ompany has made it its mission to help women find what it calls the Perfect Fit – not just the right cup and band size, but a sense of ease and self-assurance.  While global lingerie giants have historically pushed a narrow, often Eurocentric vision of the female form, Xixili is centred on bodies as they actually exist. The brand’s bras span cup sizes from A to I and band sizes from 65 to 110cm, catering to teenagers, new mothers, older women and everyone in between.  “Xixili truly prioritises finding the right fit and style according to customers’ body type and size. This requires our team to have deep product knowledge for each collection launched, so that they are able to effectively assist our customers in finding the right fit and support,” Tara Tan, chief marketing officer at Xixili, told Inside Retail.  Lingerie is a category long defined by a few big Western names with brands built on glossy fantasy, runway wings and aspirational imagery. But in that, something has often been lost: cultural nuance, body diversity and everyday wearability. Xixili, by contrast, takes a quieter approach. The brand understands that in Malaysia, undergarments serve many roles. Serving such a diverse market means doing the homework.  “Not only are there significant variations in skin tones, body shapes and sizes within and between our population communities, there are also a whole array of cultural practices and ethnic attire that’s common in our society,” Tan said.  “To serve in such a market successfully, we have had to develop our merchandise mix to provide for the most extensive size range in brassieres and panties, cups and fit moulds to accommodate for women of a wide range of body shapes and lingerie that functions and meets the demands of our customers as they journey through the various stages of her life from youth to motherhood and thereafter. With this, our vast assortment of lingerie has become a unique value proposition for women of many overseas markets, too.” According to the company, a more robust sleepwear range is currently in development. Taking the intimate online “In the past five years, we have grown the brand significantly through online retail channels and international distribution points. With steep changes in the retail landscape globally, online shopping has changed customer behaviour greatly, and we have had to work hard to ensure we can mimic the same perfect fit experience into the online shopping experience for our customers,” Tan said.  Lingerie is, by its nature, personal. While the challenge of selling bras through a screen exists, for Xixili, the difficult task is to translate a deeply human interaction into something digital, but still warm. The brand responded with a thoughtful blend of tech and empathy. Its ‘Try-in-Store’ feature allows customers to browse online, select what they like and have those items ready to try on at a nearby boutique. And then there’s the 3D avatar tool. Customers input their measurements and body shape to create a virtual version of themselves. From there, they can have their avatar ‘try on’ different styles, seeing how pieces might fit.  “By expanding online, we have managed to secure a growing audience of customers offshore and drawn a lot of interest from our international customers to then become distributors for Xixili products in their home markets,” Tan added.  “These women have brought Xixili’s extensive bra size ranges to Vietnam, Canada, Maldives, Oman and India.” Perhaps the most exciting part of Xixili’s future is happening far from the fitting rooms – in university labs. The brand has partnered with Universiti Sains Malaysia to build the country’s first anthropometric breast database, a scientific study that maps the breast shapes and sizes of Malaysian women across ethnicities. The goal? To design products that are informed not by Western templates, but by real data from Southeast Asian bodies. “We hope this partnership will effectively bring together academia and industry to address real-world needs, and by ensuring that the study’s discoveries do not remain just in academic journals but are translated into commercial improvements – in products and services,” said Tan.  As Xixili eyes the next five years, the roadmap includes both deeper market penetration in Southeast Asia and targeted international expansion.  “We are most definitely looking to further our international expansion, and always looking for opportunities to open in new markets and to gain more insights and feedback from women from new markets and cultures,” she concluded. Further reading: Myntra’s CEO Nandita Sinha on building the system for India’s next-gen shoppers.