o’s background, you can see what prompted this inspiration. She is a self-proclaimed “theatre kid” who grew up dancing and performing in musical theatre, and once convinced Broadway was somewhere in her future. Seven years later, that love of costume, 1950s and ’60s glamour and nostalgic femininity has become Chouchou’s unmistakable visual repertoire.  Her team comprises less than ten people, which leaves Grasso with a broad remit in creative direction, socials, collaborations and, inevitably, the less glamorous realities of owning a business. In this interview with Inside Retail, Grasso spoke about building Chouchou from scratch, a chance encounter at the Canton Fair after 95 per cent of manufacturers said no, the creative worlds behind its collections, expanding in the US with a new 3PL system and learning to become the CEO of the brand she founded. Inside Retail (IR): You launched Chouchou at the end of 2019 – the Black Summer and the Covid-19 pandemic hit just then. I can imagine that would have been a difficult time to launch a business. Tina Grasso (TG): I was absolutely terrified because the whole thing was such a big risk as it was. I was 25 at the time, and I had left my corporate job. “I believe in this. I’m gonna just go all in”. When I first launched, I literally only had like six pairs of underwear on the website, and I thought this is gonna be enough – and then you learn pretty quickly that you need to keep customers engaged, and you need to keep having newness. IR: What inspired Chouchou’s quintessential feminine aesthetic, and what did your first pieces look like? TG: Our style has not changed – obviously, it has evolved and it’s grown, but to our core, we still take all of our inspiration from vintage pieces, the 50s and the 60s. The first pieces were our Audrey knickers, which are a satin and mesh design. They came in three colours: black, red, and pink. IR: Where did your fascination with the 1950s and ’60s come from? TG: It’s an era that I’ve always been inspired by. When I was younger, I would always play with my grandmother’s dresses from that time period. I think with the 50s, I loved the glamorous aspect. In the 60s, I liked the rebelliousness, how women started getting a little bit more empowered. I was a theatre kid. I did competitive dancing. I did singing. I did drama outside of school. I honestly thought I was going to be on Broadway – so I think that’s where the influence began. I’ve always loved underwear, and I’ve always picked my underwear based on what I thought would make me feel most confident for that day. You put on your costume, and it set the tone. It gave me an extra boost of confidence. IR: You speak a lot about how Chouchou is for yourself, not the male gaze. Can you elaborate on that? I speak about it a lot, how it was never performative; it was never to impress anyone. It was purely just for me, and because it made me feel good. I couldn’t afford to spend $100 on a pair of undies. I also hated the alternative, which were very cheaply made beige items that would fall apart after one wash. And so I thought if I can’t find them, I’m going to have to create them – I played around with the idea in my head for three years before I even took a chance on making it a reality. IR: How did you turn those first Chouchou designs into an actual product? TG: I was fortunate enough to go over to China to the Canton Fair. I had registered the business and started building a website, but I didn’t have anything formal to show. I didn’t even know what a tech pack was. I didn’t know how to do CADs. I went with literally hand-drawn sketches, and I just went up to a bunch of these manufacturers and factories. I would say 95 per cent said no. And then I was lucky enough to find one. We found one manufacturer who was also a ‘girl dad’. I think he just saw his own daughter in me. We still work with them today. They’ve supported me from day one, and they took the chance. IR: Seven years in, what have you learned to let go of as a founder? TG: It’s been really hard, especially because I think I can be a perfectionist and I love to be across everything. I worked alone for the first three years. We’re still a very small team. I have someone who leads our socials, and a designer I work with now. I still essentially come up with the concept because I start every collection with the little world that I want us to build on. I see each collection as its own sort of little universe. It’s got a mood, a story, some sort of world that I want our community to step into. IR: Those little worlds have become a Chouchou signature. Where does a collection begin? TG: Other ones, it can be like I might have seen something in a film or a picture on Pinterest, or I just had one garment in mind, and then we built out from that. But it always starts with one thing. IR: When you spoke with Inside Retail a few years ago, the US was a major ambition. Where is the opportunity now? TG: Excitingly, we are transitioning to a 3PL for our developers, which means they won’t have to endure those crazy tariffs. It also will also allow them to have a more seamless shipping process and quicker delivery. The US is now our second-largest market after Australia, and I think it has a lot of potential to grow. The main thing I want us to incorporate more is real-life experiences. I think the missing piece for us is that people don’t get to touch and feel the products prior to purchasing. And I’m not saying that I want to go straight to stores because I don’t think that’s the position that we’re in. But just coming up with really cute, intimate ways for our customers to be able to try things on and see the pieces in real life. IR: Could that mean a Chouchou pop-up? TG: For sure. It’s definitely something that I’m working on to try and make happen in the next few months. The other thing that’s really been our focus is just creating more and launching more products, not in a fast-fashion way, because it still takes us 12 months to bring anything to life, but just having more options for our customers. We’ve expanded into lounge and sleep. I will say, obviously, our bread and butter, our core, is intimates, especially our bralettes. Intimates are our heart, but we’re playing around with a few different things. IR: Considering you’re still across so much of Chouchou, creatively and operationally, do you still feel like a creative person who just happens to run a company, or do you feel more like a CEO now? TG: In the last year, I am so [much more] on top of the numbers now. If you are going to be a founder-led business, you have to be crushing numbers. You have to be more strategic. I wish that I could just spend my whole day designing and coming up with cute concepts and fun things for social. But I would say that that’s the smallest portion of my time these days. It’s definitely about reporting and analysing which business categories are growing, identifying new opportunities and planning international expansion. That takes up most of my time at the moment.