When Jeans Don’t Fit a Woman Past Adolescence, a Business Is Born

By JAMES FLANIGAN
Lisa Rudes Sandel recalled an unhappy experience in the Barneys New York store in Beverly Hills a few years ago. She said she had tried on a fashionable pair of jeans but found they didn’t fit right — too small in places, made for the low-cut look that was then the rage.

Ms. Sandel told the sales clerk she didn’t like the jeans. “But I felt worse when I left the store than when I walked in,” she recalled recently. “They didn’t fit me, but no way I’m a size 13. The jeans weren’t made for someone 40 years old.”

Ms. Sandel, however, was not just any woman shopping in vain for a garment that fit right. She was in the apparel business, working with her father, George Rudes, at St. Germain, a maker of women’s sportswear. So she talked to him about her idea of “making a jean for women who were not being paid attention to.”

From that beginning in 2004, the family started a new company, named Not Your Daughter’s Jeans — with a NYDJ label. Ms. Sandel, her father and her sister, Leslie Rudes, put together an investment of $250,000 for the start-up. And in April 2005, they brought out the Tummy Tuck jean line, which features strategic reinforcements.

“We put in panels to reinforce the tummy,” Mr. Rudes explained, demonstrating with a pair of NYDJ jeans at his factory in Vernon, an exclusively industrial city with no residents near downtown Los Angeles. “But we use stretch fabric so there is give in the thighs. This jean is made for women with curves.”

Understanding the older customer is one of two advantages he says the company has. “Our customers are sizes 10, 12 and 14 — we’re reaching the baby boomers who are in their 50’s,” said Mr. Rudes, who is 77 years old and has worked in the apparel business since he was a teenager.

“Oh, but I know women of 38 who love these jeans,” said Ms. Sandel, 42, who speaks to customers at department and specialty stores around the country as part of NYDJ’s marketing.

Whatever their age, women evidently are buying the product. “The year we brought out Tummy Tuck, our sales went to $7 million from $2.2 million the previous year when we were in St. Germain,” Mr. Rudes said, referring to the 26-year-old company that he has closed, at least for now. And this year, “we’ll do $40 million.”

Tummy Tuck jeans, which retail for $88 a pair at Nordstrom, Dillard’s, Macy’s and Bloomingdales and 1,000 specialty stores, are a fashion product, he explained, a niche in the enormous blue jeans market where 450 million pairs are sold every year.

But being in the fashion segment calls up the other advantage Mr. Rudes claims for his company: NYDJ jeans are made in the United States from denim fabric imported from China. “The great majority of jeans sell for under $30 a pair at Wal-Mart, Costco and other mass retailers and they can wait the 90 to 120 days it takes to get delivery from China,” Mr. Rudes explained. “But stores want up-to-the-minute fashion and quick changes, so you have to make the products here.”

NYDJ, which does the designing, finishing and shipping, relies on a network of specialized factories to do the cutting, sewing and laundering. And those factories are not in other countries, but close by in the busy industrial streets near downtown Los Angeles.

It is a surprisingly vibrant complex of businesses for an industry that many people think went overseas a long time ago. There are 11,529 companies in the Los Angeles and Southern California textile and apparel industry, a larger garment industry than in any other American city, according to Ilse Metchek, head of the California Fashion Association, an industry group. They employ 122,362 workers.

To be sure, there are fewer employees today than worked here a decade ago. But currently business is brisk because modern retailers want flexibility and speed.

For example Moshe Tsabag, owner of Hot Kiss, a maker of clothing and accessories for teenage girls, needs “quick turnaround time because the stores are demanding quicker deliveries to react to new trends.” Mr. Tsabag, who has 28 years in the garment trade, said, “It’s difficult to find enough contractors in Los Angeles to handle all the work.”

He could have a new supplier in Karl Nusser, a garment industry entrepreneur from South Africa who came to Los Angeles three months ago and purchased California Sewing Services, a contractor with 160 industrial sewing machines. Mr. Nusser plans to offer garment makers and retailers more than sewing services by acquiring other contractors. “It could be cheaper to have a one-stop shop from pattern making to finished garment,” he said.

On the other hand, specialization and decentralization are age-old in the business. Todd Rutkin Inc., for example, is a cutting service dating to 1966. The company now has six computerized cutting machines slicing fabric precisely in a high-ceilinged room resembling an airplane hangar at its south Los Angeles factory.

The factory is run by Jan Rutkin, president and daughter of the founder. Cutting is a tough business, Ms. Rutkin said. “In a $20 garment, 50 cents is the cutting,” she said. “You need a lot of volume.”

It is a tough business but one that creates a variety of jobs in the Los Angeles area. Operators of expensive computerized machinery can make $15 an hour with benefits, Ms. Rutkin said. And employees who gain advanced skills can move up.

Sela Garcia, who took special courses as Los Angeles Trade Tech College, is a manager in the grading and marking department at Todd Rutkin. She must enter patterns on a computer program, calculating how machines are to cut garments in all the various sizes and dimensions. Ms Garcia is paid more than $50,000 a year, Ms. Rutkin said.

Some jobs are unique. Margie Milaney, for example, is a “fit” model. That is, she is a perfect size 8, so clothing is tested on her and adjusted to make it fit without hitches or wrinkles. Patterns for other sizes are adjusted up and down from size 8. Ms. Milaney, 67, models for many companies, including Wal-Mart and Not Your Daughter’s Jeans — at rates of $175 an hour, according to George Rudes. How does she remain a perfect size 8? “I exercise and watch what I eat,” Ms. Milaney said. “Wal-Mart measures you every month.”

Of course, in a fast-moving field like apparel, NYDJ’s success with Tummy Tuck jeans could be threatened by competitors producing a reinforced jean of their own. “You cannot patent a clothing design,” Ms. Metchek of California Fashion pointed out.

Mr. Rudes is not concerned, because working with stretch fabrics is not so easy, he said. Mr. Rudes recalled starting out selling fabric for his father’s company in New York: “I’d go to every apparel house and say ‘we have brown, do you want to buy brown?’ ”

And now, Ms. Sandel said, “NYDJ is producing other styles and colors, including Tummy Tuck skirts in brown corduroy. Chocolate brown is the new black.”

This column about small-business trends in California and the West appears on the third Thursday of every month. E-mail: jamesflanigan@nytimes.com

Pink Taxi Business

Delhi women rate buses as most unsafe place: Survey

NEW DELHI: Buses in the capital have received a thumbs-down from women, with 50 per cent finding them as the most unsafe place in the city, a survey has found.

In a study titled "How Secure or Insecure are Women in the City of Delhi" by the National Institute of Criminology and Forensic Science, 50 per cent of respondents said they consider buses as most unsafe for women.

Autos came a distant second (20 per cent) in the study conducted for the Bureau of Police Research and Development, where 630 respondents were interview in markets, colleges, railway stations, malls, ISBT, airport, slums and villages.

Ten per cent of the women felt the roadside was an area of high insecurity.

Old Delhi ranked fourth in this regard, with seven per cent perceiving this part of the capital as unsafe.

The survey, conducted to study the perception level of insecurity among women in the capital, also found that market places and colleges are places where women feel most insecure.

About 80.40 per cent of women interviewed at market places said they felt insecure at the place, while the figure for colleges was 72.10 per cent. Shopping malls came third where 60 per cent of respondents said they felt insecure.

The level of insecurity was lowest among slum dwellers (8.70 per cent) followed by respondents from villages (22.8 per cent).

Girl Power in the Form of a Pink Taxi

The service “Pink taxi” created in August 2006 for transportation of women and children only, is getting more and more popular in Moscow. The new service is aimed at helping women to avoid taxi rape cases quite frequent nowadays. The absence of men in a taxi car is a positive factor for both female Moscow citizens anxious about their safety and for Muslim women.
At the moment the auto park of the service has 10 pink cars Daewoo Matiz and Nexia, and the staff consists of 20 female drivers. Originally created for women and children only, now the service lets men get into taxi cars too if they are accompanied by a woman. On of the passengers of “Pink taxi” says: “Some ill-bred persons claim this all has to do with feminists and lesbians, while many women and their husbands feel better about being in a car with a female driver”.


It's 3 a.m. A girl -- pretty, drunk, wearing a bit less than might be prudent -- stumbles out of a club. She hails a cab and voila, three Ladas line up to give her a ride.

Within no time, the driver has agreed on a price, and off they go. What happens next, said police spokesman Vladimir Korobkov, is not unheard of: In tatters, cold, bleeding, the girl wakes up in a park a couple hours later, having been drugged and raped. She's lucky to be alive.

Admittedly, Korobkov said, these cases are rare. But not that rare, even among established cab companies.

Now women who are tired of predatory taxi drivers -- whose behavior ranges from flirtatious to violent -- have a new way home.

Pink Taxi is a Moscow service run by women for women. Not only does the company guarantee a safe ride, Pink Taxi drivers also offer advice, share gossip and make a concerted effort to lift their passengers' spirits.

Passengers say they're never going back to male cab drivers.

"I don't know where to start," said Olga Kuznetsova, 34, a mother of three who travels with her kids in Pink Taxis at least twice a week. "The male drivers smoke, spit, play loud music, and generally don't give a damn about the comfort of the passenger."

Olga Fomina, 34, Pink Taxi's general director, explained their success. "By mobilizing women, we are solving the safety problem they run into in taxis," she said.

Fomina and two girlfriends launched the cab service in August. All three women had been working in real estate but had grown tired of their jobs.

Business has been growing almost from Day One.

In August, Pink Taxi received just 20 calls. Today, the company averages 140 calls per day. Alas, demand is outstripping supply: The company can only answer 70 of those.

As business has boomed, Pink Taxi has diversified its services. It now picks up kids from school, buys and delivers flowers, and even takes care of the weekly run to the grocery store.

Still, the company has yet to outgrow its original corporate headquarters -- a couple of cramped, wood-paneled offices in an industrial park on the fringes of eastern Moscow.

"Before we created the company, everyone was so skeptical about the idea," Fomina said, adding that male friends poked fun at it.

Fomina was a bored real estate agent in January 2006, when she heard a radio dispatch on women-only taxi services in London and Tokyo. Pooling their resources, Fomina and her two friends launched Pink Taxi.

In the beginning, the company's "fleet" of taxis, as Fomina put it, comprised two Daewoo Nexia cars; they had two female drivers.

Six months later, they have 20 Daewoos and 27 drivers. Soon, the company will replace its cars with Volvo S40s. Barely containing a smile, Fomina said: "We're going strong."

She stressed that the passengers weren't the only ones in need of a helping hand.

Pink Taxi's drivers -- all female -- have been to university and are aged 27 to 55. Fomina noted that for many in their mid-thirties it's tough to find work. "After having kids, what is there for a woman to do?"

Pink Taxi's success appears to have prompted competition.

In November, Ladies Red Taxi, based in Khimki, opened. The company is getting 50 calls daily, and most of that call load comes from foreign women, said Oksana Bolshakova, the company's deputy director.

With a fleet of 10 Chevrolets, 20 female drivers aged 27 to 45 and similar, slightly above-market prices, Ladies Red Taxi has had to differentiate itself from Pink Taxi by marketing to both women and men.

Despite the women cab companies' recent success, shuttling Muscovites around town is still very much a man's business. There are fewer than 100 professional female cab drivers in Moscow out of a total of 3,500. New Yellow Taxi, Moscow's biggest cab company, with a fleet of 1,500 cars, has just 15 female drivers, said the company's marketing director, Edvard Mkhitaryan.

Besides the professional cabbies are the 40,000-plus gypsy cab drivers, noted Yury Sveshnikov, director of the Moscow Transportation Union. Gypsy cab culture tends to be tougher and scrappier and is dominated by men from the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Indeed, gypsy cab driver Vyacheslav Sokolnikov is against women driving at all. "They slow down traffic," he said, "and they don't have the necessary coordination to drive a car."

Women cab companies' executives laugh off the charge that women shouldn't be driving taxis, but their arrival on Moscow roads are raising questions about discrimination and women's rights.

"What if a guy urgently needs to get somewhere, and there are no other options available?" asked Korobkov, the city police spokesman.

New Taxi's Mkhitaryan said: "Yes, I think Pink Taxi is a good idea. But then, communism was a good idea, too."

Prominent feminist Maria Arbatova shrugged off the criticism.

"The labeling of a taxi service for women as sexist is paramount to calling a female restroom sexist," Arbatova added. "The absence of such services was a manifestation of sexism

No Substitute for Getting Personal, if You Want the Perfect Fit

Zafu.com, founded by Robert Holloway and Angelique Augereau, in reflection, uses a questionnaire to help women find just the right jeans. By BOB TEDESCHI For all its innovations, the Internet has yet to crack what is, for many, one of life’s most vexing problems: how to find jeans that won’t make your backside look like a tractor-trailer. A new online business, Zafu.com, believes that it has made progress on that front. Unlike, say, Amazon — which analyzes a visitor’s browsing and buying behavior and recommends merchandise bought by others with similar behavior — Zafu’s approach relies on users to do a little of the work. On the site, which is basically a search engine for clothes, visitors click through a questionnaire of about a dozen items, after which Zafu determines the visitor’s body type and displays what it believes are the best-fitting jeans to suit that visitor (it offers only female styles for now). Each pair is modeled from several angles, along with a link to the product page of retailers selling the item. The company, which introduced its Web site in August, can already point to a rapidly growing base of customers and merchant partners as evidence of popularity. The company’s early success underscores the industry’s slow but steady progress in personalization — finding ways to match customers with their stated or implied product preferences, and thereby satisfy what analysts say is a central consumer need. “Online shoppers are control freaks, and the tools they like the best give them the ability to customize something and do product comparisons,” said Lauren Freedman, president of the E-Tailing Group, an Internet consulting firm. “So I definitely see consumer appeal in what Zafu is doing.” Robert Holloway, Zafu’s chief executive, said the service had been about two years in the making. Starting early last year the company recruited women to come to its office in Emeryville, Calif., to test its recommendation system, and try on jeans. “At first, the accuracy was really low, about 50 percent,” as at other apparel sites in general, Mr. Holloway said. About 20 percent to 50 percent of all jeans bought online, he added, are returned. “Slowly but surely, we got it to the point where 94 percent of the women who went through our process said the jeans fit them great.” Since Zafu.com made its debut, Mr. Holloway said, the site’s traffic has grown rapidly, to more than 100,000 visitors this month, with virtually no marketing. The company makes money by earning a commission of 5 percent to 15 percent on every pair of jeans sold on the hundreds of retail sites with which it has agreements. Ms. Freedman said one drawback of Zafu’s service was that it did not weigh heavily enough a user’s brand preference. “I got a few hip choices, but it also returned me some brands I wouldn’t buy even if they fit me,” she said. “The label, for a lot of women, is as big a factor as the fit. But it’s still a really good service.” Elsewhere in the e-commerce industry, personalization technologies are growing quickly in importance, analysts and executives said, as retailers try to counter the effects of rising marketing costs by squeezing more sales from first-time visitors and more repeat sales from longtime customers. Overstock.com, whose quarterly earnings reported earlier this month fell far short of projections, is turning to two types of personalization technologies to help visitors find merchandise more easily from among the more than 700,000 items on the site. According to Patrick M. Byrne, Overstock’s chief executive, the site last week rolled out a “gift finder” service, in which visitors receive gift recommendations determined by their answers to several questions, including the age and gender of the gift recipient, and how the user describes the recipient’s lifestyle. The technology behind the service, which is provided by ChoiceStream, a Web site personalization company in Cambridge, Mass., essentially assigns a series of attributes to millions of items according to their brands, styles and prices, among many factors. The more the service is used, the more accurately it can predict which of Overstock’s items will appeal to people with a certain personality. Mr. Byrne said Overstock also began using another service last month, Aggregate Knowledge in San Mateo, Calif., that works in a manner similar to Amazon’s recommendation system. Starting this week, he said, the system would recommend products to visitors according to their buying history on the site, or their browsing history there (which Overstock tracks). In both cases, a user will be shown items that others with similar browsing or purchasing behavior have considered. Mr. Byrne said the site’s personalization effort was “one of many” he was working on to improve the company’s performance. “I have a lot of hopes for this,” he said. Martha Rogers, a partner with the Peppers & Rogers Group, a consulting firm, said, “We’re seeing more sites starting to do this sort of thing, but it’s been frightfully slow.” The number of technology vendors offering the service, including specialized companies like ChoiceStream, Aggregate Knowledge and Sento, as well as larger e-commerce software companies like ATG Inc., is growing. And even though it is not particularly expensive or difficult to deploy personalization technology, Ms. Rogers said, many retailers “are stuck in the mindset where it’s just more efficient to treat everyone the same way.” Dennis R. Hernreich, chief operating officer of the Casual Male Retail Group, which sells clothing sized for big and tall customers, is planning to change the retailer’s site into one that is personalized to the tastes of individual users. At the moment, the company uses a fairly common approach: sending out e-mail with recommendations gleaned from a customer’s past buying or browsing behavior. That e-mail essentially leads the user to a customized Web page. Next year, though, Mr. Hernreich said Casual Male would rely on technology from ATG to guide each of the site’s visitors “right to what you’d be most interested in.” That effort, he said, is similar to one in Casual Male’s retail stores, which offer merchandise according to the various lifestyles prevalent in a particular community. “Whenever we put relevant offerings in our stores, it’s considerably improved the sales of that store,” he said. “This is no different, really. We’re just adding a bit more technology to it.”

Big Impact in a Small Format

by Thomas Ripsam, Alonso Martinez, and Carlos Navarro

10/11/07
Large retailers are beginning to see the beauty of a tinier world.

J.B. Beaumont, a convenience store operator in the U.K.’s East Midlands, saw less-than-stellar sales in its six stores — and recognized an opportunity. Changing demographics in the region, such as smaller families and more single-head households, were creating a valuable segment for a retailer that could provide a broad array of products in a format suited to these groups.

To cater to their needs, Beaumont began offering both takeout meals and meals that a family can prepare at home with minimum effort. It added cold beverages that can be consumed immediately; traditional grocery items, such as condiments, in smaller packages; and single-serving sundries such as aspirin. In short, it moved into the middle ground between, say, a fish-and-chips shop that can provide a meal but not much else and a grocery store that can meet all of a shopper’s needs but might also eat up an hour of her time. Beaumont’s new format did so well that it attracted the attention of giant J. Sainsbury PLC, which acquired the smaller retailer in November 2004.

The popularity of small format retail stores isn’t limited to Europe’s mature and affluent markets. The same trend is gaining traction in Latin America, where convenience store retailer Oxxo, for instance, has established around 4,000 stores in Mexico and is adding 300 to 400 stores there per year. The stores operate as franchises, usually owned by locals who are familiar with the micromarket in which the store is located and can customize service to the neighborhood’s needs. Stores in neighborhoods where residents return home late at night remain open 24 hours; other stores deliver to nearby areas with high numbers of elderly or affluent residents. Oxxo is building on the region’s traditional changarros, or mom-and-pop stores, by personalizing its service for its customers.

After years of hype about “big box” retailing, we see an increasing number of small format success stories, ranging from convenience stores, such as Beaumont in the U.K. and Oxxo in Mexico, to discounters, such as Germany’s Aldi and EKI Descuento in Argentina, which sell basic staples and key grocery items in a cost-effective neighborhood format. The interest in small formats may soon extend to the United States, as well, where big retailers including Wal-Mart and Publix already are experimenting with the idea.

However, the trend isn’t limited to purveyors of food items. Regardless of whether the smaller stores are selling groceries, electronics, clothing, or home goods, there are three major reasons that retailers should consider how small formats could work in their markets. One is that the consumer experience in massive retail establishments is becoming increasingly unattractive. The amount of time it takes to negotiate the seemingly endless aisles is a drawback to harried shoppers — and it's made worse when they hit the checkout and run into dozens of other people in a hurry. The size of the store also takes away from personalized service and doesn’t allow for a product assortment tailored to a particular demographic niche.

Lower-income shoppers, in particular, find that they are not comfortable in large stores because service is less personal and the broad assortment of products drives home how little they can afford. Furthermore, getting to large stores, which are often located far from city centers, is difficult for this group of shoppers, who have to spend money to get there and may even lose hourly wages if it’s truly out of the way. Going farther to a bigger store is only a good value, in terms of the total cost of purchase, if the big store offers substantially lower prices — and even then, the resulting savings are usually not enough to offset the cost of public transportation.

Essentially, consumers will still patronize those large establishments, but many of them want to complement that shopping with frequent stops at more conveniently located establishments.

A second reason for rising interest in small formats is that economics and technology have shifted the value proposition. Smaller stores are no longer necessarily saddled with higher prices or lesser quality. Savvy operators of chains of smaller stores are able to achieve efficiencies of scale in procuring their merchandise and are then able to distribute those goods to specific stores through distribution channels that have been much improved by computerization and supply chain logistics.

Last, small formats offer retailers a more intimate relationship with customers and employees and therefore allow for genuine innovation in store design and even business model design. At Oxxo, for example, store operators are not just employees; as franchisees, they receive a share of the store’s profits. However, Oxxo frequently makes all of the necessary capital investments to ensure consistency across the chain, such as purchasing standard shelving, microwaves, and refrigerated displays. Oxxo’s store displays, layouts, and product assortment — with modern fixtures, lighting, and high standards of cleanliness — are much more appealing than those of traditional Mexican mom-and-pop stores. Oxxo’s parent company also drives intensive promotional and bundled offerings by, for example, offering Marlboro cigarettes with a free lighter or a bottle of Coke bundled with a discounted Powerade. The business model is novel — and effective.

Interestingly, the small format trend is widening in both Europe and Latin America, which have entirely different demographics and income levels. In Europe’s affluent economies, consumers are looking for convenience items, including meals, to suit the busy lifestyles of single heads of households. Retailing in Latin America, by contrast, is focused much more on low-income and larger families. Part of the explanation for why smaller formats are working in Latin America is that items such as dry pasta, cooking oils, milk, bath soap, and laundry detergent can be acquired in precisely the right quantities for daily use. The stores are, in effect, the customers’ pantries.

The big question is whether the U.S. market is ready for a shift toward smaller formats. In grocery, for instance, industry analyst Planet Retail and Booz Allen Hamilton have found that large format stores capture 80 percent of retail sales in the United States, a number significantly higher than in the vast majority of other markets in the developed world.

European retailers, such as U.K.-based grocer Tesco Corporation and German discounter Aldi, may be the first to test the U.S. market for its receptivity to smaller formats. Tesco, for example, plans to enter the U.S. market with 100 convenience-type stores of roughly 10,000 square feet under the Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market brand. Those stores are slated to be opened in 2007 in Arizona, Nevada, and California.

We believe that for U.S. retailers like Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Lowe’s to catch up with their international competitors, find the next spurt of growth, and escape the market saturation they are now suffering, they will also have to consider smaller formats as key channels in their overall retailing models. Wal-Mart is considering stores as small as 20,000 square feet, about one-tenth the size of its Supercenters, and other large retailers are rumored to be doing the same.

All the big box retailers need a more balanced approach to reach their customers and will benefit in important ways from what they learn about shopper preferences in smaller format contexts. Manufacturers of consumer packaged goods (CPG), too, can cash in on this opportunity, by working with their retail partners to mine the personalized data available and creating new products accordingly. The major players in the CPG industry are already reasonably sophisticated in how they adapt their product mixes from one geography to another and from one demographic mix to others, but using small stores to get close to their customers could foster a new wave of innovation in retail formats and in the products and business systems on which they rely.