In November, Josie Natori will celebrate the 30th anniversary of her renowned lingerie company with a dinner at La Grenouille. Who’s coming? Steve Sadove, Bill Dillard, Terry Lundgren, Michael Gould, Pete Nordstrom, and Burt Tansky. In other words, just about everybody who counts in the retail fashion world. As she says, “Not bad for a little girl who didn’t know anything about anything.” Not bad, indeed. Ms. Natori has earned the respect of the fashion world by building a great luxury brand and a company that generates $150 million in retail sales a year.

The party will doubtless be grand, but somewhat less exotic than her commemoration of certain past milestones. When she turned 50 a decade ago, she decided to play Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Carnegie Hall, her first public performance since the age of 14. Though she has been practicing a Grieg piece recently, she has decided against a repeat performance for her 60th. After all, it’s a lot of hard work, and she’s been busy organizing her son’s wedding, negotiating with licensees to extend her brand, traveling the world to find the iconic fabrics she is famous for, designing an exquisite couture line for the 30th anniversary, and — oh yes — writing a coffee table book called “The Art of Natori” expected at Rizzoli within a week or two.

Josie Natori does not know how to slow down. Her tiny frame may appear as delicate as the lingerie she produces, but she practically hums with purpose. It is arguably this energy, combined with liberal doses of ambition and intelligence, that has propelled Ms. Natori’s business to worldwide prominence, as opposed to any lifelong passion for design.

Even the directed Ms. Natori, though, has had a couple of hiccups along the way. At 17 she left Manila to attend Manhattanville College in New York. After graduation she went to work for Bache & Company, an old-line brokerage firm. “Six weeks later they discovered I was Filipino,” she says, “and they shipped me off to Manila to help open an office. So there I was, age 22, assistant head of an office. I was up until 2 or 3 in the morning trading. There were two stocks that traded on both the New York and the Manila exchanges, so I made a lot of money arbitraging the two markets. It was great in terms of managerial experience.”

Her family supported her budding financial career, though her traditional father was appalled by her 1960s dress. “My father would croak, ‘How can you be trading hundreds of thousands of dollars and wear those miniskirts?'” she says.

Her parents were even more taken aback by her blooming relationship with a fellow trader, whom she eventually agreed to marry. In deference to their views, however, she broke off her engagement and returned to New York. “I would never disobey my parents,” she says.

That respect didn’t keep her from running off to Europe for a solid year of sulking. She had saved up a little money and made it last by staying in $5 a night hotels. Eventually, however, she blew her remaining $300 on a fur coat (she does admit to being a shopaholic), and was reduced to calling her family for help.

Her mother talked her into returning to New York and joining Merrill Lynch, where she quickly became the company’s first female vice president in investment banking. She stayed with the firm for six years, in the meantime marrying her husband, Ken Natori, an old-line syndicate manager at Smith Barney.

About this time Ms. Natori became restless. Her grandmother had been a successful entrepreneur, running pharmacies, ice plants, movie theaters, and other businesses, and she had set an example for Ms. Natori. She decided to strike out on her own.

She and her husband “looked at a gazillion businesses — brokerage, car washes, McDonald’s franchises, fertilizer companies. … Then I realized it had to be something I could relate to, something to do with the Philippines. I imported a container of baskets, and they took forever to sell. We ended up giving a lot of them away to friends. Then we brought in a container of reproduction furniture that someone had given my father to pay off a debt. That didn’t sell, either.”

Finally, magic struck. A friend sent her a suitcase of hand-embroidered blouses, similar to the peasant blouses popular at the time, which she took to Bloomingdale’s. The buyer there suggested she lengthen the blouses and create nightshirts, advice that Ms. Natori happily followed.

In early 1977, Ms. Natori quit her job. In August she had a trunk show of sorts in her living room. The Saks buyers placed orders for $350,000 and left Ms. Natori to wonder how in the world she could produce 5,000 pieces in four months. She managed to get the goods manufactured by a couple of friends in the Philippines, but soon thereafter she built her own plant, which still produces about half of her merchandise.

As she got started, Ms. Natori was still one step removed from displaying the design talent that has since become the hallmark of her line. “I thought about it as trading,” she recalls. “I never thought about building a brand.” “No one ever taught me anything,” she says. “You become resourceful — that’s part of being an entrepreneur. You figure it out.” On the other hand, the retail business was far different when she started out than it is today. “It was so easy in the beginning. Every store returned my call. Stores are run by Wall Street today — it’s very different. There were 100 stores 30 years ago. Now there are five.”

Ms. Natori’s husband is evidently still squeamish about visiting showrooms strewn with lacy underclothes, but he has been her only business partner since joining the company in 1986. She is elated that her only child, Kenneth, recently decided to leave Wall Street and join the firm. “It was always an issue: What’s the exit strategy?” she says. “Now we don’t need one.”

Not that she seems even close to retiring, though she acknowledges that her husband would like her to slow down, and especially to spend more time in their weekend home in Westchester. “I don’t really need a weekend place,” she says. “If I need trees, I can go to Central Park.”

For now, Ms. Natori continues to build out her business and continueherwhirlwindpace.”There’s an easier way to make a living, and this isn’t it,” she says. “People think it’s glamorous — it isn’t at all. It’s a lot of schlepping and hard work.”

Though she looks wistful when talking about the financial home runs hit by the likes of Giorgio Armani or Ralph Lauren, she also seems happy with her creation.

“I’m very proud,” she says. “We’re still here, 30 years later, and we’re only in the best stores. We’ve kept the integrity of the brand, which is all about luxury. It stands for something.”

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