851 Ratchel Pinlac:

I shopped around in a department store and was like, you know what? There isn’t any (fade music softly) brand that’s doing this in a very stylish, cute, acceptable way. And so I scoured the internet for a designer that could at least help me with the process because I was like, where do I start? I actually had no experience in product development at all. And so actually my first, I’d say six months was me just talking to people.

How is this done in the industry? How did you do this? I gathered a bunch of samples from different competitors, and just frankensteined my way through it. Eventually I found a factory and it was very much trial and error. They would send me a sample. It was horrible, and it was (start MUSIC SOFTLY – from here) just iteration after iteration from there, this is too tight here. This is the wrong fabric. Let’s change it to this fabric. It was very scrappy.

Melinda Wittstock:

Rachel, welcome to Wings.

Ratchel Pinlac:

Thank you for having me.

Melinda Wittstock:

Your childhood journey was a big impetus for founding Pinsy. Tell me about that, because so many women really struggle with body image issues at younger and younger ages now. Thanks a lot to social media and such, but tell me about what was going on in your childhood that’s the through line to the business that you created.

Ratchel Pinlac:

Yeah, so I remember, so I wore Shapewear ever since I was nine years old, and it really came about because, so I grew up in a Filipino, basically an Asian household, and I know that a lot of Asian American women can definitely relate to this, but particularly in the Filipino culture, it’s normal to comment on women’s bodies from any age. And so I grew up a little bit heavier, and we would go to Filipino parties and a lot of my aunts and uncles and grandmas and relatives, it would always be like, oh, you gained weight, or just commenting on weight in general. And as a child, I developed, I guess this trauma around looking at myself and being like, wow, I cannot be heavy in this world if I’m going to be accepted. In order for people to not make comments on my body, I need to lose weight.

And so I grew up unfortunately feeling that way. And my sisters as well, I’m the middle child of two sisters. And we would always, before Filipino parties or any sort of family get together, we would try to hide our bodies in the form of wearing shapewear or wearing something tight fitting underneath our clothes to avoid these types of comments. And it didn’t help that back in the day, especially in the age of Victoria’s Secret and just these models on TV that were very thin. It definitely didn’t help the situation. And so I unfortunately grew up thinking that you can’t be overweight if you’re going to be accepted in society, unfortunately. So I grew up wearing my mom’s shapewear. I would dig into her underwear drawer, try to look for something decent. Back then there wasn’t, and still to this day, I noticed that there just weren’t a ton of options.

It was like nude flesh colored girdles that didn’t fit well, and it kind of just cut into your skin, and yet it rolled down. And just all of the discomforts associated with shapewear that I was unfortunately subjected to at a young age, and I grew up just continuing to wear these types of garments. When I was in my twenties, I was like, at that point, I had stopped wearing shapewear. I was like, I learned to just accept my body. And as you get older, that tends to happen where you’re like, you know what? I’m not even going to subject myself to the thoughts that I had when I was a child, but I still wanted to feel sort of smoothed and sculpted. And there’s benefits to shapewear that extend beyond just looking good. Sometimes you want to feel sort of tucked in and enhanced. And I was like, there isn’t a brand out there that I can associate positive thoughts with when it comes to shapewear, largely because it hadn’t had a lot of innovation. A lot of the brands in my twenties were still the brands that I wore as a child.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so what were some of those brands? Like Spanx is a leader in this, right?

Ratchel Pinlac:

It was, so Spanx, there’s Maidenform, there was Jockey, there was these sort of department store type brands that no one really talks about. You kind of just go in the store and you’re like, I’m going to pick something out and walk away and not tell anyone that I wear this stuff. It was just this thing that women don’t really talk about. It was never like a, oh, let’s go on a shopping date and shop for Shapewear. It was never that, right? Or, oh, hey, on my Christmas list, I want some shapewear. It was never this.

Melinda Wittstock:

There was kind of a shame around it. It was-

Ratchel Pinlac:

Yeah, exactly.

Melinda Wittstock:

Something you keep quiet. Yeah, right?

Ratchel Pinlac:

Exactly.

Melinda Wittstock:

Except now, it seems like with brands like Kim Kardashians Skims, and there’s a lot of brands out there now that are, I don’t know, do you think they’re still trapped in that same shame, or do you think they’re sort of solving that issue along with yourselves? Where do you see Pinsy in that evolving marketplace?

Ratchel Pinlac:

Yeah, it’s interesting because a lot of the brands that still sell shapewear, skims included, it’s still sort of that flesh colored garment. It’s still that underneath base layer that women still don’t talk about. I think what’s nice is that because skims came out, it’s bringing more awareness to shapewear and it’s being associated with something that’s not as negative anymore. But it’s still fundamentally, the brands today are still undergarment based where it’s intended to be hidden. We take the stance of like, okay, what if I buy shapewear to not hide it because I’m done with this being kind of this secret shameful thing and actually make it a part of my outfit that is worn externally? Because then I don’t feel like, oh, I have to kind of adjust underneath, or I have to worry about the line showing, or Oh, I have to worry about, there was a lot of, I guess, dread in wearing shapewear for the reasons I just mentioned. And so we take the approach of making shapewear actually clothing that you don’t have to fidget around with and hide.

Melinda Wittstock:

Give me some examples of some of your most successful products.

Ratchel Pinlac:

Our most successful products, so we launched, actually, we have a lace shapewear bodysuit that visually, it looks like a dual purpose garment of, it could be lingerie or it could be an intimate item, but it’s actually something that we’ve styled as clothing. We will put jeans or pants and a blazer, and it’ll actually be the centerpiece of your outfit. And it’s designed in a way where it actually does enhance the body. We have a signature shaping lining underneath that you don’t see, but externally it’s like, oh, that’s a cute top, or, oh, that’s a cute bodysuit. So that by far has been the most successful item. And then we do have just a plain scoop tank, shapewear bodysuit that looks like any other shapewear tank that you have, or sorry, just any other tank that you have. But it has the benefit of being shapewear, so that’s been really popular as well.

Melinda Wittstock:

So I’m seeing that lace on your website and you got the cooler days ahead, and it does look kind of really cool. So you have, I mean, the fabric part of this. So tell me a little bit about the fabrics that you use. Have you innovated there or what’s the hourglass shaping technology that you call it that you use?

Ratchel Pinlac:

Yeah, so in terms of the actual fabrics, and fabrics when it comes to shapewear is a pretty involved sort of decision process because usually with shapewear, it’s all about, okay, does this stretch enough? Does it actually compress enough to the point to where you can actually put it on and take it off with ease and still kind of do the job of shapewear? But what makes us different is that we have a shapewear lining in the inside that’s made out of power mesh that I develop to essentially enhance your waist into an hourglass figure. Normal shapewear, usually, because it’s not constructed in the way that our lining is, it makes your body look like a rectangle.

And I actually have an Instagram video of myself that I posted last week of, okay, here’s me with normal shapewear. It makes your body sort of look rectangular and it makes you lose sort of that waist. It just pushes all the fat around. So what I really wanted to do was say, okay, let me develop a lining that’s made out of something breathable. So power mesh is a very breathable fabric, but it’s still very powerful in shaping. And I constructed the liner so that it is doubled up in the waist. So there’s two layers, and actually when you put it on, it just cinches the waist in. And so we’ve constructed the liner specifically to do that.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so a lot of the hourglass solids that you have or whatnot, I mean, it looks like you don’t really need a bra with those. They kind of keep the girls in?

Ratchel Pinlac:

They do. So there is power mesh in the bra area. There’s no wires or anything like that, but all of our pieces are developed so that you don’t have to wear a bra, because what’s also very unflattering about bras is that there’s that back bulge where your bra kind of is strapped back. So I was like, I don’t want this bulge that I’m going to think about. I want it to just be completely smooth. So how do I do that?

I was like, okay, there has to be a component where I don’t have to wear a bra. And so what a lot of women love about our stuff is that they’re like, oh, cool. I don’t have to wear a bra. I don’t have to think about shapewear. I don’t have to think about having a body suit over it. Some girls go commando and they’re like, this is all I’m wearing. I’m wearing this one piece that took the place of a bra and underwear, a shapewear and a body suit. I don’t have to buy four things. So that’s really the benefit of why we’ve been so successful in the past few years.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, right.  And so what did it take for you to start this business? Because there’s so much involved in not only creating the product, this kind of propriety fabric and all of that, all the way through to the marketing and whatnot. So let’s start with the product creation. What were the steps that you went through to be able to get the right fabric, get the right design, all of that? How much of that is you? What was your genius in it?

Ratchel Pinlac:

Yeah, it was a very long, it actually took three years. So from the time I shopped around in a department store and was like, you know what? There isn’t any brand that’s doing this in a very stylish, cute, acceptable way. And so what I did was I scoured the internet for a designer that could at least help me with the process because I was like, where do I start? So I hired an hourly consultant. I think I paid her $30 an hour. I was like, just tell me what the steps are. What I realized is that everyone has their own way of doing things. I was like, okay, I can’t listen to just one person. I actually had no experience in product development at all. And so actually my first, I’d say six months was me just talking to people. I was like, how is this done?

How is this done in the industry? How did you do this? And so I kind of just pieced together my own way. What I did was I gathered a bunch of samples from different competitors, and I was like, I like this fabric, I don’t like this fabric. I like this type of finish on the leg. I don’t like this. So I kind of just frankensteined my way through it. Eventually I found a factory and was like, okay. I basically safety pinned some Spanx shorts to a lace bralette, and I said, this is what I want it to look like, where it looks very pretty like this, but I want it to function. And so then I hired a designer to kind of sketch it out, and it was very much trial and error. She would sketch it out, we would send it to the factory. I was like, I want these types of fabrics in it.

They would send me a sample. It was horrible, and it was just iteration after iteration from there, it was like, okay, this is too tight here. This is the wrong fabric. Let’s change it to this fabric. It was very scrappy. There was absolutely no, because when you’re creating something that doesn’t exist, where I didn’t have a competitor that I was like, I want it exactly, this, just change a few things, it makes it that much harder creating something from scratch.

So the three years was just a lot of fit testing. It was like, okay, we would get a sample again, fit it, wait two weeks. That went on for quite a while. Finally, when I went into production, that’s really how it all started. In fact, the first batch of production wasn’t great either. It was like, all right, the boobs are too small. But we were like, you know what? We have to sell something. I’ve already invested so much money of my personal savings just to even get a product in hand that I was like, well, I need to launch something or else I’m not going to have any money to continue this on. And so that’s really how it happened. And then it was just iteration after iteration from there on the product.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, this is always the way, I mean, you’re always, always iterating, and then once you have your product, then you’re going to like, how are you going to get it to people? And so talk to me through the marketing, because managed to use TikTok and Instagram exceedingly well to get the word out. Did you have expertise on those platforms before launching this? Or what was your trial and error, or how did you build such a massive following there, because that’s obviously a big part of the discoverability of your brand.

Ratchel Pinlac:

What I did was I adopted TikTok early on, so this was back in 2020, and I spent a ton of time on TikTok just looking at what was performing well for other brands or for other creators. Back then actually, I take that back, brands weren’t really on TikTok in 2020. It was a lot of just creators in their house doing their thing, and I just studied exactly what was working for other people. And that was a trial and error process as well. Because when it comes to TikTok, you just have to post and see what’s working well and what’s not working well, and then lean in of course, to what’s working well. If you’re like, oh, this got more traction and more views. I think what made this really succeed was this had a strong hook. A lot of times we’ll try to have a strong hook at the beginning of our videos, give people something, a reason to stay and watch it or to save it or to interact with it.

So we take a very deliberate approach and being like, okay, what’s working? Why are people liking this? And then continuing to create content in-house. So what we do is like, okay, we can control our messaging and our voice and our content style if we do it ourselves. And so a lot of the times, especially in the early days and even today, we create content ourselves. We see what works, and then we often then give influencers the opportunity to work with us. And we tell them specifically like, Hey, do this. Speak about the product authentically. Shoot it in your house. We give them pointers based on what we’ve seen to work for us, and so they’re able to mimic that and then continue fueling the engine, really.

And so I think we’ve just taken the approach of leaning into authenticity and speaking to an audience about the product, and then also being very aspirational with how it’s styled and just showing the various uses of the product. So I’d say that’s similar to how this business got off the ground with iteration. Social media in general is a constant iteration, and so it’s really just keeping the pulse on that and continuing to give people what they want to see.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so do you spend a lot of time on it personally just engaging with people directly and such?

Ratchel Pinlac:

Yeah, I’d say I personally spend a decent amount of time on social media. Our social media manager of course, does as well. But what we’ve leaned into is we do a lot of polls on our Instagram stories of what people want to see, whether it’s new products, new colors, or what type of content they want to see. And we take note of that and we make it happen.

I think a lot of times it’s like you’ll know what type of content people want to see by just trying to interact with them through stories or through captions under our videos or of course, what’s performing well. And so it’s really just being hyper-responsive to that. We post every day, so it’s being always on as a brand. I think that’s really helped. Eventually, of course, we’ve invested in paid advertising. What we do specifically is if we see a video doing really well on our platforms organically, that’s when we’ll apply some paid spend onto it just to continue that momentum. Because we’re like, oh, great, we know that this is a good video based on its organic performance. And we use that as a guide and a compass for us to say, okay, which video should we launch on the paid side of things to accelerate it further?

Melinda Wittstock:

And so what’s next for you? I mean, are you going to expand into different clothing lines like pants or leisure? I mean, where are you going with this?

Ratchel Pinlac:

Yes. The goal from day one has been to make Pinsy span beyond just bodysuits. We’ve leaned into shaping bodysuits largely because everyone wears bodysuits. It’s like a no-brainer sort of purchase. And the goal is to expand into different categories of clothing. We actually are developing already various other categories because I think the first few years that we’ve been in business has largely just been perfecting sizing and fit. I think a lot of brands, they make the mistake of over assorting and over expanding too fast, and they haven’t quite nailed their sizing and they haven’t quite nailed those sort of nuances that can really sort of damage your brand long-term if you have high returns. We actually have a very low return rate, which is nice. And so now that we’ve seen that, we’re like, okay, I think it’s ready to expand further.

Melinda Wittstock:

Fantastic. So what are some of the biggest challenges you see kind of moving forward with this? What’s kind of top of mind for you right now? We all have these challenges as we grow and scale businesses. What’s your biggest one at the moment?

Ratchel Pinlac:

The biggest one as you grow, especially because this is a bootstrap brand. Up until this point, I haven’t taken outside investment. The biggest challenge really is where do you invest your money when it comes to inventory? We’ve ran into some issues earlier in the year where we’ve sort of overstocked too soon on certain items, and that basically takes your cash and puts it into those types of items. And you’re like, well, I could have done something different with that money. I could have maybe developed a new line or added to the assortment, or we could have hired people that could have sold through more product.

There’s always these balances that you have to go through as a business owner in terms of how to properly allocate your funds. And so I think as we get bigger, we just have to be very deliberate about where we invest the money. Is it new product? And if so, then how much? Because if that doesn’t sell well, or if it does, then you’re like, oh, shoot, we have a six month lead time just to get back in stock. It’s always this constant balance between capital and inventory in a product-based business.

Melinda Wittstock:

So a lot of female founders start businesses later than men. I mean, usually we’ve had a lot of experience in corporate and other things. And so that spark that led you to jump out of the corporate world, what was that like? Because a lot of people listening to this show are probably, either they’ve made that leap and it’s such a different experience going from corporate to entrepreneurship. So what were the biggest things that surprised you in that? What was your journey making that transition?

Ratchel Pinlac:

I think that the biggest thing that surprised me, I’m trying to think, about just that leap, is you have to be very self-disciplined. I think that usually when you don’t have a boss to answer to and provide things by a certain deadline, it takes that much more discipline to really discipline yourself and not put things off to the next day or the next week or what have you. And so I think a lot of times entrepreneurship does get glorified and idolized, but it does take a lot of discipline to kind of be in this space.

And on top of that too is being able to handle a lot of the liabilities that come with being an entrepreneur, financially, and being able to push forward because you really believe that something is going to be successful. I’ve burned through quite a bit of savings just to even get the first batch of inventory developed. And so all of those years of being like, okay, is this even worth pushing through? Should I even continue this? I already, all my friends are taking trips and I’m using my thousands of dollars to develop this product. I’d love a vacation. And so it’s really kind of pushing through those types of sentiments in order to be able to, of course, capture the reward later on. And so I think that the most surprising thing was I was like, wow, I’m actually working more than I worked in the corporate world.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. It never ends when you’re an entrepreneur.

Ratchel Pinlac:

It never ends. Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock:

Never ends. And it does have to come from within you. I mean-

Ratchel Pinlac:

It does. It does.

Melinda Wittstock:

No one’s going to do anything for you.

Ratchel Pinlac:

Exactly. It’s such a self-discipline, self-motivation game.

Melinda Wittstock:

A hundred percent. And it requires just a completely different mindset. Along the journey, there’s all kinds of things. Even when things are going well, there’s always some new challenge that you haven’t anticipated or something you can’t control.

Ratchel Pinlac:

Exactly.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so where you’re getting that reserve from, so how do you manage, because we talk on this podcast a lot about how to manage our own self-care and our own sanity on this journey. What are some of the things that you do?

Ratchel Pinlac:

What I like to do actually is I definitely do dedicate time to not think about anything. Because as an entrepreneur, you’re just swirling all the time and so many things just in your head, whether it’s new ideas or things on your to-do list or worrying about your employees and worrying about, just the constant worry and anxiety and all of that that comes with it, but you really have to dedicate time to shut off. It’s easier said than done, right? It’s not easy to “shut off”, but there needs to be at least a day where you literally don’t think about anything to do with the business because then it is just going to be like a 24/7, 7 day a week type of thing, and you’re going to be drained. And so those are some of the things that I do. Usually it’s on either a Saturday or a Sunday, depending on the day, and that’s exactly what I do. I just don’t think about anything to do with the business.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, a hundred percent. This is so, so vital. Really, really is. Well, thank you so much, Rachel.

Ratchel Pinlac:

Of course.

Melinda Wittstock:

…for putting on your wings and flying with us, and we’ll make sure that everybody knows how to find you in our show notes. Just really quickly, what’s the best way? Is it just Pinsy, P-I-N-S-Y .com, and then find you on TikTok by the same name?

Ratchel Pinlac:

Yes. And then P-I-N-S-Y, actually it’s WearPinsy.com, so it’s W-E-A-R like you’re wearing, and so WearPinsy.com, and then our Instagram is Pinsy Shapewear.

Melinda Wittstock:

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for sharing your journey.

Ratchel Pinlac:

Thank you.