Designer Eunice Cho, who grew up in Orange County, finds success with her athleisure brand Aella

While interviewing for business school four years ago, Eunice Cho found herself increasingly frustrated with the lack of suiting options available for younger women entering the working world.

Not one to ignore an opportunity, the La Habra native, who graduated from Sonora High School in 2003 and majored in painting as an undergraduate student at Yale University, enrolled in UCLA’s Anderson School of Management — a program conveniently located near her family’s textile business — and quickly began creating prototypes of office-appropriate essentials for her fledgling clothing line, Aella.

She started with a pair of pants, a silhouette widely regarded throughout the fashion industry as notoriously difficult to construct in a way that flatters the wearer. “To me, that was the biggest opportunity,” says Cho, 31. “No ready-to-wear brand was focusing exclusively on pants, so it was a problem we could solve for people.”

By fall 2014, she’d earned her MBA and celebrated the online launch of Aella’s first product rollout, a tightly edited collection of black pants in three styles — skinny, cigarette and flare — that combine the classic lines of tailored suiting with the comfort and machine washability of yoga wear.

All three styles incorporate fabrics from the same Italian and Turkish mills used by luxury brands such as La Perla, Lanvin and Ralph Lauren. Later additions to the Aella lineup, including hand-dyed tops, cropped blazers and convertible duster jackets, are made from custom-woven fabrics like Feather Skin, the brand’s trademarked T-shirt material built around a moisture-wicking inner layer. “The functionality and practicality of the clothing is just as important as the style,” Cho says.

Despite her aggressive commitment to sourcing high-quality fabrics and manufacturing her line domestically, Cho remains steadfast in her decision to market Aella as a midlevel brand at a matching price point.

“The woman we’re designing for is a very ambitious and smart person who knows where she wants to spend her money,” she explains. “These days, consumers know there’s a lot of markup when they’re buying something from a department store or traditional retailer. Personally, I think it’s too much if a basic pair of pants is priced more than $300. Even if people know a brand has great quality, they’ll still find and buy the pieces at a discount.”

To encourage new customer experimentation, Cho resolved to keep Aella’s pricing “approachable” — a pair of the brand’s bestselling ankle-length skinny pants starts at $198 — while shying away from traditional retail tactics like seasonal sales and loyalty discounts.

Her strategy caught the eye of a senior executive at Bloomingdale’s, who invited Cho to debut Aella pop-up shops this past summer at a handful of the department store’s flagship locations, including South Coast Plaza.

“When you grow up in Orange County, South Coast Plaza is one of the major places you go to shop,” Cho says of the experience. “It’s an iconic mall. When you’re selling online, you’re in a vacuum because people come to you for a very specific purpose, but when you’re in a larger retail setting, you’re both competing and working in conjunction with all these other brands. It makes us think twice about what we offer there.”

For now at least, many retail experts would agree with her decision to highlight Aella’s elements of athleisure, a trend that’s seen high-end workout clothing integrated into everyday wardrobes.

“Athleisure is both a clothing phenomenon and an important growth category for South Coast Plaza,” says Debra Gunn Downing, a spokeswoman for the Costa Mesa-based shopping center. South Coast Plaza initially took heed of athleisure’s surging popularity around seven years ago, she adds, and made a conscious decision to invest in athleisure-dedicated apparel and footwear brands.

Cho believes Aella’s focus on movement is well suited to an Orange County audience. “If I didn’t have the part of me that’s from Orange County, my design aesthetic probably would’ve turned out a lot more conservative and tailored,” she says. “I think I had a very typical Orange County childhood. Most of my time was spent going to the beach, and I had a lot of creative interests. I used to make my own clothes as a hobby, always painted and played piano.”

Now living in Santa Monica, Cho spends much of her downtime cooking, an activity she likens to designing Aella because both pursuits involve “doing one classic, simple thing very well.”

She’s most inspired by other people who dress well, especially older women. “I’m not 22 years old anymore, so I’m not looking at girls in crop tops and cut-offs for inspiration,” she says. “I’m looking for something a lot more polished and age appropriate.”

A five-person operation, Aella continues to grow out of an airy showroom in downtown Los Angeles. The brand recently moved into Bloomingdale’s in San Francisco, and Cho has hopes to conquer other domestic and international markets, particularly Asia, over the next few years.

“Right now we’re only in New York, San Francisco and here,” she adds. “But our athleisure-inspired edge has so much potential for global appeal because interests in health and fitness are becoming worldwide phenomena.”