Different Stripes Going against the grain in the clothing industry paid off for these entrepreneurs.
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"Why don't they make corduroy pants that go the otherway?" Chris Lindland's ques-tion was more an effort to fitin with his girlfriend's design colleagues than a businessidea. But last year, Lindland, 33, of San Francisco, started takingthe idea seriously. In January, he and partner Enrique Landa, 27,produced their first pair of horizontally striped corduroy pants."They looked totally normal," says Lindland. So the twoinvested $8,000 in pants and an e-commerce site, and three weekslater, the pants were on The New York Times style page.
Cordarounds.com (the pants are only available online)now sells about 20 pairs of pants a day. Last summer, the partnersintroduced Summerounds, horizontally striped seersucker pants,which Lindland expects will help boost the company's first-yearrevenue to between $150,000 and $250,000.
Men's pants and jackets and women's skirts and jacketsare now available, and the line will soon include other apparel."It's an idea Seinfeld's Kramer might have comeup with," says Lindland. "But he probably wouldn't beable to get it off the ground."
