A concept of hierarchical stiffened shell is proposed in this study, aiming at reducing the imperfection sensitivity without adding additional weight. Hierarchical stiffened shell is composed of major stiffeners and minor stiffeners, and the minor stiffeners are generally distributed between adjacent major stiffeners. For various types of geometric imperfections, e.g., eigenmode-shape imperfections, hierarchical stiffened shell shows significantly low imperfection sensitivity compared to traditional stiffened shell. Furthermore, a surrogate-based optimization framework is proposed to search for the hierarchical optimum design. Then, two optimum designs based on two different optimization objectives (including the critical buckling load and the weighted sum of collapse loads of geometrically imperfect shells with small- and large-amplitude imperfections) are compared and discussed in detail. The illustrative example demonstrates the inherent superiority of hierarchical stiffened shells in resisting imperfections and the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Moreover, the decrease of imperfection sensitivity can finally be converted into a decrease of structural weight, which is particularly important in the development of large-diameter launch vehicles.