Intimissimi Brand Guidelines: The Lingerie Brand Born Inside a Verona Hosiery Group

From hosiery shops to lingerie shops.

Intimissimi is an Italian lingerie and underwear brand launched in 1996. The group’s own website, English and Italian Wikipedia, Il Post in October 2015 and Forbes Italia in December 2023 all give that year. Italian Wikipedia places the start at Dossobuono di Villafranca di Verona and describes the brand as a line dedicated to underwear within the Calzedonia group. Il Post reported that Sandro Veronesi had built that group on hosiery alone, and that it widened with Intimissimi in 1996.

The group presents the brand’s purpose in its own words. Intimissimi was created, its website says, “to convey sophistication and romance,” and it gives the brand’s identity as “romantic and sophisticated.” The same page says the range now reaches beyond intimates and lingerie into knitwear and nightwear. Italian Wikipedia agrees on that widening, and says lingerie for women and men has stayed the main product.

The shop count rose quickly. Italian Wikipedia says Intimissimi had 80 shops in Italy in 1998 and more than a thousand in the following ten years, with a network across Europe; English Wikipedia says that by 2006 the brand had opened more than 1,000 single-brand stores worldwide.

America came through a partner. On 23 November 2005 the German trade paper TextilWirtschaft reported an agreement with Victoria’s Secret covering the Calzedonia and Intimissimi names. It said the American retailer already ran one Intimissimi shop-in-shop in Ohio, meant to open 25 more by the end of that year and a further 135 by the end of 2006, with 300 as the aim for 2009. Those were plans at the time of the report. English Wikipedia adds that the arrangement also covered an Intimissimi beauty line and sales through outlet stores. By October 2015, Il Post was reporting Veronesi’s words to Bloomberg about opening shops in the United States himself, in competition with the owner of Victoria’s Secret.

Film, famous faces and an arena of ice.

The company says Intimissimi has invested heavily in marketing since its founding, constantly looking for new ways to carry its values. Italian Wikipedia records Heartango, a 2007 television campaign directed by Gabriele Muccino with Monica Bellucci and José Fidalgo. It lists later faces including Bianca Balti, Alyssa Miller and Blanca Suárez.

The company marks 2017 as a change of direction. It says Intimissimi turned that year to what it calls “feminine storytelling,” with campaigns about successful women, naming Sarah Jessica Parker, Irina Shayk, Gisele Bündchen and Chiara Ferragni among them. English Wikipedia says Mario Testino photographed the 2017 campaign, with the former tennis player Ana Ivanovic, the food writer Ella Mills, Shayk and the actor Dakota Johnson. The company says Parker fronted the worldwide campaign from September 2018. Italian Wikipedia lists Jennifer Lopez as a face of the brand from 2023, and English Wikipedia describes a capsule collection with her that year called “This Is Me Now.”

One piece of promotion took place outside advertising altogether. Intimissimi on Ice was a show combining dance, professional ice skating and choreography inside the Verona Arena, the Roman amphitheatre close to the group’s home. The company dates it to between 2014 and 2017 and says the aim was to raise international awareness by showing the brand’s Italian character. Il Post described the second edition, on 9 and 10 October 2015, with the skaters Carolina Kostner and Stéphane Lambiel and the singer Ellie Goulding, and read the show as part of a group-wide push on brand communication. English Wikipedia says that the October 2017 edition had costumes by Ferragni.

The shops have had their own projects. English Wikipedia says the brand opened a shop on New York’s Fifth Avenue in October 2017, and that in June 2020 it launched “Infinity shelf,” a service that draws on the online window when an item is out of stock in a shop. The group’s site says all of its collections are sold exclusively through its own single-brand stores, directly run or franchised, and that its franchise shops are designed in-house.

Design and documentation.

Hosiery and high-street lingerie are sold at close quarters. A pair of tights is usually bought in a flat packet or from a hanger, a bra from a rail and a vest from a folded stack, so much of the design work falls on the things around the garment: the pack, the hook, the shelf and the shop front. Type on a legwear packet has a practical job to do, since it has to carry a name, a style and a size in a small space.

Retail shapes the look as much as print does. Some names in this field are found mainly in their own shops, often in shopping malls and on high streets, where the shop front is the largest sign the brand has. Oniverse, the Italian group behind Calzedonia and Intimissimi, says it sells its collections exclusively through single-brand stores. Others reach customers through department stores, or as a concession inside another retailer: in 2005 the trade paper TextilWirtschaft reported Intimissimi shop-in-shops opening inside Victoria’s Secret in the United States.

Colour is often seasonal. A wall of tights or swimwear arranged by shade can work as display and stock at once, and a change of season can change the look of a shop without touching its fittings. Plain folded basics pull the other way, relying on cut, material and label rather than pattern, so that the same shop can hold both a bright display and a quiet one.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made, with the company’s own claims marked as such. The palettes and specimens here are our own.

One shop name, then two.

The men’s line has moved furthest from the original name. The group dates Intimissimi Uomo to 2014 and lists it as a separate brand of underwear, knitwear, nightwear, socks and swimwear. On 16 April 2025, at the group’s headquarters near Verona, it was presented under a new name, IUMAN; nss magazine and Sky TG24 both reported the event the next day, and Sky TG24 called it a tenth anniversary. Sky TG24 explained the word as a blend of the “I” of Intimissimi and “man.” Veronesi called the new name short, direct and immediately recognisable, and MF Fashion described the change in 2026 as a strategic rebrand separating the men’s identity from the women’s. The group has sponsored the Giro d’Italia through the line since 2019, it says.

Ownership has not changed, though the owner’s name has. The Calzedonia group became Oniverse in December 2023, a change reported by Sky TG24 and Forbes Italia on 4 December. The new name plays on the English word “universe” and is an anagram of Veronesi. The group says none of its companies is listed, and that De la Costa S.r.l., wholly owned by Veronesi, is the controlling shareholder of Oniverse Holding. Its site gives Dossobuono as the base of its operating company.

Production is largely in-house, on the company’s account. Oniverse says its own factories make about 82 percent of what its shops sell, across Italy, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Ethiopia and Tunisia. The clearest public detail concerns Sri Lanka. In a question-and-answer piece in the Daily FT of Colombo on 17 February 2026, Veronesi called bras and underwear among the hardest products to make consistently, said the group’s Omega Line business there supports Intimissimi among other brands, and described a new plant to make a component used in bras. The group’s site says the in-house making of cups and accessories in Sri Lanka has not yet reached the standards it wants.

The network is large. The group counted 1,737 Intimissimi and 466 IUMAN points of sale at the end of 2024, in Italy and abroad.

For a design guide, Intimissimi shows how a brand can grow inside a retail group by owning its own shop front, then split that name when the customer base widens. Compare Calzedonia, the hosiery chain it came from, and Victoria’s Secret, its one-time American partner. For this guide we use plum, blush and warm stone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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