Madewell isn’t interested in making weird pants, but it believes that it can work with that first athletic-inspired segment, at least. “The activewear component has made clothes so much more comfortable,” Pierson says. Denim is doing the same in response. Pierson calls the increase of stretch in denim over the past five years “an avalanche.” “Now that guys are in [stretch denim], why would they ever go back?” Pierson says. “It's like women being corseted: When they don't have to wear a corset anymore, why are you going to corset yourself? It's a whole different ball game now.”

Madewell

What do two years of denim development get you then? What is Madewell’s perfect pair of jeans?

According to Pierson, it starts with the leg shape: slim but not too skinny, with a hem that won’t pool over shoes. Madewell doesn’t necessarily need to capture the guys looking for the latest bizarro pant styles off the runway—it’s more interested in nudging Queer Eye candidates into a more stylish pair of denim. “A lot of guys are walking around in these baggy jeans, and those are the guys trading down and getting slimmer,” says Pierson.

After the leg shape, Pierson needed to nail the yarn. She says that six to eight different yarns got test runs before landing on the one in the denim releasing today. Pierson was after a vintage look—something that looks just as rugged as jeans produced decades ago, without the newfangled stretch. “I hate to say this, but we wanted it to look manly and masculine,” Pierson says.

So what does manly and masculine yarn look like?

Pierson says that vintage jeans are typically very heavy, but with today’s technology, denim is getting lighter and flimsier looking. “What I like about a traditional vintage denim is it has a good chunky yarn character,” Pierson says. “We worked with our mill to achieve that look. So it looks heavier-weight—it's constructed a little more meaty.... When guys put jeans on, they want to feel like they have something substantial on.”

Madewell

The last key ingredient to Madewell’s denim is the stretch. As much as Pierson knew it was critical to include stretch so a guy could comfortably walk around (or laze on the couch) in his denim, she really didn’t want the jeans to look like there was stretch in them. The stretch was developed not to loosen up over time and be invisible. Pierson accomplished that by wrapping the elastane in polyester—a material that has a memory like an elephant and returns to form, according to Pierson—and then cocooning that combination in cotton.

The current collection of Madewell denim for men is pretty tightly edited, at least compared to what’s offered on the women’s side, where there’s a wide range. Pierson hopes that at some point, men’s will build up to that level. But for now, it just needs to successfully launch. (At the start, the brand will only be available on Madewell's site and in-store at Nordstrom. It's not launching in Madewell stores, which the brand wants to keep as spaces for its women customers.)

And how: The new brand is doubly important because J.Crew is going through a total relaunch to combat sliding sales, and Madewell is the bell cow for J.Crew Group. Late last month, J.Crew finally started to reverse course on the Cleveland Browns–y rut it was in: 15 consecutive quarters of negative comparable sales. The brand’s sales increased—by 1 percent. Madewell, on the other hand, was riding a hot streak and went up another 28 percent in this most recent quarter. Madewell hopes, too, that its devout customers on the women's side are an advocate for this new arm of the brand. Now she can buy a pair of jeans for herself while also grabbing a pair for her husband or boyfriend, the thinking goes.

So in the best of all worlds, Madewell men’s can be a game-changer: A successful launch means boosting those profits even more. Step one was to create the perfect pair of jeans. Up next: saving J.Crew Group. That does sound stressful.

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