She Sold Knix for a Canadian Record. Then She Stepped Down Too.

Joanna Griffiths wasn’t trying to start a lingerie company. She was researching the intimate apparel market for her MBA at INSEAD when she found a problem the entire industry had quietly agreed to ignore: roughly one in three women experience bladder leakage at some point, and the only products built for it were clinical, adult-diaper-style pads designed for an entirely different demographic. The lingerie business spent its money on push-up bras and lace. Nobody was spending it on something that actually solved a problem women lived with. Griffiths decided the fix wasn’t medical — it was a design problem, and in 2013 she launched Knix in Toronto with underwear built to manage leakage while looking and feeling like anything else in the drawer.

It worked past the point most founders plan for. Griffiths grew Knix from a single leakproof-underwear line into a broader intimates and activewear brand, closing a $53 million funding round in 2021 that, per AdWeek, wrapped up three days before she gave birth to twins. By 2022, the company had surpassed two million customers, and Griffiths was routinely credited with having helped invent what’s now described as a billion-dollar leakproof-underwear category.

That growth is what made the 2022 deal possible. Essity, the Swedish health and hygiene conglomerate, agreed to acquire 80% of Knix in a transaction that closed that September, paying an estimated $320 million and valuing the company at $400 million overall. Fortune and Retail Dive both reported it as the largest publicly disclosed sale of a private company by a solo female founder in Canadian history. Griffiths kept the remaining 20% and stayed on as president — a structure that put her in the same position as Elizabeth Stein after Ferrero bought Purely Elizabeth: sell most of the company to a much larger strategic buyer, keep a stake, keep running the thing you built.

Unlike Stein, Griffiths didn’t stay in that seat indefinitely. She told Fortune in February 2026 that she’d been diagnosed with burnout in 2024, and that she’d spent the years since the acquisition working through what she wanted her role to look like — including, notably, that running a public company wasn’t it. That reckoning showed up as a decision five months later. On July 10, 2026, Griffiths announced on social media that she was stepping down as president, saying the time felt right after 14 years building Knix and four years running it post-acquisition — language FashionUnited reported the same way. It’s a different kind of exit than Jennifer Hyman’s departure from Rent the Runway — Hyman left a company she’d just pulled back from the edge of collapse, while Griffiths left one that had already been sold — but both spent well over a decade running what they’d founded, and both chose the moment they walked away rather than having it chosen for them.

Nicole Tapscott, who had been Knix’s chief commercial officer, was named president in Griffiths’ place. Tapscott built her retail résumé before Knix helping stand up Casper’s Canadian operations and serving as chief marketing officer at Toronto jeweler Mejuri, with earlier experience at the World Economic Forum. Griffiths, for her part, said she was looking forward to more time with her family while she watches the company she started in a research project keep growing without her behind the desk.