Greg Taylor’s Step One makes move into women’s underwear range

For bamboo boxer king Greg Taylor, there was one key factor that drove a decision to launch a women’s underwear range.

Step One has moved into women’s underwear. Company founder Greg Taylor says: ‘We have engineered the best pair of female underwear that we could possibly make.’

For underpants king Greg Taylor, moving into the highly-charged world of women’s underwear didn’t require a leap of faith.

Nearly half of the sales of the homely men’s underwear Step One are already to women who have been buying them for their partners or themselves.

Taylor, who founded the ASX-listed Step One, says for years he had been fielding requests from women looking to get a slice of the bamboo-based boxers.

Women make up 40 per cent of Step One’s sales

And it was when he started to see women from all walks of life modelling Step One men’s underwear on the visual social media site Instagram, it was clear he had to move.

“40 per cent of our customers are female and so it seemed a very logical thing,” Taylor says. ”They already know the brand and trust the brand.

“We’ve shown it with men that we’ve got a great, ethically-focused product that solves a functional problem. And we’ve taken the best features of the men’s products and made them for women.”

Step One chairman David Gallop, left and Step One founder Greg Taylor. Picture: Jane Dempster

The initial product line is a boxer short style, which has been tailored to fit women. Like the men’s range they come in a range of colours and sizes for all sorts of body types.

Taylor said the design and testing of the chafing-busting briefs had been largely crowdsourced using feedback from female customers.

“We have engineered the best pair of female underwear that we could possibly make. We spent hundreds of hours and we made hundreds of samples, and we picked real customers that had said to us, ‘can you make a women’s range’ and we involved them in that process.”

Women won’t have to pay a premium for the underwear, which is priced at around $30 each, in line with the men’s range.

Step One makes a female shift.

Sydney-based Step One built its business up to sell directly to consumers. As an online-only retailer this has given it greater control over its destiny as well as profit margins as it bypassed big box retailers. Covid lockdowns over the past two years have helped turbocharge the underwear group as more Australians have come around to the idea of buying goods online.

Step One has also made inroads into the UK market over the past two years and has recently launched into the US. Investors backed the move into women’s wear, sending Step One’s shares up 8.6 per cent to close at $1.45 on Monday.

The company’s shares were marked down in November when supply pressures caused its sales growth in the UK to stall in the lead up to Christmas.

Launching a new product in the time of Covid has brought its own complications with most retailers suffering supply and logistics squeeze, but Taylor notes that since launching in 2017 nearly half the company’s life has been operating under the pressures of the pandemic.

“The world is now flat with the internet. And it’s almost the new norm now is working from home and understanding and working around that and how you approach it.”

Given Step One is not selling fast fashion or perishable goods, it has learnt to front load its orders to ensure it holds plenty of local stock to avoid the worst of the global supply chain squeeze. Although like most online retailers, it remains vulnerable to the performance of “last mile” distributors such as Australia Post.

Taylor talks about the problem he has been trying to solve, which is selling no nonsense underwear to everyday people.

“What this comes back to is that we sell a need – not a want. Everyone has to wear underwear every day, you spend over half your life wearing it.

“Today is the first time I can say we’ve made a product that every person in the world values every day,” he says.

Originally published as Greg Taylor’s Step One makes move into women’s underwear range