The seeds for the idea that became Josie and Sophie Bidwill’s Thunderpants business began in Nelson over thirty years ago.
Josie was enrolled in a fashion and textile design course at Nelson Polytech. She and flatmate Victoria McKenzie were dissatisfied with the design of the underpants made for women at the time. “They were designed by men to look ‘feminine’ and to use as little fabric as possible in order to make more profit. They were the wrong cut for the shape of women’s anatomy. They rolled up, they rolled down, they were very uncomfortable,” Josie said.
So they decided to make their own.
Pleased with the result, they decided to take it further and used the idea to fulfill an assignment at the Polytech course. The design of the underpants presented to the supervisors was very similar to the design of Thunderpants now.
Encouraged by the success of this project, Josie and Victoria then set up an exhibition of their hand-printed underpants in a Nelson gallery. Most visitors really loved the exhibition but there were also some strongly-worded letters of complaint to the editor of the Nelson Daily Mail saying, in effect, that the designer had “committed the mortal sin of making women comfortable in what they wore.”
In May 1995 Josie and Victoria decided that they were onto a winner and started to make the underpants in their flat for sale. They virtually built a small factory in the flat and believed that the venture would make them millions of dollars.
In 1997 Victoria moved to Auckland and Josie to Martinborough to be closer to family and to return to her roots. At this stage the product was being made in a factory in Palmerston North and then in Levin. The idea of having a shop to show off and sell her wares seemed like a good idea to Josie, but first she had a six-week trial period by taking over a hairdresser’s salon in the weekends to sell the Thunderpants. This worked well, so she then took on premises in Kitchener Street and set up the shop “Thrive.”
Her sister Sophie, who had been at art school in Nelson and was very involved with the venture down there, officially joined her in the business.
It was another sister, Kate who had come up with the name Thunderpants. When they had the exhibition in Nelson the question was asked “What do think we should call them?” Kate immediately reminded Josie that when they were kids they always called their big undies ‘thunderpants.’
In order to keep the business as local as possible they moved the manufacturing to a business run by Sandra Saville in Carterton. Sandra was very helpful in refining the construction of Thunderpants products. At the time Josie and Sophie had a clear philosophy about how their business would operate.
“The main driver was to counter the decline in clothing manufacture in New Zealand and to have slow, sustainable growth using local resources.”
Apart from sales from the shop, Thunderpants were also stocked in a hundred stores around New Zealand. The next move was to set up a mail order business. At first this involved doing a regular physical mail out. The sisters remember clearly the hard slog of producing, folding and sending out a 14-page order form. But very quickly they moved on to using a website for sales and in 2018 gave up the shop.
Thunderpants is run as a very inclusive company. They have now de-gendered all the language on their website so it’s either flat-front or pouch-front, not female or male. They’re also size inclusive and cater for all body shapes.
They have proved that they are not afraid of change and have always been at the forefront of the latest innovations in retail. But their product has stayed the same for thirty years – comfortable and practical.
As the advertising says: “They don’t go up your bum!”
