Hi,

With August here, we take a closer look in today’s newsletter at what makes a swimwear brand endure, not just trend.

Swimwear is a highly visual category that thrives on social media. It’s also relatively easy to produce and quick to bring to market, making it a go-to for creators launching their own brands. But while influencer buzz can spark attention, it rarely sustains momentum. The brands that endure don’t just build hype, they build infrastructure.

Two swimwear brands illustrate this contrast clearly: Monday Swimwear and Inamorata Woman. Both launched with cultural momentum, aesthetic credibility, and massive platforms. But only one turned that early attention into a durable, scalable business by focusing on operations, not just influence.

Below, we break down what made the difference and what every DTC brand can learn from it.

When Natasha Oakley and Devin Brugman launched Monday Swimwear in 2014, they weren’t starting from scratch. Their blog, A Bikini A Day, had built a massive following of loyal, swimwear-obsessed fans who trusted their taste and their fit recommendations.

Instead of pouring money into ads, Monday Swimwear launched with content and community. No performance marketing. No outside capital. Just two creators who deeply understood what their audience wanted in a swimsuit.

Their first drop wasn’t just trendy styles. The brand focused on flattering fits, neutral tones, and elevated basics designed to make women feel confident. One of their early breakout pieces, the Palma bikini top, stood out for its structured support, adjustable coverage, and inclusive sizing.

By directly addressing the fit and comfort issues surfaced in their DMs and comments, Monday Swimwear cut through a saturated market of generic styles. These weren’t designs plucked from runways. They were shaped by an ongoing dialogue with their community.

That tight feedback loop became their real launch strategy. And it’s what transformed initial buzz into lasting brand loyalty. The result? A $40M+ DTC brand built entirely on organic growth and product-market fit. Monday Swimwear’s customers don’t just buy bikinis. They help shape them, promote them, and keep coming back.

What makes Monday Swimwear successful isn’t just product quality or visual branding. It’s the system behind it and the ability to turn audience insight into growth that compounds over time.

At Vivaio Ventures, we don’t just believe in the creator economy, we build around it. For every brand we work with, we apply a strategic framework that we call the Creator Flywheel: a proven model for turning influence into infrastructure and short-term demand into long-term momentum.

The most successful creator-led brands aren’t built on hype. They’re built on alignment between audience, product, and execution. Our framework focuses on four essential pillars that turn creator trust into long-term growth.

1. Build for your audience. Creators spend years listening, responding, and earning trust. That direct connection offers powerful qualitative insight. We help translate that into strategic, data-backed decisions so every product and brand move reflects what the audience truly wants.

2. Launch great products that define the brand. Hero products do more than drive revenue, they set the tone for everything that follows. We help creators launch with intent: products that solve real problems, express the brand’s identity, and earn loyalty through quality and relevance.

3. Deliver operational excellence. Content builds attention. Operations build trust. We focus on ensuring operational excellence across the full customer experience. These turn first-time customers into long-term advocates.

4. Use feedback to fuel continuous improvement. From launch-day conversations to long-term retention loops, we build mechanisms to capture real customer feedback. That insight powers product refinement, informs future drops, and ensures the brand evolves in sync with its audience.

Monday Swimwear’s success demonstrates the effectiveness of putting this model into practice. Their founders earned trust long before selling anything. By sharing their lifestyle and style evolution online, they invited their audience into the brand before it even existed.

Model & actress Emily Ratajkowski launched Inamorata Woman in 2017 with clear advantages: strong personal branding, beautiful visuals, and a massive online following. The launch generated instant interest. The brand looked good, felt aspirational, and had all the ingredients for rapid growth. But this initial interest didn’t translate into long-term traction.

Inamorata kept its audience at a distance. The content was polished and curated, but not participatory. Emily was always front and center, but customers had little opportunity to shape the product or engage with the brand in a meaningful way.

The brand did not visibly involve its audience in product development. It lacked clear, differentiated hero pieces. Its storytelling leaned heavily on the founder’s persona rather than values or purpose customers could share in.

As a result, customers frequently voiced frustration with the product experience: sizing was inconsistent, materials felt flimsy for the price, and support features were lacking in designs marketed as wearable and versatile. Without input from the audience, fit flaws and quality concerns went unaddressed. And at a premium price point, those shortcomings weren’t just disappointing but brand-damaging.

When operational issues arose such as delayed shipping, lack of customer service, and slow refunds, the absence of a strong community foundation made those missteps more damaging. Inamorata had the initial attention, but it lacked the system to build trust, deepen engagement, and sustain growth.

Aesthetics and celebrity can create initial hype, but without the right infrastructure and feedback loops in place, brands are vulnerable to collapse the moment things go wrong. Influencer-led brands can no longer rely on reach alone. Sustainable growth comes from systems that turn customers into contributors, not just passive spectators.

Monday Swimwear scaled because they backed community insights with operational discipline: reliable shipping, responsive customer service, and consistently high-quality fulfillment. The brand didn’t just meet expectations, it earned trust by delivering on them.

That same system is what allowed the brand to expand beyond swimwear into athleticwear and sport-focused categories. Their audience didn’t just want more product. They wanted more of the brand, across different parts of their lives. That’s the result of long-term trust.

Inamorata, by contrast, treated customers as followers instead of stakeholders. It led with influence but lacked the infrastructure to turn attention into retention.

If you're building a brand today, the question is no longer “How do I launch with attention?” It’s “How do I build a system that gets smarter and stronger with every customer?” That’s the real growth multiplier. And it’s the difference between a temporary buzz and one that compounds.

At Vivaio Ventures, we help early-stage and scaling consumer brands turn influence into infrastructure. We partner with founders to shape compelling brand stories, build high-performing creator-led flywheels, and launch products that customers are proud to wear and eager to share.

If you’re interested in reading more on this topic, we’ve compiled sector research on swimwear, including competitive analysis, product trends and success cases. If you’d like access, just reply directly to this email and we’ll share the Notion link.

P.S. - Check out our additional Learnings & Insights here.