Panache Brand Guidelines: The Sheffield Family Firm Behind D-Plus Lingerie

A family firm and a size range.

Panache is a lingerie company from Sheffield, and it has stayed in one family’s hands. On 19 May 2022 it marked its 40th anniversary with an evening reception at Ringwood Hall in Chesterfield, the trade title Underlines reported the next day, which places the brand’s start in 1982. The magazine described the business as a specialist in larger cup and larger figure fittings, and as still family-owned and managed. Sales agents and distributors came to the party from Europe, the Americas and Australia, alongside staff from the head office. Managing director John Power thanked his staff for their work through two difficult years and made presentations to the longest-serving among them.

The legal company is a little older than the brand. Companies House records that it was incorporated on 22 October 1980 as Sartorial Limited, renamed A.J. & D. Marketing Limited at the end of 1981, and has carried the name Panache Lingerie Limited since April 1993. The register lists its nature of business as the wholesale of clothing and footwear and its registered office in Waterthorpe, on the south-eastern side of Sheffield, and shows the company as active. The same register names Anthony Power among the company’s earliest recorded officers, and its current directors include John Power and Daniel Power. In 2016 Underlines summed up the firm as a family-owned business started in the early 1980s.

The specialism is written into the company’s own description of itself. Its website calls Panache one of the world’s leading designers and manufacturers of “D plus lingerie”, and says it aims to lead the way in fit and quality.

One house, several labels.

Over time Panache built a family of labels around that core. Writing in May 2016, Underlines listed seven of them, all aimed mainly at larger-cup customers. Among them were the main Panache line, Cleo by Panache, Panache Sport and Sculptresse, with separate swimwear and a premium Panache Black range alongside.

Sculptresse was the extension into larger band sizes. The Lingerie Addict reviewed its launch on 15 April 2013, calling it the newest addition to the Panache family and giving its range as cups D to J with bands 36 to 46. The reviewer tried two early styles, the Willow full-cup bra and the Bellise balconette, and noted that the collection ran from bright prints to pastels, nudes and t-shirt bras. In February 2026 Lingerie Briefs, in a section it runs as a partner spotlight on Panache, covered a relaunch of Sculptresse, describing it as designed in London and now cut for cups D to K and bands 34 to 46. The styles it named included the Liberty Plunge and the Sophia Full Cup in a lace the brand calls Infinity Lace, and it placed several pieces in a collection called Future Icons.

The sports bra is the range most closely tied to the company’s design team. At the 2022 anniversary, Underlines reported, John Power paid tribute to the head designer Clare Fallon, whom the magazine called the mastermind behind the Panache Sports Bra, one of the company’s biggest success stories. She had worked for Panache for some 28 years.

The family runs the commercial side as well as the board. In 2013 Danny Power, then business development director, judged a live lingerie project with second-year fashion design students at Sheffield Hallam University, alongside head of design Debbie Morley. Fifteen student groups designed vintage-inspired lingerie or nightwear capsule collections, judged at the Millennium Galleries in Sheffield, and Underlines reported that versions of two designs might enter a future collection. In April 2022 the magazine reported that Jenni Burt, who had previously headed Figleaves.com, had joined in March as commercial director. She described Panache as an international brand with strong export markets in Australia and the USA, and said she would look at developing the Sculptresse brand.

Lace, tables and trade shows.

Many lingerie houses present themselves through material first. Close-up photographs of lace, ribbon and stitching run across the category, and the trade sorts itself in the same terms: Interfilière Paris, the show for suppliers, listed fabrics, lace, embroidery, accessories and textile designers among its sectors in a press release of November 2023, with nearly 170 exhibiting suppliers expected.

Behind the photographs sits the workroom: pattern cards, cutting tables and sample rails. Wacoal says its first bra began with a paper pattern, and The Underpinnings Museum, an online collection of dated garments, publishes a pattern library beside its catalogue entries, which record fabric, origin and construction piece by piece.

The shop counts for as much as the cloth. Wacoal says it opened its first department-store underwear counter at the Kyoto branch of Takashimaya in 1950, while Agent Provocateur’s first shop, opened in 1994 on Broadwick Street in London’s Soho, still carried its seasonal windows in February 2026, FashionUnited reported. Boxes and ribbon finish the sale in many houses, and ribbon can be part of the product too: the museum names satin ribbon-slot lace trim and bows as signature details of many early Agent Provocateur designs.

The trade meets in France. The Salon International de la Lingerie and Interfilière Paris, organised by Eurovet, marked sixty years since the Salon’s first edition at Paris Porte de Versailles in January 2024, with nearly 250 brands expected at the Salon, according to the press release.

A brand defined by its size chart.

In the trade coverage cited here, Panache is described by two things: its size range, larger cups and fuller figures, and its house, a Sheffield family firm of more than forty years.

When the brand does go public, it shows the product. In May 2016 Panache took over four windows at the Oxford Street entrances of Selfridges in London from 20 to 25 May, Underlines reported. The windows carried named sets from the spring and summer 2016 collections: Andorra and Clara from the main Panache range, and Ardour and Quinn from the Panache Black range. They coincided with the store’s Body Studio, which the magazine described as a 37,000 square foot floor for intimate apparel, swimwear, loungewear, hosiery and fitnesswear that opened in April 2016.

The recent Sculptresse coverage shows how the house talks about construction. Lingerie Briefs described sheer three-piece cups and pleated satin straps on one style, a four-part cup with soft wings on another, and Swiss-designed embroidery on a third.

For a design guide, Panache shows how a maker can build an identity on fit and a family name rather than on one signature image. Compare Wacoal, the Kyoto lingerie group, and Agent Provocateur, the London lingerie label. For this guide we use a deep plum, a pale mauve and a warm sand with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Panache’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.