Exclusive interview with Marnie Rabinovitch, founder of Thigh Society
The bootstrapped story of how thigh chafe became a 17-year-old brand leading the way in women's undergarments.
I mean, who wouldn’t want to start their morning coffee with topics of crotch sweat, chafe sweat and butt sweat? You know who’s not afraid? Marnie Rabinovitch, the wonderful mind behind Thigh Society, who’s set out to solve what (after our call) I’d genuinely call an epidemic.
A Toronto local, and someone who brings more life to a call than most people manage in a week, Marnie “quit two pensioned jobs, during two recessions” to chase a problem-solution, while coaching MBA students at the Rotman School of Management. This isn’t your typical venture backed cannonball story. Marnie founded Thigh Society 17 years ago, in the middle of the 2008 crisis, with an $8,000 commitment to the idea. The outcome? An extraordinary business.
The problem
Nobody likes a sweaty summer in the office, am I right? As a Brit, where AC still seems to be rationed like potatoes in WW2, I can easily relate. Marnie (and as she’d later discover, plenty of other women) could never find an undergarment that was comfortable, solved the chafing and sweat problem, and managed to feel elegant or fashionable in the process. As she puts it: “Is it so much to ask that you wear an undergarment and expect it to fit perfectly from day to night?”
She reflects back on a moment during her lunchtime walk at work, having forgotten to wear her cycling shorts (yes, she’d resorted to cycling shorts). A few minutes in, she started to think: “I’m not going to be able to walk that far, because thigh chafe is happening and I don’t have my bike shorts.” After running to a pharmacy to grab baby powder, the common quick fix, the frustration coupled with a broader sense of “why is this still a problem?” really started to take over. “It’s humiliating to have to walk with your legs apart,” she said. So Marnie’s hunt for a solution accelerated, and while there were a few cotton-based options out there (soft but moisture-absorbing), nothing actually hit the spot.
She even shared a funny interaction at a department store in Toronto, where she was hunting through the men’s boxer briefs as a possible workaround when a woman tapped her on the shoulder and said: “Are you looking for yourself or your man?” Marnie, taken aback by the blunt delivery, responded “What? What do you mean?” The lady replied: “Oh, I get women shopping in here for themselves all the time.”
And so there was a spark.
Marnie’s leap into entrepreneurship
“I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur but I never really knew what that meant.”
I think about this a lot, and her statement really resonated with me. Being an entrepreneur (not the biggest fan of the word) is often misunderstood, and it shows up in many different forms. For some it’s through influence, for others it’s stumbling on a solution like Marnie did and accidentally building a brand around it, and for a few it’s a deep, simmering protest against corporate life. Who knows. But what I like about Marnie’s story is that the idea didn’t just stem from a clear problem, it grew slowly and steadily, while she balanced everything else in her life. She isn’t an Ivy grad with investors lining up to write checks because her family’s name is on the door.
Marnie made a calculated decision about how best to balance making a living with the time she could dedicate to Thigh Society, never conforming to the burn-out stereotype that founders tend to wear as a badge. This is a self-made, bootstrapped success story, in a time where the world’s financial system had just collapsed. She’d left Accenture, where she was a consultant first and then led recruiting and HR strategy, for a government job. A stable, “safe” and pensioned role with a long career ahead if she wanted it. But Marnie was “feeling very unchallenged,” she explained, and that unfulfillment eventually led to her resignation.
She used the time to learn the mechanics: how ecommerce worked, to build a Shopify store, all the way through to product engineering, material safety, and brand building. Around the same time, she was offered a coaching position to MBA students at Rotman, essentially training the very prospects for the consulting world she’d left behind. Her $8K budget eventually went into sampling the product, and she shipped early versions to friends in Vegas and Florida to test it in the heat. “I didn’t want people to just wear this around the house, I wanted them to trial it outside in the heat. Ultimately this product really shines in warm weather,” she said.
Marnie’s business grew slowly. Between 2009 and 2016 she was still very part-time. “Our first year we did $13,000 in revenue,” she said. “I wasn’t drawing a salary or anything, I just knew in my gut that I was providing a solution to people that needed it.” She hired a developer hourly to help with her Shopify store, while she ran everything else, growing organically and listening to her customers to refine the product, tweak the waistband or the material, and improve one stitch at a time.
The Dragon in the room and her first hire
Long before the brand started to scale, Marnie had a moment that could have killed it. She attended a workshop led by one of the Dragons from the Canadian version of Dragons’ Den. She raised her hand and asked: “I have this brand, it’s like long-leg underwear…” looking for feedback. The response was uninspiring. “Women aren’t going to buy this. Women will choose shapewear,” the Dragon said, before closing with something blunt along the lines of “this will never be a big business.”
Marnie kept going anyway. Interestingly, she’ll openly tell you she’s more comfortable being called an inventor than a CEO. Understandably, everyone has things they’re better at. The fact that the brand has scaled past every assumption that Dragon made probably says more about both of them than the workshop ever did. Marnie’s first hire was actually a media buyer in 2016, well before Chinese knock-offs started taking up real estate in the auctions. The brand scaled from approximately $350K to $750K primarily on Meta.
It was in 2020, after a flat revenue year, that Marnie brought on her first fractional CMO. A shakeup of the agency stack and a sharper growth strategy followed, and Thigh Society started its climb toward $10M. She’ll still tell you the foundation was always the product: best-in-class quality, being the category creator, and being among the first to talk openly about chafe online, normalizing it as a skin condition, not a plus-size issue, all while staying lean and profitable from day one.
The “oh shit” moments in Marnie’s journey
How would I describe the “oh shit moment”? It’s the moment when all the blood, sweat (in this case literally) and tears you’ve poured into an idea actually starts to snowball, and gives you that feeling that you’ve got a real brand on your hands. For most founders, it’s the first order, watching your Shopify dashboard like a poker player watching the river.
For Marnie, there are a couple of moments that stand out, no doubt among an array of insane stories. The first one started in Australia, with a blogger from Melbourne she’d discovered while running a little bit of guerrilla tactic marketing, hunting down fashion writers covering the same problem. Marnie reached out, sent her a pair of shorts, and triggered a chain of reviews plus a flurry of surprise orders from Australia. It was the first time the Shopify notifications weren’t a friend of a friend or a family member buying out of loyalty. To take the story full circle, Marnie eventually met up with Lilli, the writer, on a trip Down Under.
These moments don’t stop happening, they just space out. In 2022, a cold email from Bobbie Thomas, a Today Showhost, asked to feature the product on air, and that one note triggered a chain reaction of A-list celebrities and journalists carrying Thigh Society all the way to the Oscars. Not bad for a brand that started with $8,000, a department-store stranger asking if she was shopping for her boyfriend, and a Dragon telling her it would never work.