About
Kate Hipkin
Creative Consultant & Design Thinker
Kate Hipkin is a lingerie designer and creative thinker with three decades of experience in the intimate apparel industry.
Most recently immersed in fast fashion and mass production, Kate chose to pause, question, rethink and reimagine how our underwear is designed, made and valued.
The Story
Having spent over three decades designing intimate apparel, Kate Hipkin has worked at every level of the industry — from heritage brands to fast fashion & mass production. This experience has given her deep insight into how underwear is made, how businesses operate, and how creativity can become trapped in cycles of pressure and repetition.
Stepping away from that environment created the opportunity to rethink — to reconnect with why underwear matters, and to begin designing with greater intention and responsibility. Today, Kate focuses on shaping a different future for intimate apparel, where imagination leads, collaboration replaces competition, and change is approached with optimism and realism.
She works closely with long-standing manufacturing and mill partners in Asia — experts in innovations that scale — to explore new ways of creating products that balance beauty, function, and responsibility. With lived experience of real factories and real production challenges, Kate is passionate about designing affordable underwear that is cherished, not thrown away, and about finding practical, solutions that improve how underwear is designed, made and valued.
Core Values
Creativity and imagination as the key to unlocking change.
Equal care for the maker, the wearer, the system and the future.
Collaboration over competition.
Moving beyond repetition to design intentionally and ethically.
Celebrating the true DNA of intimate apparel — and understanding why underwear really matters.
Identifying change that scales for the benefit of all.
How I Work
Positioned at the front end of the design process, Kate recognises that imagination, insight and experience can create forward thinking products with the greatest impact.
Kate works as a bridge between creativity and manufacturing reality, considering the full product cycle from initial ideation through to scalable production and end of life solutions. Partnering closely with mills and manufacturers, she explores new materials, technologies, and processes that open fresh possibilities for the industry.
Because so much of this work happens through conversation rather than solo decisions, Kate's role is often to connect the right people, ask the right questions, and bring shape to ideas that would otherwise stay stuck in the room.
Her approach turns risk into opportunity, designing garments that people love, whilst honouring the body and respecting the planet. The result is thoughtful, achievable design that moves beyond repetition towards meaningful, future-ready products.
3D CAD and AI are two examples of the technologies Kate is actively exploring. Through working with specialists, she is learning how technology can amplify creative expertise rather than replace it, speeding up the process and opening up new ways of working towards a more sustainable future.
Being conscious throughout the full design and product development process means treating every component in a garment as a precious material, designed with value and purpose. What's essential for performance? What needs rethinking or replacing? And how can intimate apparel move forward while meeting what consumers need and what the planet requires?
Conscious by Design
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