Our Story

Every brand has an origin story. Most involve a lightbulb moment. Ours involves a teenage boy on a beach, his father’s girlfriend, and a bikini produced from a matchbox at a moment when he had absolutely nowhere to put his eyes.

That boy grew up. And he told the story repeatedly, and with relish to anyone who would listen. Eventually, he told it to his daughters. His second youngest daughter, me, listened carefully, filed it away somewhere in the back of her brain, and got on with life. For a few years, that meant music. Then my son arrived, and the pace of that world shifted, and the matchbox story started surfacing again.

In 2022, my sister-in-law Gaby and I ended up in Ibiza together, our husbands are stepbrothers, so family holidays have a way of happening. We were at breakfast at the hotel, my son in tow, and I finally told her the idea I’d been quietly carrying for years. The bikini in the matchbox. The girlfriend on the beach. The whole thing.

Gaby was already running a successful business of her own. She understood product, operations, the nuts and bolts of actually making something real. I was doing creative bikinis, ideas for artwork, the visual world of it. Between the two of us, across a breakfast table in Ibiza, Matchbox Bikini stopped being a story and started being a brand.

What I love most about the original girlfriend is that she wasn’t doing anything remarkable. Not from her perspective, anyway. She wanted to swim. She didn’t want to carry a bag. The bikini fit in a matchbox. End of story. The fact that this was also extraordinarily chic, that it would lodge itself in the memory of a teenage boy and travel decades forward through a family and eventually become a brand was, I imagine, entirely incidental.

That’s exactly what made it the coolest concept in the world to me.
She didn’t set out to start something. She was just going for a swim. But she had taste. Real taste: the quiet, unpretentious kind that doesn’t announce itself. And she understood something, long before the rest of us caught up: that the best things in life should fit in your pocket.

We’d like to think she’d approve.