Hold Your Haunches

Hold Your Haunches sold shapewear leggings designed to smooth and support without the discomfort of traditional compression garments. Erin Bickley and Jenny Greer ran the company out of Macon, Georgia, and built it around a frustration a lot of shoppers already had with the shapewear on the market.

The pair pitched in Season 5, Episode 23, which aired in April 2014, asking for 75,000 dollars for 20 percent of the company. That put the valuation at 375,000 dollars.

Barbara Corcoran and Lori Greiner teamed up on the investment, splitting a full 100,000 dollars, more than the founders had asked for, in exchange for 40 percent rather than the 20 percent on the table. Reported terms also included an additional 100,000 dollar line of credit on top of the direct investment, which gave the founders working capital for inventory and manufacturing, the two costs that tend to decide whether an apparel startup survives its first year.

The post-show run was stronger than most apparel pitches manage. Sales hit 1.5 million dollars within six months of the episode airing, and the company was popular enough to earn a Season 6 follow-up segment, something the show reserves for products it treats as genuine success stories. As the shapewear category filled up with cheaper competitors, the brand responded by discounting more aggressively and expanding into swimwear to diversify beyond leggings.

That worked for a while. Hold Your Haunches was still generating roughly 1 million dollars a year as late as June 2022, but it had already dropped off Amazon, one of its bigger sales channels, by August 2021. In January 2023 the website went dark and the social accounts went quiet, and there has been no update or relaunch since. The wind-down was gradual rather than sudden, and there is no acquisition or sale on record, so there is no successor entity. Nine years is a long run in a category that competitive.