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The Great Men's Underwear
Shake-Up
The category is growing — but the names selling it are changing fast. Long-standing retailers are disappearing while a new wave of bold, direct and sustainable brands takes their place. Here's what's happening, and what it means for shoppers.
If you've gone looking for a familiar men's underwear website lately and found it gone, you're not imagining it. The past couple of years have reshaped who sells men's underwear in the UK — even as demand for the product itself keeps climbing.
As a specialist men's underwear retailer since 2006, we've had a front-row seat. Here's an honest look at the upheaval: why the old guard is fading, who's rising in their place, and where that leaves you if your go-to shop has vanished.
A growing market — with fewer familiar names
First, the counter-intuitive bit: this isn't a category in decline. Industry analysts value the global men's underwear market at around $39 billion in 2026, growing at roughly 5–6% a year. Boxer briefs alone account for close to 40% of sales.
So why are shops closing? Because where and how people buy has changed faster than many retailers could adapt. Around half of men's underwear sales now happen online. Direct-to-consumer brands are growing at double-digit rates. Value-focused private-label ranges — think Amazon's and the supermarkets' own lines — have hollowed out the middle. And the wider UK high street shed more than 13,000 stores in a single year. Multi-brand retailers caught between cheap private label below and slick direct brands above have had the hardest time of all.
What happened to UnderU?
One of the names that didn't make it through was UnderU — a long-running online men's designer underwear retailer. Its operating company, Sunrise Online Retail Limited, entered creditors' voluntary liquidation in April 2026 after more than two decades of trading, and the website has since gone offline.
UnderU was a classic example of the squeezed multi-brand model: a broad range of third-party designer labels sold through a single site. It's a model that thrived in the 2000s and 2010s but became increasingly tough as the big designer brands pushed their own direct channels and marketplaces competed on price. If you're a former UnderU customer wondering where your favourites went, you're in the right place — more on that below.
What's driving the shake-up
Roughly half of sales are now online — and store-heavy models struggled to follow.
Brands selling straight to shoppers, often by subscription, are the fastest-growing part of the market.
Cheap own-label ranges from the giants have hollowed out the mid-market.
Big labels now push their own sites, leaving less room for multi-brand resellers.
Organic cotton, bamboo and recycled fabrics are pulling shoppers toward newer, values-led brands.
Statement cuts, colour and athleisure crossover are where the energy — and the growth — is.
"The product has never been more popular. It's the business models that had to change."
Twenty years in men's underwearThe new wave rising in their place
For every familiar name that's faded, a more focused one has stepped up. The brands winning today tend to share a few traits: a clear point of view, an own-label or specialist edge rather than a mile-wide designer range, and a real answer on sustainability.
You can see it across the brands gaining ground — bold, design-led labels like PUMP! and Modus Vivendi, athletic specialists like Teamm8, and retailers building their own lines rather than simply reselling everyone else's. It's a smaller, sharper, more distinctive market than the designer-everything model it's replacing — and, for shoppers, a more interesting one.
Where UnderU shoppers (and everyone else) can go now
This is where we come in. Bang & Strike has specialised in men's underwear since 2006 — which means we've lived through the whole shake-up and adapted with it, moving from a broad reseller to a focused edit of the brands and own-label ranges worth wearing.
If a favourite retailer has closed, you'll likely find its natural replacements with us: PUMP! for bold, athletic style; Modus Vivendi for design-led and organic ranges; Teamm8 for sporty Australian cuts; and our own STRIKE PRO label for cotton and microfibre essentials. Same category, sharper selection, still trading.
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A focused edit of men's underwear, from a specialist trading since 2006.
