A kick in the pants for boomers

Spending time at the family-operated Not Your Daughter’s Jeans corporate office in Vernon is like hanging out in somebody’s living room.

The daughters prop their feet on a coffee table, the son scratches his dog and patriarch George Rudes launches into a series of stories about his granddaughter.

Everybody’s laid-back, except maybe Rudes, 77, who is poured into a pair of the company’s Tummy Tuck jeans. What can he do? He’s crazy about the product, and they make jeans only for women.

By riveting attention on baby boomers who consider hipness a birthright, the company has struck a nerve that others have hammered at and missed. And his family’s once-small business is popping out of its seams.

The jeans maker, which launched in 2003, expects sales of at least $55 million this year, said Rudes, a garment industry veteran whose daughters coaxed him out of retirement to help start the business.

Offering jeans that perform a function -- supposedly flattening the stomach and hoisting the rear -- is a smart strategy, especially in a cooling jeans market, said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst for NPD Group Inc. Jeans sales slipped 2% last year, the first drop since 2001, he said.

Everything, it seems, has to work harder these days. Even your jeans.

Women wonder: “If I buy a cellphone that does five things, why can’t I buy a pair of pants that make me look slimmer and trimmer and sexier?” Cohen said. “The consumer is just waiting for a success story to emerge.”

Mary Newton was hunting for a “younger look in an older pant,” when she discovered a particularly snazzy pair of black Tummy Tuck jeans trimmed with amber rhinestones.

“I’m beyond just plain jeans,” said the 57-year-old Huntington Beach resident, who was shopping recently at the Grove in Los Angeles. “You want to be hip.”

But Ardy Paulsen, 60, isn’t buying. The mortgage broker from Graeagle, Calif., tried on a pair of the Tummy Tucks -- which sell for $88 to $99 -- and didn’t like them.

“They were so clingy, and so this showed,” Paulsen said, clutching her stomach. “And they pushed things where they don’t belong.”

It’s not easy to please baby boomers, a massive group of consumers who are both picky and quick to spend. San Francisco-based Gap Inc. recently gave up on its boomer concept Forth & Towne. Still, many companies are dueling for them, including department stores and specialty chains such as J. Crew, Chico’s and J. Jill.

But boomers were low on the radar of premium denim makers when they began cranking out jeans earlier this decade. Their skin-tight pants slipped low on the hips -- not a great look for older women whose six-packs have started jiggling.

“Women tell me all the time, I tried the low-rise jeans, it didn’t work. I tried the skinny jeans, it didn’t work,” Cohen said. “I want something that really works.”

The curvy, older crowd was out of luck, said Lisa Sandel-Rudes, 43, George Rudes’ younger daughter.

“There were no jeans for the woman -- except baggy, dumpy looking things,” she said. So she called her father in Florida. “Come home,” she said.

“Lisa was the mastermind,” said brother Kenneth Rudes, 45, a Toluca Lake resident who also works for the business. But their dad is the “whiz.”

George Rudes got his start in the clothing business in 1950, when he began selling fabric to women’s apparel manufacturers in Puerto Rico, where he lived. After moving to California in 1978, Rudes and a partner started making jeans under the St. Germain label, a brand that evolved into a full sportswear line but was best-known for its one-piece jumpsuits.

When he retired in 1995, Rudes handed the business over to his daughters and moved to Florida.

But St. Germain struggled as fashion tastes shifted early this decade just as sales for nearby jeans makers, such as 7 for all Mankind, were sizzling. So Lisa and her sister Leslie Rudes, 47, both Beverly Hills residents, decided it was time for the family business to return to its roots.

Not Your Daughter’s Jeans played with fabric, patterns and stitching techniques to create Tummy Tuck jeans, doubling up on the Lycra to make them stretchier. The pockets are stitched to create a horizontal band across the front that reduces the stretch in that area, thereby -- theoretically, at least -- subduing the belly. A note from Sandal-Rudes is stuck inside the pants: “You can thank me later.”

The patriarch was antsy from the get-go. “He’d call me all the time, ‘Did you sell some?’ ” said Kathleen Moeiny, a saleswoman at Nordstrom at South Coast Plaza.

“I used to see him at 7:30 in the morning with patterns over his shoulder,” said son Jeff Rudes, who co-owns premium denim maker J Brand Inc. in Los Angeles. “He was ... running around like he was 40 years younger.”

The jeans sold slowly at first but took off after appearing in trend-spotting magazines such as In Style and on the “Oprah Winfrey Show.”

Now, “it’s our biggest seller,” Moeiny sad. “People buy several pairs of them.”

The line has evolved to include shorts, capris and jackets. George Rudes said that eventually the company will launch a men’s line, and then he won’t have to wear the women’s size 12.

Tummy Tuck jeans, made locally, sell in department stores and in more than 1,000 specialty stores nationwide. The company also has accounts in at least half a dozen countries and plans to expand further internationally.

All this shifts George Rudes into new territory, because St. Germain’s sales never exceeded $13 million.

Bracing for future growth, the company in June moved into a 32,000-square-foot headquarters, three times the size of its former home. And it’s now eyeing an even larger site. Since July, it has doubled its workforce to 60 employees, including hiring its first vice president of domestic sales.

“It’s extremely exciting,” Rudes said.

Would the business have taken flight if their dad hadn’t “come home”? No, both daughters say.

“He lives and breathes it more than my sister and I,” Sandel-Rudes said.

And he doesn’t seem to miss Florida.

“When things are going good, it’s a lot of fun,” Rudes said. “It’s better than golf.”

leslie.earnest@latimes.com