Just days after introducing her new pajama and loungewear brand, Daphne, to the world, DeSorbo announced that she wouldn’t be returning for the next season of Summer House, the Hamptons-based Bravo show she has appeared on since 2019.
It was an unexpected move—and one DeSorbo didn’t make lightly. “If I had launched Daphne maybe a year prior or two years prior,” she says, “I think I definitely would have stayed on the show” because “it’s so invaluable to be on national television each week while you’re also selling a product.”
But DeSorbo had just wrapped up what she calls the best year of her life, “career-wise.” Giggly Squad, the podcast she hosts with her best friend and former Summer House castmate Hannah Berner, reached 44 million downloads. The book she and Berner wrote together became a New York Times best seller, and the cross-country tour they held sold out Radio City Music Hall twice.
“I could have obviously given it one more summer,” DeSorbo says, “but it didn’t feel 100 percent authentic to me—like I’d be forcing it a little.”
Leaving Summer House while launching Daphne is just one of many contours of DeSorbo’s career that she didn’t plan for. But, like the past twists and turns, it might just work out in her favor. Both DeSorbo and Chris Kim, founder and CEO of Concept Brands, Daphne’s brand incubator, say their long-term goal is to ensure that Daphne becomes not just a brand with staying power, but a brand that’s even bigger than DeSorbo—who commands 1.6 million followers on Instagram.
Building a career by leaning in
DeSorbo says she didn’t join Summer House with a business plan. She knew joining the reality show, which follows a group of young New Yorkers as they party and share a house in the Hamptons, could help her build a platform—but didn’t know how she’d want to use it.
When her first season aired in early 2019, DeSorbo says she was surprised to see that Bravo gave her the “lazy girl edit,” using several scenes of her lounging in bed and chatting with castmates. Her first thought was, “Oh, my god, I’m not lazy!” Then, she says, “My business brain was like, ‘Why don’t I just lean into this?’” Over the next few years, she did just that, hosting a sleep-themed party on Summer House with fellow “bed bugs”—as fans call them—Ciara Miller and Amanda Batula, and hosting a live shopping event series on Amazon Prime called “In Bed With Paige DeSorbo.”
Photo: Coliena Rentmeester
She started to brainstorm how to turn that personal brand into a business. “I was approached to come out with a skin care line and a jewelry line and all of these different things,” she says, “but nothing felt truly authentic to me.”
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, DeSorbo and Berner began livestreaming their long FaceTime calls for their Instagram followers. The view count quickly took off, and again, DeSorbo leaned in, creating chatty podcast Giggly Squad with Berner. “It was a mistake of a career,” she says, and then takes back: “Not a mistake, but a we-weren’t-expecting-it of a career—and it has truly turned into one of the absolute best things in both of our lives.”
Many people expected their podcast to center heavily on Summer House, DeSorbo says. But she and Berner don’t talk about the reality show at all. During their recent appearance on the podcast Good Hang with Amy Poehler, DeSorbo explains that at first, this was because Bravo asked them not to. DeSorbo also tells Inc. that since Berner isn’t a big reality TV fan, steering clear of that topic felt natural.
Keeping Summer House separate, it turns out, helped Giggly Squad develop a wider fanbase. “We just had so many more things to say and different topics that we wanted to talk about,” DeSorbo says, “that we ended up creating this fanbase that either doesn’t watch Bravo, or didn’t find us from Bravo, or does both of those things, but this is just like an added fun thing.” And when Berner was fired from Summer House in 2021, this separation became even more essential, saving Giggly Squad from losing a large segment of listeners over reality show drama.
Berner’s exit may have also inspired DeSorbo to get serious about starting a business. The concept began to keep her up at night, until about two and a half years ago, she realized: “It’s pajamas.”
She began to meet with different brand incubators and manufacturing experts to determine who could best help her bring that vision to life. Kim and his team, she says, “just got my vision without me really having to explain it.” The Los Angeles-based brand incubator became Daphne’s operating venture partner and pre-seed investor, and Kim became its co-founder. Daphne has now raised a full round of funding from outside investors, according to Kim. (He declined to disclose the amount raised and the company’s equity split.)
Chris Kim, founder and CEO of Concept Brands, Daphne’s operational venture partner, and co-founder of Daphne. Photo: courtesy companyDeSorbo’s “fortuitous accident”
Marketing consultant, creator economy writer, and Bravo fan Lia Haberman says that while DeSorbo “having a multiplatform approach was a little bit of a fortuitous accident,” it has “actually really benefited her to have these different avenues and different audiences who tune into her for different things.”
And her experience in compartmentalizing these aspects of her life and career might help Daphne overcome what Haberman says is one of the most challenging transitions for a celebrity-led brand: moving beyond its famous founder.
DeSorbo “has a very short window to convert her existing audience,” Haberman says. After that, Daphne will need to start attracting customers who buy into the brand because they like its products, rather than its founder.
Haberman adds that product-forward celebrity brands like Hailey Bieber’s Rhode and Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty have an easier time doing this than personality-forward brands like Emma Chamberlain’s Chamberlain Coffee. In her opinion, Daphne falls in the latter camp because pajamas are so closely tied to DeSorbo’s Summer House persona.
Kim, DeSorbo’s co-founder, is well aware of this challenge. Daphne’s initial strategy is to lean heavily into DeSorbo’s personal brand through social media and press placements to create a customer base. But, he says, “we can’t always just lean on [DeSorbo] to be the sole marketing channel.” Soon, Daphne will begin testing paid marketing channels like Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.
Kim also says that he and DeSorbo have aspirations beyond sleepwear. Over the next few years, the label will use collaborations with other brands to add new products within the lifestyle category to its offerings, according to Kim. He declines to share which brands, exactly, Daphne will partner with, but says it already has a number of collaborations in the works.
“It’s not as if we’re going to come up with something that’s completely off course,” he adds. “But we want this to be a tremendous business. We want it to be something that has a broader reach than just pajamas.”
In its short time in business, Daphne has already faced a few snags. When DeSorbo announced the brand three weeks ago, many of her followers aired their frustrations over the price point. The line has 34 products, which include sleep shirts, tank tops, lounge pants, and boxer shorts, and costs $58 to $120 for single pieces and up to $230 for a set. And after the brand officially launched on June 10th, some customers critiqued the quality of their orders.
Still, the brand sold out a normal run of products within only a few days, according to Kim and DeSorbo. So far, DeSorbo’s bet is paying off.
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