Exclusive: Chubbies launches women’s swimwear brand Cheekies

Launching a brand like Cheekies was a natural next step for Chubbies, executives told Modern Retail. Chubbies has sold women’s swimwear before, but only through limited drops that matched men’s styles. That swimwear didn’t have a large repeat rate, but it did “have a ton of demand, and that demand hasn’t disappeared,” said Chubbies co-founder Rainer Castillo. For years, women who bought Chubbies for family and friends also asked for swimwear of their own. In fact, “women’s” is consistently one of the top two search terms on Chubbies.com, Castillo said.

Cheekies is the first time Chubbies has “centered the women’s customer,” said Kit Garton, the co-founder of Cheekies and an svp at Chubbies. The original women’s swimsuits drew from Chubbies’ best-selling men’s prints, but they were more like “photo-op bathing suits you wore for one day on a trip with your boyfriend,” Garton explained. The new suits, meanwhile, were built on insights from focus groups, under the direction of an all-women design team. The pieces also come in multiple silhouettes and feature unique prints.

Chubbies considers Cheekies a sister brand, but not its twin, said Garton, who worked on the prior iterations of women’s swimwear. “We wanted to create something that she loved and that she was grabbing out of her swimsuit drawer,” she said. “[It’s] something that’s lasting and a favorite that she feels really good in.”

The birth of Cheekies

Cheekies began as a “pretty intense research” project, in which Garton and her team conducted market analysis for months. They talked to hundreds of women, as well as retail partners, to find out what was missing in the world of women’s swim. The field is crowded with incumbents, from direct-to-consumer brands like Summersalt and Andie, to lines from big retailers like Target and Walmart.

“The biggest takeaway [from our research] was that there wasn’t really a perfect solution out there [in terms of fit and functionality],” Garton said. “Women’s swim felt pretty vulnerable for a lot of women, and it could be a deeply insecure shopping experience.” For Cheekies, then, a major goal was “encouraging women to feel confident in what they’re wearing,” Garton explained. “We also want to empower them to be playful and irreverent with their girlfriends when they’re out in the water.”

The brand conducted rounds of wear testing and came away with two different fabrics that are secure but not too compressive, Garton said. During testing, Cheekies heard that “a concern area for one woman was not a concern area for another,” Garton added. Cheekies, therefore, made the silhouettes adjustable, so women can decide how much support they’d like. Three of the bikini tops have adjustable straps, and two of the bikini bottoms can be cinched for extra coverage.

Much of the marketing around Cheekies revolves around the idea of a girls’ getaway. For its launch campaign, Cheekies shot footage of a real group of friends, some of whom are models, in Mexico. It hopes to replicate that approach “for every single campaign,” Garton said.

Cheekies is also leveraging its ties to Chubbies to spread the word to new consumers. One of its recent videos on Instagram shows a man in Chubbies shorts changing his Facebook status to “in a relationship.” A woman then comes out wearing Cheekies swimwear and asks if they’re going to the pool. “It was a soft launch, sort of like how you would soft launch a new relationship on social media,” Garton said. Chubbies will also have a tab linking to the Cheekies site to try and increase traffic and sales.

A future for Cheekies

Chubbies and Cheekies will share the same parent company in Solo Brands, the maker of Solo Stove. Solo Stove acquired Chubbies for $130 million in 2021. Five years later, Chubbies has the resources and the backing to grow even more, Castillo said. “This type of expansion [with Cheekies] is something you afford yourself when you have your core set and your foundation strong,” Castillo explained.

Both Chubbies and Cheekies will overlap from an operations perspective, including supply chains. Even so, Cheekies will still have “its own brand identity,” Castillo said. “Even if it starts here [with Chubbies], it’s going to take its own life, really fast, in terms of where it finds customers and how it builds the brand.” “The hope is that Cheekies will operate as an independent brand under the Chubbies umbrella,” Garton added.

Within the Solo Brands portfolio, Chubbies has done relatively well. For the nine months ending in September 2025, Chubbies reported $103.6 million in net sales, up from $88.6 million a year prior. It attributed the growth to “retail strategic partnerships, coupled with solid demand within the DTC sales channel.” However, Chubbies’ third-quarter net sales were down 16% year over year, part of a larger slump across Solo Brands.

Solo Brands — which also oversees Oru Kayak and Isle paddleboards — grew rapidly during the pandemic amid an outdoors boom, said Will Hamilton, partner at Kestrel Merchant Partners. Solo Brands “was a hockey stick during Covid, but like a lot of consumer stuff at that time, it just proved to be too fleeting,” Hamilton told Modern Retail. “Chubbies has, by and large, done better,” Hamilton said. “It remains an interesting asset within Solo Brands.”

Hamilton isn’t surprised that Chubbies is expanding more into women’s, given its past experience in the category. “Growth is always something that these consumer brands strive for,” he said. “And either you’re growing within your existing product lineup, or you’re expanding to other areas.” Taking the second path, he said, “brings a little bit of risk with it, in terms of capital and time and effort.” With Cheekies, he said, “There’s also risk with leveraging your retail relationships [for] Chubbies, if it doesn’t work.”

Cheekies and Chubbies, for their part, are being intentional with which doors they go into, executives said. When it comes to Dick’s Sporting Goods, “We’ve honed in on key markets where swim does well, where the Chubbies brand has done well and where there’s data that suggests this should be a success,” Castillo said. “We’re starting small to understand what’s possible here.”

Garton, in the meantime, is eager to see how many Chubbies customers Cheekies can convert and what data it can glean. “What is she gravitating toward? Does she want more prints? Does she want more solids?” asked Garton. “We’re already working on our spring ’27 collection, so these first few months of sales are going to shape the next year, as well.”

Castillo agreed that Cheekies’ merchandise strategy remains flexible. “We’re not doing a mad dash [to roll out products],” he said. “But, 12 months from now, I think it would tell me, ‘Hey, we’ve proved we can do this. Is there more we should be exploring?'”