Ripley Rader’s Perfect Pants Did Not Happen Overnight

Recently while scrolling Instagram, I came across a video of Hoda and Jenna talking on the Today Show about “the perfect pants” by Ripley Rader. Later I was fed an ad with tens of thousands of likes and hundreds of comments about the same pants. Ripley Rader had officially gone viral.

If you hadn’t heard of the brand until recently and assumed it was an overnight success, or that it’s the brainchild of some marketing firm, you would be mistaken. Ripley Rader is run by none other than a former Broadway performer named Ripley Rader (she’s named after the town in West Virginia where her grandparents are from, and where her aunt is currently mayor) who for a decade has been working hard, along with her husband, to build her fashion brand.

They nearly called it quits at a low point during the pandemic—like many fashion brands, Ripley Rader pivoted to making masks and donated about 30,000 face coverings, but business overall was difficult, and she and her husband applied for jobs.

But then in 2022, the internet fell in love with her pants. She could finally hire a team—in fact she had to to keep up with demand (although she still does all her own photography). And now she’s ready to show the world that she’s about more than just pants. She has a whole collection to fall in love with if you’re into looking effortlessly chic while feeling extremely comfy all day and night—you could even wear many of her pieces to bed.

Read on to find out who (thank goodness) turned Rader down for a job, all about her journey from Broadway performer to designer, and her commitment to fair American-made production and fair wages.

You've been doing this for 10 years and it seems like all of a sudden you're everywhere. How Ripley Rader get where it is now?

“Well, we launched in late 2013 at Fred Segal with a jumpsuit. We were wooed by a few people who wanted to invest money in us, but I realized that I wanted to have creative control along with financial control of the company. So we just plugged along and that's when we reached out to every influencer and blogger we knew at the time. We had a PR team for a minute, we just plugged along. We grew and grew and grew, but slowly.

And then about three years after I launched the company, my husband came on. So at this point it’s like an old school family business and we like run it like I imagine my grandparents ran their business. And to do that we had to not make huge moves—we had seen too many fashion companies explode and tech companies explode in huge flashes and then die. We always joked that we’re the little engine that could

Then last year, coming out of the pandemic, women were ready to pick up what I'd always been putting down, which was comfortable clothing that felt like athleisure, but didn't look like it. I think people were done with their super flowy dresses and things like that. They wanted to up their game a a little bit.

And then I felt like I was the girl in the ‘90s movie who took her glasses off and suddenly I’m hot. And I was like, but I was the same girl all along!”

I’m excited to try them because I gained weight during the pandemic and went through menopause, so my body has completely changed and pants are kind of scary to me.

“I think that's another reason why my pants have been so popular is that that we have inclusive sizing. Because hot is hot. I don’t care what size you are. But yeah I do think there was this idea of ‘let's get back into pants, but let's do it on our own terms.”

And look like you put in a little effort.

“Without any real effort! It’s less effort than buttoning up jeans. There’s not even an elastic waist, it's just the fabric memory and elasticity that bounces back. It's not compression like Spanx, because we love women. I don't want to change women's bodies. My whole argument is how are we celebrating asses and butts and boobs? We love curves.”

Oh, interesting, I kind of assumed that there was some compression.

“I'm not here to make us feel like we need to be smaller. I'm here to make clothes that let women feel like they can take up some space. Imagine an army of women not afraid to take up space!

It sounds like a tagline, but it's not because what happens is as we get older, there’s this desire for women to get smaller and smaller. And men are allowed to get bigger and bigger and bigger, and no one's given them a hard time. This is my philosophy about making clothes—not only my pants, but also my jumpsuit.”

Do you still do the same jumpsuit?

Yes, the classic jumpsuit. It's funny because we're just about to do a big campaign to “launch” the jumpsuit, even though it was the thing that we started with. The jumpsuit is still one of my very favorite things. It’s great for pregnancy and just life in general. I wear it all the time underneath our blazers because it's this easy piece. I feel that way about the whole collection.

Women take on so much that we don't need bad mood clothing. We need clothes that feel good.”

How do you explain your sudden popularity?

“You know, we've been in about 200 boutiques nationwide, including Neiman Marcus. But we've been under the radar. And then last year we decided maybe it's time for more people to know who we are. We took the leap a little bit on some marketing things and then we went viral about six months ago on this ad campaign.

It makes me laugh actually, a young woman on my team was filming me and said, have your clients ever said anything funny about the brand? So I told her a client had said to me, ‘I wear your clothes when I want to get a job or get laid.’ It was a totally unscripted. I sent the ad to my mom and asked is it too crass? Can we run it? And she said I think you should run it. I think it's so funny. And it's how women talk. Women want to get a job and get action as much as anybody else does.”

I think that that ad works so well because it's not you saying this is what our our pants are good for, it’s you relaying what a customer said. So there's that one degree of separation, it makes it very relatable and fun to connect with.

“Yeah, and then what happened was we just became this viral in some ways (not my words) but this sensation of, oh, they must be this Instagram famous brand. Which is so funny because I've been around this whole time, but in the past six months we have tripled our workforce.

This time last year it was me and (my husband) Ben and an 18 year-old-intern. And now I’m in my design studio in Hollywood and we have a big loft office and distribution space indowntown L.A. We have 10 employees plus our factories.

I think a lot of actors go through something similar. They work and they work and they work and then—I think I saw an interview withe The Rock where the interviewer called him an overnight success, and he's like, yeah, except for the 15 years I put in when no one knew my name.”

Did you have to rethink anything about your production when you started growing so fast?

We are still made in America even though we've exploded. That's really, really important to us and that does mean that sometimes we suffer delays on deliveries because our factory is pretty much maxed. But we try to communicate with the clients that we are a small team that exploded and now we're scaling up to meet the demand without sacrificing the pillars of the company, which are being made in America using really high quality fabrics, and paying people what they should be paid.

The price point reflects that too. We're not the cheapest pants around, but those values really matter to a lot of people and they definitely matter to us. So it lends itself to a little higher price point, but I'm proud of it. I can sleep at night.”

I’m happy to hear that, I feel like many consumers have a very skewed idea of how much it costs to make clothing in the U.S., paying workers fairly.

“Yes, so you turn a blind eye to it. But if you actually saw what was happening, if you saw the working environments, you would say, ‘I could never buy these clothes.’

For me, I shake the hand of every single person involved with the brand—that's not me being righteous or anything like that. It's me saying I could not exist without my team. And I'm so grateful for them. They're artisans. Maybe they're not making a pair of shoes over the course of six months but we take a lot of pride in every pair of pants that we send out, or every jumpsuit, every piece that goes out. We really care about it.

And humans make every piece of clothing, it's not some machine. I think there's this idea that maybe machines do it. But everything you wear on your body is sewed by a person.”

How did you get started in fashion?

“I've sewn my whole life. I started sewing at age 13 with my grandmother, and then I started making all my own clothes. I'm from a small town in West Virginia and there really weren't a lot of options for clothing. But my family and I traveled a lot. It was very important for my grandparents to show my sister and me that even though I was from a small town, I was deserving to be in any room that was out there.

So we would travel and I would see fashion. My grandmother got me an InStyle magazine subscription at age 11 or 12, and we would see something in the magazine and then go to Joanne's Fabrics. My parents also owned a fabric store for home design. So I would get the pattern at Joanne's fabrics, and then I would go to my parents' store get fabric that should be on curtains or couches and take that fabric—I’d have half a yard or something—and then tweak the patterns to make them look like what I wanted them to look like.

Throughout junior high and high school, I would wear these clothes and I would go to a friend's houses and sit down and my skirt would match the couch—that happened to me, one time it was curtains and one time it was a sofa.

Then I started making these hippie shirts that I was selling for like $15. It was like very much the Dave Matthews era, so I would sell them before the concerts and I did well with those.

But meanwhile I was a professional dancer from the time I was like age 10—and dancer and singer, so I made clothes for myself and my people and for fun, but I was going to be a Broadway performer. I went to NYU for musical theater and was on tour, and that's how I ended up in L.A.

When I was on tour, I would find myself in the costume department just sewing and it was a real stress relief for me. I was just making costumes and things, and then I got off tour and was in L.A. trying to be a musical theater actress, which is funny because that doesn't exist in L.A. and I’m a terrible actress. But I can sing and dance.

So I obviously wasn't working and I made myself a jumpsuit that I wore everywhere, and that was the one that got scouted by the buyer at Fred Siegel in 2013. She said, if you make it, I'll sell it, but you have to make an America and it has to be under $200. And then she asked me what my name was and I said, Ripley Rader. And she said there you go, you have a brand.

A week later I was at an L.A. Magazine party, and Linda Immediato (the style editor) came up to me and said what are you wearing? And of course I was an unemployed actress and broke so I was wearing the same jumpsuit again. I said this is crazy but I think I might launch at Fred Segal. And she said, when you do, I'll do a story on you. So a week later with no fashion school or anything, I go on Craigslist to find sewers and I source fabrics on my own and the rest is history.”

Wow, so that was about 10 years ago.

“Yes, it was not an overnight success. We rented out part of our house for years so we could afford the business, so we could put money back into the business. There were sacrifices over nine years between launching and then being an ‘overnight success.’

I walked throught the Coterie wholesale show in New York for nine years and literally no one would give me the time of day. People would just walk past and walk past. And then this year it was insane. I was so tired at the end of the last night that we were driving to the airport in an Uber and I just fell asleep.

There's something really powerful in persistence and showing up, and that's been the through line. And doing it joyfully for the most part.”

Were you ever tempted to move on from your own clothing brand?

“At the lowest point of the pandemic, Ben and I both applied to other jobs thinking there's no way we can make this happen. And thank goodness they both said no. I will forever be grateful to Reformation for not hiring me as their creative director. What a different path that would've been. And it might have been awesome, but it wouldn't have been the path that I blazed and I feel really proud that we were able to stay on it.”

Also check out Ripley Rader’s podcast, Younger But Wiser, where she interviews teen girls.