Laura Alicia Jareño Wants Women to Feel Good in the Bodies They Already Have

A girl messaged Laura Alicia Jareño on Instagram after seeing her at a concert, asking for the name of her surgeon. She wanted, she said, a figure like Jareño’s. Jareño told her there had been no surgery. That was the moment it actually landed for her: her body was changing, visibly, and strangers on the internet could see it. Within months she had left a compliance career at a private bank and launched Snatched by Laura, the shapewear brand that now sells from London clinics to Los Angeles, with a government flight to Bogotá somewhere in between.

I am speaking to her on a video call from her third week in LA, and the day already feels unreal to her. A local magazine published a piece on her that morning, three weeks after she arrived in the city. She found out this week she will be coaching entrepreneurs through Foundervine, a UK mentoring programme, despite being two years into her own business. She has a meeting later at Soho House and another with a client in Beverly Hills. None of this, she keeps reminding me, was supposed to happen to her.

“My body was actually changing. Strangers on the internet could see it. That’s when I decided to go ahead with the idea.”

She is from Venezuela, and her mother is Colombian. When Jareño was seven, her father was taken in an express kidnapping, the kind that lasts a single day and is over as suddenly as it begins. The family survived it financially intact. What it cost them was her father’s state of mind. He had been the provider; afterwards he told the family he could not stay, and within a year they had relocated to Spain, where Jareño also had roots.

The timing was brutal in a way that had nothing to do with the kidnapping itself. The euro, at that point, was extremely strong against whatever they had brought from South America. A family that had been comfortable arrived in Europe and found they were not. Jareño traces her entire ambition back to that gap between what they had and what they lost. “My dad was a provider,” she said. “My mum was a homemaker, and we used to have a comfortable life. One day when I grow up, I want to recover that life. I have to make my parents proud.”

She credits her parents directly for the resilience she now describes as her defining trait. They had moved continents with two children, in their forties, and started again. If they could do that, she reasoned, she had no excuse. When Spain itself ran out of room to grow, she moved again, alone this time, to London.

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She arrived in London at twenty speaking almost no English and took work as a cleaner. The route from there to a compliance desk at a private bank is the part of her story she tells with the most precision, because it is the part that still structures how she runs her business.

She has no degree. She never went to university. An interview for a personal assistant role turned into a finance job once the interviewers noticed she spoke Spanish, Portuguese and English. They trained her. Within a year she had moved to a brokerage as a junior compliance officer, and within five years she had worked her way up through several financial firms to a senior compliance role at FirstBank UK, the London arm of First Bank of Nigeria, which serves a largely Nigerian high-net-worth clientele.

Her job was to examine where money came from. She checked the transactions of ultra-wealthy clients, Aliko Dangote among them, tracing source of funds and source of wealth to make sure nothing improper was moving through the bank when the money came in to buy London property. It is, on the face of it, about as far from designing shapewear as a career can get. But the discipline transferred whole. “Even if your company is selling sweets on the street,” she said, “you need a process for what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. You need to document everything so you understand what is actually making you money.”

She has since met a lot of entrepreneurs, she says, who never built that habit, who could not tell you which part of their business was actually profitable because nobody had ever made them write it down. She thinks that gap, more than any idea, is what separates businesses that survive from ones that do not.

In Colombian culture, she explains, the hourglass figure carries real weight, and her mother had her in shapewear from the age of sixteen. The problem was her skin. She has eczema, and the polyester most corsets were made from, compressed against her body for hours, triggered bad reactions. Cheaper ones were worse: the boning inside would shift like a loose wire and work its way through the fabric into her skin. She wore them anyway, because they gave her the shape she wanted, and she noticed, somewhere in all of that discomfort, that nobody was making a version that did not hurt.

Her sister’s husband is a tailor who has worked for houses like Loro Piana, Hermès and Burberry. She took her complaint to him directly: she wanted something hypoallergenic, good for the skin, and actually beautiful, since most of what existed, in her words, was ugly and bulky. He told her which materials to use and how to make the boning flexible enough that it would stop hurting her. Her mother, who had run a boutique in Spain for twenty years, had contacts in Colombia, and a supplier there sent samples to London. The first was wrong. The second was right, and she wore it for a solid month before she let herself believe it.

The reaction to that Instagram message, the stranger asking about surgery, is what actually moved her. She was still working at FirstBank when it happened. She left within months to write the business plan properly, and launched the product in the UK two or three months after that, with no experience running a company and no illusions that experience was required.

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She had no marketing budget, so she built the company’s entire early distribution by hand. The product, she had realised, was useful to several different kinds of women at once: mothers managing skin laxity after birth, patients recovering from liposuction or a tummy tuck, and women like her who had had neither procedure but wanted the support anyway. That versatility became the pitch.

She started with beauticians, the smaller operators who do lymphatic draining and body contouring massages, rather than aiming straight for established clinics. In under two months she contacted more than four hundred of them, by call, email and Instagram DM. “I started with the small ones first. People try to jump way too high. No, no, no. Start from the bottom, go up.”

Her first serious client bought over a thousand pounds of stock in a single meeting. While she was still pitching, somebody else in the clinic overheard through the door and asked to buy one on the spot, before Jareño had even closed the first sale. She began documenting all of it online, and the traction, especially from London’s Latin community, compounded from there.

A week-long business trip to the US in February produced four meetings and, by her own account, nothing from any of them. What came out of the same trip instead was three days at MAGIC Las Vegas, a textile trade show, where a trade commissioner for the Colombian government liked the product and liked, just as much, the fact that she had come alone from London knowing nobody. He arranged a fully funded invitation to a ProColombia conference in Bogotá two months later, to meet suppliers. The government of a country she has never lived in flew her out because of a corset.

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She has never taken outside money, and will not say this lightly: no bank loan, no investors, nothing beyond her own savings to start and the business’s own revenue to keep going. The reasoning is, again, straight out of her compliance training. In the UK, a shareholder holding more than 25 per cent voting rights can begin to direct the company. She did not leave a bank to hand her decisions to someone else. “Look at Steve Jobs,” Laura said. “He got kicked out of his own company because he had investors who didn’t agree with him. I don’t want that happening to me.”

She is self-funding the US expansion the same way, channelling UK revenue into Los Angeles meetings, Ubers, and the slow administrative work of a company not yet technically operating stateside. She does not drive, which in a city built entirely around driving is its own kind of tax, paid daily in ride fares she has already budgeted for. She is taking lessons now. In the meantime she treats the Uber spend as a cost of doing business, because, functionally, it is one.

I ask her where the brand’s insistence on celebrating women’s bodies, rather than hiding them, actually comes from, and she answers without flinching, though the story is a hard one.

At seventeen she was hospitalised. She had been convinced she was overweight and had stopped eating properly, quietly enough that her parents did not realise what was happening; she would throw away food they had made for her rather than tell them. She fainted in the shower one day and was unconscious for close to an hour before an ambulance reached her. She woke up in hospital to a doctor telling her she was severely deficient in iron and the other basics a body needs, and asking, gently, how long it had been since she had eaten.

She is in a different place now, she says, training regularly, eating properly, and wearing her own compression often, not as concealment but because it makes her feel good in her body as it actually is. She does not claim to have arrived anywhere final. What she has built, instead, is a product aimed squarely at the gap she once fell into.

“You don’t need to lose weight to look perfect. The compression underneath your clothes can give you that extra support, that extra shape.”

When a customer messages her to say a product changed how she sees her own shape, Jareño says it as a woman first and a founder second. She knows the particular exhaustion of comparing yourself against a feed designed to be compared against. The seventeen community events she organised in her first year, Pilates mornings, yoga sessions, were never really about moving product. Women arrived for the garment and found, repeatedly, that what they actually wanted was somewhere to say the difficult thing about their body out loud to someone who would not flinch either.

The current target is Los Angeles specifically, chosen for its concentration of surgery clinics and its Latin and Black American markets, with Atlanta and Miami next in line. But the ambition, she is clear, does not stop at American borders. She already has Nigerian clients who love the product, and Lagos is explicitly on her list.

There is a longer-range plan too, one she has actually written into her business plan rather than mentioned in passing: she wants to employ women, and build in the flexibility that she thinks most companies strip away the moment someone becomes a mother. She talks, half-seriously, about putting a kindergarten inside her own building one day, so employees do not have to choose between the job and the child.

Asked what she would tell the twenty-year-old who arrived in London unable to speak the language and cleaning houses to survive, she does not perform the question. She says she thinks she would simply cry, and that she still does not quite believe, on the better days, that any of this is her actual life. “If I went back to when I was twenty,” she said, “I think I would cry a lot. I never thought I would have my own business.”

It is nine in the morning in Los Angeles when we speak, and by her own account the day has already delivered more than she expected from it. There will be a meeting at Soho House this evening, a client in Beverly Hills, and, somewhere behind all of it, a woman who once checked other people’s money for a living, now building something entirely her own, one clinic at a time.