On today's episode of Behind Her Empire podcast, meet Michelle Cordeiro Grant, the founder and CEO of LIVELY, a direct-to-consumer company that makes lingerie and more with a focus on style and comfort.
Grant grew up with immigrant parents, thinking she wanted to become a doctor or a lawyer, but her true passion lay in working with products and building brands. At the end of a long and extremely successful career at brands including Victoria's Secret, Grant came to the realization that the $13 billion lingerie category was being dominated by a single brand and had a very narrow point of view.
This led her to go out on her own and create LIVELY, with the goal of building a brand that strived to reflect real, authentic, everyday women like herself. Grant watched the women walking down 5th Avenue in NYC, "and you could just see the confidence oozing when they had this handbag or the shoes."
She said she wanted to bring that kind of confidence, coupled with comfort to women. In 2016, she launched LIVELY,, which now has four stores and fosters a network of over 140,000 brand ambassadors whose online content embodied, "passion, purpose and competence."
She grew the business from its concept stage to a recent $100 million acquisition in just three years, beating the odds that many female-founded companies face.
On this episode, you'll hear from Grant as she describes the tactical steps she took to leave her career and build a company that she was passionate about, what it takes to build a brand from concept to acquisition and how she built a community of 140,000 ambassadors.
Michelle Cordeiro Grant is the founder and CEO of LIVELY. Previously, she was VP of merchandising at Thrillist and director/ senior merchant at Victoria's Secret.