Photos courtesy on CheapUndies - CheapUndies recently offered these Skmpeez swim shorts for $15.00 (original retail price: $67.00) and this Betsey Johnson bra for $14.00 (original retail price: 48.00).
The daily deals model has been championed by the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial, which offer enormous discounts on a broad range of products, services and vacations. But it has also proved effective in several niche markets, including all sorts of apparel, from shirts (TeeFury) to hats (Hataday) to shoes (Shoe Privée).
Now the model is being tested underneath your clothes.
Richmond-based entrepreneurs Edward Upton and Michael Grider recently launched CheapUndies, the first deal-a-day site peddling nothing but upscale underwear. Basically, the duo haggle with designer brands to secure bargain prices on large quantities of closeout skivvies, which they then offer online for usually around 80 percent off the original retail price — but at any given moment, there’s only one deal for men and one deal for women, starting at noon every day and ending exactly 24 hours later.
“People shouldn’t have to pay outrageous prices for a nice bra or a pair of boxers,” Grider, 24, said in an interview. “We had seen this model work in various other industries, and we thought it could work here, too. So far, we’re really happy with the results.”
The origin of the site dates back to Upton’s teenage years, when he began purchasing overstock merchandise from a local Abercrombie & Fitch store and selling it for a profit on eBay’s United Kingdom site. Over the course of three years, after dropping out of high school, he says he made several important connections in the retail world, learned the ins and outs of e-commerce and saved up enough money to bootstrap his own venture — a risqué underwear site for men called Nuwear.
Upton, now 28, incorporated the business in 2006, selling his own line of intimate menswear alongside several designer brands on a self-built site, and a couple years later, he met his current business partner at a party promoting the company.
“Right away, I was intrigued by the business and asked Ed for a job,” said Grider, who at the time was in school at Virginia Commonwealth University. “He brought me on and I wound up dropping out of school about six months later to work full time on Nuwear.”
They continued expanding the site over the next few years, with Upton handling most of the administrative duties and Grider hunting for new products. But as they started purchasing and manufacturing more underwear, they found themselves holding more items that, for one reason or another, didn’t sell out quickly. They needed a way to purge those undergarments from their inventory, and around that same time, the daily deals model was catching fire on the Web.
Such was the inspiration for CheapUndies.
“We initially designed the site to sell excess products from Nuwear, but when we started talking about it with some of the brands we work with, they just thought it was a great idea,” Upton said. “Many of them actually approached us first about buying their closeouts and selling them on CheapUndies.”
Already, CheapUndies has offered deals from brands like Diesel, Vanity Fair, Betsy Johnson and N2N Bodywear, with Upton and Grider securing bargain-basement prices by purchasing huge quantities and then tacking on only a small amount to each deal, so the consumer prices remain exceptionally low. The plan is to make up for tiny profit margins by moving a ton of underwear every day.
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