\u201cWe offend a lot of people,\u201d Kaeding admits cheerfully. \u201cMotherfucker\u201d tube socks? They\u2019re bestsellers. \u201cSee You Next Tuesday\u201d T-shirts? Quickly pulled by one retailer, but also bestsellers.<\/p>\n
Language has always been central to Mother\u2019s success. \u201cWe lock ourselves in a room after we design everything and pick all the names until it\u2019s done,\u201d Kaeding says. \u201cIt\u2019s exhausting.\u201d<\/p>\n
If words gave Mother personality, denim established its authority.<\/p>\n
When skinny jeans were dominating in the early 2010s, Mother introduced high-waisted, light-wash flares that looked radical by comparison. Later, its Crop Step Fray helped reignite interest in wider-leg silhouettes. Throughout shifting fashion cycles, Kaeding has often preferred embracing the silhouette that initially seems wrong.<\/p>\n
\u201cFashion is all about changing. If you don\u2019t change, you\u2019re out of business.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you think, \u2018That just looks so ill-proportioned,\u2019 that\u2019s exactly what you should do,\u201d he says, crediting Becker\u2019s adventuresome personal style for pushing him toward barrel legs and other fits before they hit the mainstream. \u201cFashion is all about changing. If you don\u2019t change, you\u2019re out of business.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today, he believes denim has entered its healthiest era in decades, where skinny, flare, barrel, straight and bootcut styles can coexist.<\/p>\n
For Mother, that freedom has also enabled growth beyond jeans, into ready-to-wear, accessories, and home items such as candles and vases. Shoes and bags are next, and beauty is the dream. Mother also sells an elevated curation of third-party brands such as Alix of Bohemia, La Prestic Ouiston and Sablyn, which help to broaden its fashion reach.<\/p>\n
Behind all of it remains a hands-on, LA manufacturing operation called Mother Ranch, with six buildings and 200 employees. Mother even acquired one of its longtime sewing factories rather than watch it disappear, producing about 20% of its volume and what it now calls \u201cMother Maker\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe actually want to physically interact with the people touching and making the clothes,\u201d Kaeding says.<\/p>\n
For Becker, whose business responsibilities increasingly include overseeing the company\u2019s rapid expansion, retail has been a welcome new creative outlet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWe offend a lot of people,\u201d Kaeding admits cheerfully. \u201cMotherfucker\u201d tube socks? They\u2019re bestsellers. \u201cSee You Next Tuesday\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":977345,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1582,276,2961,5510,224,5337],"class_list":["post-977344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-la","tag-latest","tag-los-angeles","tag-losangeles"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117030306930897004","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/977344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=977344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/977344\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/977345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=977344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=977344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=977344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}