How maternity jeans and T-shirts led to Juicy Couture

The Juicy Couture brand is probably best known for the brightly colored tracksuits that were favored by celebrities in the early 2000s. But athletic wear wasn’t what Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor had in mind when they started the brand — a story they tell in a new book, “The Glitter Plan: How We Started Juicy Couture for $200 and Turned It Into a Global Brand”.

Skaist-Levy says the two knew they wanted to make a ready-to-wear line together:“So we set out to create the perfect T-shirt. We’re really not into disposable clothes, we love things to last,  [to] get better and better as you wash them.”

To the pair, the perfect T-shirt was “buttery, buttery, buttery soft. We love soft,” says Skaist-Levy.

In the beginning, those T-shirts were branded with the tagline, “Made in the Glamorous USA.”

“In the beginning, what’s crazy is that everything we made, every bit of cotton, everything, came from the U.S., came from the Carolinas,” says Nash-Taylor. “Today, you couldn’t do that. You just couldn’t, none of those mills even exist anymore.”

Listen to the full interview above to hear more from the Juicy Couture founders including why maternity jeans were so important to their first collection; how they spent that first $200; and what it was like to sell their company at the height of its popularity.

JuicyCouture.com