A decade ago, Susie Crippen, a Los Angeles-based fashion stylist and occasional cabaret singer, thought her career was dead. At the age of 40 she had been working in a bar, before turning to a motley collection of stylist jobs. And though she dreamt of making it big in the fashion world, she doubted it could happen; at her age most of her contemporaries were already settled into careers. “I felt like I was going nowhere,” she recently explained to me. “I had no [health] insurance, no savings, I was drowning in $50,000-$60,000 of credit card debt. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life.”
But then Crippen’s luck – or mindset – changed. In 2003 she started dating Jeff Rudes, a textile expert, and persuaded him to join forces to create a company, J Brand, funded by friends and family, which would sell jeans for consumers who wanted streamlined, dark-hued styles. On paper, it seemed an unlikely venture; Crippen had never been an entrepreneur before, the fashion world was already full of jeans and J Brand’s so-called “skinny jeans” were priced at several hundred dollars.
But Crippen became obsessed with creating a “jeans empire” and her creative eye blended with Rudes’ business smarts. Within a few years, J Brand had exploded; so much so that when the pair sold it in 2010, the company was valued at $80m. It has since been resold for $300m; those skinny jeans turned out to be a gold mine.