While her twin sister was crooning tunes in Nashville, Emma Butler was busy building her fashion brand in Paris.

The 24-year-old entrepreneur, raised in Portsmouth and a graduate of Brown University, is the founder and CEO of Liberare, a fashion startup company that has gained international attention for its innovative line of adaptive bras and underwear designed by and for women with disabilities.

Butler has been profiled by Vogue, Forbes and Business Insider and her company in August announced a partnership with Aerie, an intimate apparel and lifestyle brand owned by American Eagle Outfitters.

Butler, who started her first fashion blog with her sister in eighth grade, originally wanted to design her own major at Brown to focus on fashion, but she ended up studying visual arts, including taking some painting classes at RISD.

She also took French, in large part because her sister Zoe encouraged her to step out of her comfort zone and try something new. “I had never taken French before, but my sister encouraged me to,” said Butler, “and then she encouraged me to major in it.”

As much as her visual arts training is helpful in the fashion industry, her decision to study French proved just as influential on her path in life.

“I fell madly in love with the language and the culture, and I lived in the French house at Brown for two years, and that’s what ultimately got me to study abroad," she said. "And if we’re really skipping ahead, that got me my first internship at the location where I am right now.”

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Semester abroad set in motion Emma Butler's path

When she said "right now," Butler was referring to Station F, a former rail freight depot in the 13th arrondissement, near the French National Library and the River Seine. The 370,000-square-foot space is the largest startup incubator in the world, home to Liberare and about a thousand other companies, as well as big corporate partners like Facebook and Microsoft.

She first stumbled across the giant building during her 2019 study abroad because, “they happen to have amazing iced coffee here, and as the true New Englander I am, I drink iced coffee all year round and at the time in 2019 there was no other place to get iced coffee.”

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She was painting, studying French and immersing herself in the city and its culture that semester, but she also thought of the idea that would eventually become Liberare.

She also paid keen attention to the environment in the cavernous building around her iced coffee spot, which was constantly bustling with young entrepreneurs and creative people of all stripes. At that point, she decided she had to stay.

“I applied to every job that had an English-speaking role in marketing, and ended up getting a job at a software company, and I was so excited to spend the summer in Paris — and then (the company) ended up moving to California because we got into this program called Y Combinator,” she said with a wry smile.

She compared her unexpected summer living in California with five French tech entrepreneurs to the television show "Silicon Valley," and reflected on the experience as a valuable deep dive into entrepreneurship, fundraising and how to run a startup.

As an intern, she started working on her own business

She worked 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday to Saturday for that internship. Then on Sundays, instead of taking the day off, she would work on what was at the time called Intimately.

“It was a blog. I was building community, I was understanding and thinking about the business model with fashion and disability and trying to narrow it down,” Butler explained.

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On the last day of her internship, she and her blog were featured in Forbes as one of seven young founders making innovations in the adaptive space.

“That was a big moment for me because I realized that maybe this little side project I’d been working on could actually be something," she said.

Intimately and the community it fostered, including women with chronic illnesses and disabilities and allies in the fashion world, led to Liberare.

“I was always interested in fashion,” Butler said, “and a few people in my life were living with chronic illness and chronic pain … I learned more intimately about how difficult it was for people with chronic illnesses and disabilities to put on bras and underwear …there must be more innovative ways to put on clothing.”

Butler built her company from her parents’ house in Portsmouth during the COVID pandemic, started working with a professional designer named Maddie Highland and hired a team of women with disabilities, including her chief creative officer Alyssa Silva, who hails from Cumberland.

In August 2020, she decided Station F was the best place to build her company, and she packed up her bags and moved back to Paris.

That decision paid off — Intimately raised a million dollars, launched in February 2022 and sold out its first line immediately. The company changed its name to Liberare in June and debuted a lingerie line in partnership with Aerie in August.

Liberare is Latin for 'liberate' or 'set free'

Liberare currently sells two bras, two underwear and a sleepwear set in black and pink. The focus currently is on intimates, but Butler says she has big plans to expand as Liberare continues to generate buzz.

After being mentioned in Cosmopolitan and a few other places, the company landed a full feature in Vogue and was also written up in Business Insider by Portsmouth Abbey alum Annie Sherman.

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Beyond innovations to the way Liberare’s underwear is fastened, Butler and the team of designers she works with have succeeded in part because their underwear is also fashionable and designed to help women feel beautiful and confident.

Liberare is Latin for “liberate” or “set free,” and that idea is central to Liberare’s goal to create underwear, including lingerie, that is both adaptable and beautiful.

Liberare is on Instagram and Facebook, and has a website at liberare.co that includes an online group called “Liberbabes” of a few hundred women living with various disabilities and illnesses who talk to each other about many different topics, but also give feedback on products.

Several of the company’s officers and interns also are women living with disabilities, and the company is very plugged into the community it serves.

“One of the best parts of Liberare is our community and designing closely with them,” Butler said. “So they were excited to buy all the products when they came out. And I think that’s what really got Aerie excited, too, is innovation around the products but also our community and how devoted they are.”

This article originally appeared on Newport Daily News: Meet Emma Butler: Founder of an adaptive intimate apparel company