£1 million from one email: Stripe & Stare on funding a brand on your own terms

Around 1% of venture funding goes to all-female founding teams. Nicola Pierce, co-founder of Stripe & Stare, has built a nine-year-old B-Corp brand from inside that statistic, without waiting for the VC world to catch up.

On the latest episode of DTC Live On Air, she talks about the thing most founders worry about: money. The pitch rooms. The red flags. How you actually fund growth when the people writing cheques don't look like your customer. 

Here are a few things that stuck with us. The full story is very much worth hearing in her own words.

The room often doesn't get you, and that's the game

Stripe & Stare makes what it calls the world's most comfortable underwear. It's been on Oprah's Favourite Things and has racked up tens of thousands of five-star reviews. And Nicola still walked into pitch after pitch with investors who couldn't relate to the product.

"80, 90% of investors are men, middle-aged white men," she says. Her fix was refreshingly practical. Before a meeting, they'd send product for the investor's wife, girlfriend, sister or daughter to try. The feedback did the pitching for them.

Her bigger point is about resilience. They heard "a lot of nos, millions of them," and her advice is simple: don't take it personally. Not everyone is your investor, and that's fine.

Your best investors might already be your customers

This is the part that made us sit up. Stripe & Stare raised a large chunk of money not from a fund, but from the people who already loved the product.

"We sent an email to our customer database, one email, and said, if you're interested, fill out this form. And we raised a million pounds from that email."

They'd been doing versions of this since year one. The result is a base of hundreds of small investors who buy, advocate and, in Nicola's words, "only shout when we need them." How she structured it, what those customers get in return, and why it works so well is one of the best parts of the episode. Listen now.

Treat raising like a marriage, not a transaction

When the money is on the table, it's tempting to grab it. Nicola's take is the opposite.

"It's like going into a marriage, especially with VCs," she says on doing your own due diligence, calling the other founders an investor has backed and asking about the good, the bad and the ugly. They once had four term sheets on the table and turned several down. One rejected investor reacted so badly it confirmed they'd dodged a bullet.

The lesson: the person matters as much as the cheque. You're choosing who you'll be stuck with for years.

Growth doesn't have to mean burning cash on ads

Here's a number worth sitting with. For the first four years, Stripe & Stare spent roughly £1,000 a month on Google ads. By that point they were turning over millions. The growth came from word of mouth, early influencer gifting, well-chosen podcast sponsorships and a lot of getting out there.

It started fast, too. They went from first conversation to launch in three months. Nicola's philosophy on that: "Don't wait for anything to be perfect. You've just got to get it done."

The unglamorous truth nobody puts on a pitch deck

For all the highs, Nicola is refreshingly honest about the grind. A physical-product business means carrying serious stock: seven sizes, a wall of SKUs, a 14,000 square foot warehouse, and buying inventory five months before you know if you'll hit forecast.

On getting that balance right, she doesn't pretend to have cracked it: "There is no magic solution." It's a good reminder that even a brand on Oprah's list is juggling the same cash-flow maths you are.

Her advice if you're raising now

Nicola's playbook for founders starting is grounded and doable:

• Get your deck and assets in order first.
• Start with warm leads, not cold cash-grabs. Ask "can you read my deck, and who do you know?" rather than "please send money."
• Try every angle: angels, crowdfunding, grants, and bootstrapping if you have the patience.
• Get into the room. Go to events and join founder communities.

And on imposter syndrome, the thing that keeps so many founders quiet in the room: you don't have to know everything. "No one needs to know all the answers." Be honest, ask for help, and the right people will show up.

Listen to the full conversation

We've barely scratched the surface. The story of how a gifted box of knickers got Stripe & Stare into Selfridges in year one, how Oprah found them organically, and exactly how they turned their customer list into a funding engine is all in the episode.

If you're building a brand and wondering how to play the funding game, listen to the full episode of DTC Live On Air. It's one of the most honest conversations about money we've had on the show.

For more like this, the rest of the podcast is full of founders sharing what actually worked; our private slack community is where these conversations carry on all year, and you can meet founders like Nicola in person at our events. 

You might also like what the first half of 2026 taught DTC brands and the line-up for Connect LDN 2026, where founders get this candid on stage. 

The best funding advice rarely comes from a fund. Sometimes it comes from a founder who's said no to the wrong money more times than she's said yes.

‍