What she found in a small textile workshop in Nepal would become the starting point for an entirely new kind of compression stocking.
When Anna saw her mother, Monika, sitting on the edge of the bed again that morning, she already knew what was coming.
Beside her lay a pair of beige compression stockings.
Monika picked up the first stocking, pulled it over her toes, and tried to work the stiff fabric over her heel.
She pulled.
Adjusted her grip.
Pulled again.
After just a few seconds, she let go, exhausted.
“I can't do this today.”
To someone else, it might have been just a stocking.
For Monika, it had become a battle every morning.
And for her daughter, Anna, there came a point when she couldn't watch it happen one more time.
Monika had always been an active woman.
She took care of her family, spent much of the day on her feet, and for a long time, didn't think much of it when her legs felt heavy in the evening.
But over the years, something changed.
Especially around menopause, the discomfort grew worse.
Her ankles swelled.
By evening, her shoes felt tight.
Her legs felt heavy and hot.
Sometimes her skin burned.
Then came the tingling and other uncomfortable sensations.
On some days, certain areas even felt numb.
Severe or persistent swelling can increase pressure within the tissues and put additional strain on sensitive structures. Eventually, Monika could only describe it this way:
“My legs feel like there's pressure building up inside them.”
What had started as discomfort was beginning to shape her entire day.
Standing for any length of time became tiring.
Hot summer days were miserable.
And by evening, all Monika really wanted was to put her feet up.
Eventually, her doctors recommended compression stockings.
And the compression itself did help her.
There was just one problem:
The stockings themselves were becoming more and more of a burden.
The medical stockings were so firm that Monika found it harder and harder to put them on by herself.
Some days, she needed Anna's help.
Other days, she eventually gave up and went without them.
Then there was the heat.
Especially in summer, heat built up beneath the dense fabric.
Her skin itched. The stockings started to smell unpleasant and needed constant washing.
After a few hours, the fabric felt uncomfortable.
And after a long day, Monika really wanted only one thing:
To take them off.
The cost bothered Anna, too.
High-quality medical compression garments can be expensive, depending on the design, compression level, and fitting required. Then there are measurements, replacements, and the ongoing need for new garments.
So Anna kept coming back to the same question:
Why did there seem to be only two options?
Comfortable stockings that didn't offer enough support.
Or firm compression that was hard to put on and that her mother didn't want to wear all day.
One day, Anna said:
“Something that's supposed to make your day easier shouldn't be a problem before the day has even started.”
She couldn't get that thought out of her head.
At first, she looked in the obvious places.
Different compression stockings.
Different manufacturers.
Different materials.
Different countries.
She ordered different styles from Europe and the United States.
Some were softer.
Others were a little easier to put on.
Still others felt better against the skin.
But there was always a trade-off.
When the fabric was soft, Monika missed the feeling of support.
When the compression was firmer, getting them on became the same old struggle.
Eventually, Anna changed what she was looking for.
She stopped searching for the perfect compression stocking.
She started looking for people who understood how to bring pressure, stretch, and comfort together in a fabric.
And that search eventually took her somewhere neither she nor her mother had expected.
6,500 kilometers from Germany.
To Nepal.
Anna had pictured a modern textile factory.
But when she finally stepped inside the small workshop in Pokhara, she found something completely different.
No endless assembly lines.
No enormous factory floors.
No anonymous mass production.
Instead, women and men sat at their workstations, completely absorbed in what they were doing.
Fine yarns lay in front of them.
Stitches were checked.
Tension was adjusted.
Threads were guided with such precision that Anna stood watching for minutes at a time.
There was something almost meditative about it.
The same calm movements, over and over.
Thread by thread.
Stitch by stitch.
Steady.
Focused.
Almost painstaking.
One woman kept running the yarn through her fingers before working with it.
At another table, every finished piece was checked again.
Not with a quick glance.
But centimeter by centimeter.
What Anna saw there wasn't conventional industrial production.
It was craftsmanship.
The small workshop was run by Sunita and her family.
Textile craftsmanship had been part of their family story for generations.
Now in its fifth generation, the family worked with yarns, knitting techniques, and stretch fabrics that no large corporation could reproduce on an industrial scale.
Sunita had learned her skills from her own family.
Now her son, Rajan, worked alongside her in the workshop.
One day, he hoped to take over the business.
But it wasn't just the family's precision that fascinated Anna.
It was the kinds of textiles they knew how to make.
Because some of their knowledge came from a field where fabric can quite literally shape someone's quality of life.
Among other things, the family worked with stretch fabrics and pressure garments for especially sensitive skin.
They sold their fabrics to a nearby hospital in Bhaktapur that treated burn survivors from the surrounding regions.
Materials like these also play a role in caring for extensive scars after severe burns.
Until then, no one else had shown interest in their fabrics—and the small Nepalese family didn't have the money or the know-how to bring their unique fabrics to the rest of the world.
Suddenly, Anna understood just how demanding the requirements for a fabric like this could be.
Because imagine this:
You're wearing a close-fitting garment for more than an hour.
More than an afternoon.
Sometimes, for almost the entire day.
Day after day.
For months.
The fabric has to apply pressure.
It has to fit close to the body.
It can't lose its shape after just a few hours.
And at the same time, it's touching skin that may be especially sensitive.
Too much friction?
A problem.
Too much heat?
Uncomfortable.
An uneven fit?
Another problem.
So for the people in that little workshop, a stretch fabric wasn't simply about making something:
“As tight as possible.”
They thought about how tension was distributed.
Stitch density.
Stretch.
Contact with the skin.
Movement.
And comfort.
Anna picked up a piece of the material.
She stretched it between her hands.
The fabric gave—and drew back together in a controlled way.
It felt completely different from her mother's firm medical stockings.
And suddenly, she had an idea.
Anna thought about her mother again.
About the places where the stockings dug in.
About the stiff top band.
About the uncomfortable feeling of the compression simply stopping at a certain point.
And she asked herself a different question:
What if, instead of squeezing just part of the leg into a tight stocking, the support extended around the whole leg?
From the ankle.
Up over the calf.
Over the knee.
All the way to the thigh.
Not as a medical-looking stocking.
As leggings.
Leggings with a fabric structure that wraps around the whole leg and spreads support over a much larger area.
Anna wasn't looking for even stronger compression.
She wanted a smarter way to distribute support.
A kind of compression legging that adapted to the leg as a whole.
Of course, Anna couldn't simply bring her mother to Nepal for several weeks.
So they improvised.
Working with the family, Anna started by making small fabric samples.
Different yarns.
Different knit densities.
Different tension zones.
And, above all:
Different ways to distribute stretch along the entire leg.
The most promising versions eventually became the first full leggings prototypes.
Anna packed them up and sent them to Germany.
A few days later, her phone rang.
It was Monika.
“They're still too tight at the bottom.”
So it was back to the worktable.
The next prototype arrived.
“Much more comfortable. But something still isn't right at the knee.”
Back to work again.
The third felt good, but still didn't give Monika enough support around her calves.
The fourth fit better—but was still too warm after several hours.
It went on like that for weeks.
Nepal developed.
Germany tested.
Nepal refined.
Sometimes Anna and her mother stayed on a video call while Monika tried on the latest prototype.
Anna watched closely.
How easily did the fabric go over her feet?
Over her calves?
Over her knees?
Did Monika have to pull hard?
Did anything dig in?
How did her legs feel after an hour?
And in the evening?
Anna took notes.
Then she carried them the few steps back into the workshop.
There, they knitted again.
Made changes again.
Tested again.
Thread by thread.
Stitch by stitch.
Monika sat on the edge of her bed, as she always did.
She picked up the latest prototype.
Pulled it over her feet.
Over her calves.
Over her knees.
And finally, up over her thighs.
Anna was watching on a video call.
She waited for the feedback.
Too tight?
Too loose?
Slipping down?
Scratchy?
Digging in anywhere?
Instead, Monika just looked at her daughter.
Then she said:
“Anna … is that it?”
No spending minutes tugging at an extremely firm compression stocking.
No stiff top band pressing uncomfortably into her swollen leg.
And, most of all, no more feeling that just one part of her leg was being squeezed.
For the first time, Monika felt supported along her whole leg.
From her ankle, over her calf and knee, all the way up to her thigh.
She stood up.
Took a few steps.
The leggings fit close to her body.
But this felt different.
Softer.
More flexible.
More evenly spread out.
To Monika, it felt less like “squeezing” and more like even support along her entire leg.
And that moment became the beginning of Coreex—the brand the leggings would later become known by.
Together with the workshop, Anna continued developing the distinctive 3D knit structure.
The idea was this:
Go beyond simply making a stocking as tight as possible.
Create a fabric with a three-dimensional structure that follows the shape of the entire leg.
Leggings that don't suddenly stop at the calf or thigh with a stiff band around the edge.
Instead, one continuous fabric structure.
From ankle to thigh.
The different parts of the leg weren't meant to be treated exactly the same.
Instead, they worked with different stitch densities, yarn tensions, and stretch zones.
The aim was for the leggings to wrap around and support the leg over a broad area, instead of simply squeezing individual areas as tightly as possible.
The fabric needed to allow movement.
Still feel secure.
And offer support without making Monika feel as if she had to force her legs into stiff medical compression stockings every morning.
Coreex later filed a patent application for the 3D knitting technology that grew out of this work.
After countless prototypes, the product was finally ready.
But that brought an entirely new problem.
After they had refined the first prototypes again and again, Anna made a decision:
She wanted to make Coreex available to other women in Germany, too.
Carefully, at first.
One small initial production run.
No huge quantities.
After all, no one knew whether other women had the same problem as Monika—or whether this new kind of compression would feel the same to them.
But shortly after the launch, something happened that neither Anna nor the family in Nepal had expected.
The first customers told other women about them.
Orders started coming in.
Then more and more.
And suddenly, that first production run was:
Completely sold out.
The family in Nepal kept working.
More leggings were made and sent to Germany.
But as soon as the next shipment became available, the warehouse was empty again sooner than expected.
Sold out again.
By the time Coreex had sold out completely for the third time, Anna understood:
Finding enough customers for her idea was no longer the problem.
Now the problem was:
How were they going to make enough leggings?
The small workshop had the knowledge.
It had the experience.
And it could deliver exactly the quality that had made Anna want to work with them in the first place.
But there were only so many machines.
The rooms were small.
Many steps took time.
And as more and more orders came in from Germany, the people in Nepal could barely keep up with production.
Anna had a decision to make.
She could have taken what they had developed and moved to a large industrial manufacturer.
Modern production lines.
More capacity.
Faster delivery times.
It probably would have been the easier path.
But to Anna, it felt wrong.
The people in Nepal weren't just another supplier she could replace.
They had developed Coreex with her.
So she decided to keep production where it was.
And build it up together with them.
Together with the family, Anna began expanding production on site.
They financed new machines.
Expanded the production space.
Modernized workstations.
And trained people from the surrounding area in the special knitting and manufacturing techniques.
The small workshop began to grow.
But its original knowledge wasn't swept aside in favor of anonymous mass production.
Quite the opposite.
The new machines were meant to preserve the precision of the original process, even at higher volumes.
The workers learned to combine modern equipment with the family's textile expertise.
At the same time, something was taking shape that Anna had never imagined when she began her journey.
New jobs.
What had started with a single family didn't go unnoticed for long.
People nearby heard that the workshop was hiring.
They stopped by.
Received training.
Learned to operate the machines.
Check quality.
Work with yarns.
And make Coreex's distinctive knit structure.
For some, it was their first chance to find steady work close to home.
Without having to move far away for good.
As production grew, so did the economic opportunities for several local families.
And little by little, the small workshop became an employer for the surrounding community.
But one thing was never meant to change:
The commitment to quality.
To this day, the yarns are handled with great precision.
Knit patterns are checked.
Pieces with irregularities are set aside.
And the people who work on Coreex know exactly where the product came from.
Not from an anonymous product concept.
From a problem they wanted to solve together with Anna.
Watch them at work today, and you'll see the same concentration as in those early days.
Calm.
Steady.
Precise.
Almost meditative.
But at some point, she realized:
Monika wasn't the only woman with this problem.
Many women know what heavy legs feel like.
Swollen ankles.
Fluid retention.
A feeling of tightness.
Uncomfortable legs after a long day of sitting or standing.
And many also know the daily struggle with traditional compression stockings:
The effort of getting them on.
The stiff fabric.
The digging in.
And the feeling that the compression ends right where the leg could still use support.
There are also women who want their legs to feel smoother and more supported, and who wear the leggings, for example, with the appearance of cellulite in mind.
What had started as a solution just for Monika could suddenly reach many more people.
And that was the opportunity Anna saw.
She didn't want what they had developed to stay within her family.
She wanted to share it with the world.
At first, Anna had only wanted to solve one problem.
Her mother's.
She wanted Monika to stop having to sit on the edge of her bed every morning, struggling with compression stockings that dug into her legs.
But once the Coreex leggings became available in Germany, she quickly realized:
Monika was far from alone.
More and more women discovered Coreex.
Women with heavy legs.
Women with fluid retention.
Women who stand all day.
Women who sit for hours.
And women who knew traditional compression stockings all too well—but were tired of the digging, the firm compression, or the struggle to put them on.
What had first been made in small quantities began reaching more and more people.
The first batch sold out.
Then the second.
And eventually, Coreex had sold out completely for the third time.
At times, the workers in Nepal could barely make enough leggings to keep up with orders from Germany.
Anna's personal search had suddenly become a product that thousands of women were asking for.
And that is what still makes the story so special to her.
Because every time someone in Germany orders a new pair of Coreex leggings, its journey begins in the place where Anna first stepped into that little workshop years ago.
In Nepal.
With the people who helped her turn an idea for her mother into something much bigger.
Today, there are new machines there.
The workshop has grown.
People from the surrounding village have found new jobs.
And yet, when Anna visits, she still sees the same scene she saw at the very beginning:
People sitting with their yarns, completely focused.
Thread by thread.
Stitch by stitch.
With a precision that feels almost meditative.
Only now, the leggings they make no longer leave in just one small package addressed to Monika in Germany.
Women all across Germany wear them.
And to Anna, the fact that Coreex has already sold out completely three times may be the most heartening proof that her mother was never alone in her struggle.
It all began with a few words on the edge of a bed:
“I can't do this today.”
Today, Monika no longer has to struggle with her old compression stockings every morning.
And the solution Anna had wanted to create just for her became a pair of compression leggings that is beginning to change the way more and more women think about compression.
Designed around the whole leg. For the whole leg.