when Wendy Bounds, a journalist for The Wall Street Journal, heard the buzz about what we’ve now trademarked as, “the world’s most comfortable thong,” and came to see us for an interview. I will admit I thought, “The Wall Street Journal? I don’t think this is ever going to happen.” Wendy told us she would really have to sell this story to her editors. But she sold it! We were expecting to be in an article in the Small Business section, which is nothing to sneer at. In the Friday edition, June 18, 2004, it was on the front page, above the fold, center column. Talk about a tipping point. It was like D-day for us.

Buzzed About Bottoms

DM: You mentioned the buzz that lead up to the publication of that article. What type of marketing did you do to create that buzz?

LO: The buzz is its own marketing, and that happens organically. The best buzz is buzz about a product that can create an emotional attachment for the user. I’m actually quoting from Emanuel Rosen, who wrote, The Anatomy of Buzz, and in the book, The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited, he talks about this, and he talks very specifically about the “Hanky Panky phenomenon.” It is such a personal product that it really caught people emotionally and women talked about it.

Because our thong is comfortable, it is an oxymoron—the “comfortable thong”— and that got the buzz going. When women started to discover the product, they started to talk to other women about it. Our end users have developed a kind of culture around the product. That happened very early on, and it accounts for our slow but steady growth. Women talking to women, women giving it to other women, women having this, “ah-ha” experience of, “I found a comfortable thong!” It’s a kind of secret Hanky Panky handshake that’s developed. When I tell women what I do, I can’t tell you how many times they dig down below their pant waistband and pull up their thong or their underwear to show me that they’re wearing Hanky Panky. It’s amazing, that women really do this—they’re so proud. It has a real cult feeling.

Another factor that helped the buzz is that, as time went on, thongs became more mainstream and acceptable. They aren’t considered erotic, exotic underwear like they were 30-plus years ago when we first started.

DM: Today, your thong gets a lot of buzz from celebrities, including Becki Newton, Kate Hudson, and Eva Longoria Parker. How have you been able to leverage that? Do you do paid celebrity endorsements?

LO: They’re not paid endorsements. I think it has to do with the emotional attachment to the garment because of its intrinsic value of comfort. So celebrities are willing to say, “Yeah, I wear it.” We’ve certainly done some gifting, but people have endorsed the product from early on.

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