About Brand:
Juicy Couture, Inc. (Juicy), an upscale American fashion apparel company, became a subsidiary of Liz Claiborne, Inc., in April 2003. The Juicy brand of women's and men's clothing is available in some 30,000 retail establishments worldwide, as well as in freestanding Juicy Couture stores. Under the parentage of Liz Claiborne, Juicy is managed by co-founders Gela Taylor and Pamela Skaist-Levy, who serve as co-presidents of the company. Claiborne, whose image is rather conservative, nevertheless allowed Juicy Couture to operate autonomously and to remain as colorful as its co-founders, Gela Taylor and Pamela Skaist-Levy.
Juicy Couture was founded by Gela Taylor and Pamela Skaist-Levy. Taylor was a native New Yorker who held a college degree in drama and had appeared in Broadway productions as well as on some weekly television series in the 1980s. Skaist-Levy, on the other hand, was born in California and attended the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, where part of her curriculum was designing a hat that received favorable notice and was eventually carried at upscale retailers Barneys New York and Fred Segal.
Taylor and Skaist-Levy met in 1988, when a mutual friend introduced them at her clothing boutique in Los Angeles. Taylor was pregnant at the time and dismayed at the dearth of chic maternity wear, so the two began their collaborations with a line of maternity jeans, which they fashioned after experimenting with elastic and a pair of Levi's. The jeans were marketed to maternity boutiques under the brand name Travis Jeans, after Taylor's newborn son Travis. Sales of the jeans were bolstered when actress Melanie Griffith was photographed wearing a pair.
From there, the partners went on to design a T-shirt made to be especially flattering for women. In an interview that appeared in a November 2000 issue of People, Skaist-Levy said, "We wanted to revolutionize the T-shirt." Form-fitted, with plunging V-necklines, and available in a variety of bright colors, the cotton T-shirts proved wildly popular. During this time the women adopted the business moniker Juicy Couture, which, Skaist-Levy noted in People, was chosen because the shirts were so colorful and enticing that "you just want to eat" them. The company remained based in Taylor's Los Angeles apartment before moving to an industrial park in the San Fernando Valley. Manufacturing was all done in the United States, and clothing labels read "Made in the Glamorous USA.
