Mother’s Home: Inside the LA Brand’s First Standalone Store

The first thing you notice in Mother’s flagship in Beverly Hills isn’t the denim, it’s the curves. Walls bend like Richard Serra sculptures. A conversation pit anchors the floor. Boudoir-style mirrored fitting rooms — inspired by Halston’s famed atelier — are designed to show your butt from every angle.

For a Los Angeles brand built on obsessing over the way jeans flatter the form, the architecture feels almost autobiographical.

The humor that’s at the heart of the contemporary brand is also front and center. In a glass vitrine at the entrance is a “Cabinet of Curiosities” that will change monthly alongside Mother’s cleverly named collections. The opening installation is of vintage telephones titled “Call Mother”, and labeled as “found telephones, synthetic lace, existential dread and approximately 41 missed calls”.

“It started with the idea of a 1970s house with a conversation pit and everything curved around it,” says co-founder and creative director Tim Kaeding during a tour of the Canon Drive store. “We wanted the store to feel like an adventure. The best stores are the ones where you wander a little. You turn a corner and find something you weren’t expecting, then another corner and there’s something else. The layout follows one continuous path inspired by a sublime spiral,” he says of the layout, sounding a bit California mystical, which is part of Mother’s branding and will be expressed in store programming like birth chart and tarot card readings, alongside crystal curations and tequila tastings.

The space has been nicknamed “Big Boy” by the team, and leopard print jeans, “Wild Thing” sweatshirts, red flame-emblazoned letterman jackets and lighter case necklaces hang in front as part of Mother’s fall collection, while the denim bar, which Kaeding calls the most boring part of any store, is further back, past shelves of the new Mother Beverly Hills store merch that spans matchbooks, pens, hats and bags.

The 3,850-square-foot space marks a milestone for the 16-year-old company, which has quietly become one of fashion’s biggest denim success stories, with annual sales approaching $200 million, according to industry sources.

The timing comes after an especially painful detour, one that cost the business millions of dollars. Mother had been preparing to open its first retail location in 2025 before the Palisades wildfire destroyed it just days before opening.

New team members had been hired and billboards leased. A vintage 1970 El Camino was purchased for the opening to serve ice cream out of the trunk and thousands of branded frozen treats had already arrived. “We’re still eating them,” Kaeding jokes.

Rather than abandon retail, Mother doubled down. “It took less time than you’d think to gather ourselves,” he says. “The machine was already moving.” LA is the brand’s spiritual home, and the place they wanted to open the first flagship. More than 90% of the brand’s manufacturing still takes place in LA, a rarity in an industry that long ago chased lower production costs overseas. And the company remains privately funded, even as it prepares to roll out stores on Bleecker Street in New York in November and Pacific Palisades in February 2027, before expanding globally.

Companywide sales are up 18% year-on-year, driven by a surge in e-commerce, which has grown 207% over the past five years and now accounts for nearly 40% of gross revenue. Even more telling, 89% of online sales have been at full-price this year, signaling strong brand equity at a moment when much of the apparel industry is dependent on promotions. International e-commerce is growing even faster, up 35% year to date.

Wholesale, the channel on which Mother built its reputation, continues to expand as well. Sales are up 14% year-on-year, including 15% domestic growth, despite the disruptions. Domestic wholesale has nearly doubled over the past five years. International wholesale, which represents just over a fifth of the business, remains a significant opportunity.

“The Saks bankruptcy and merger affected us, but it was more of a motivator than a setback. It made us want to have control of our own destiny,” says Lela Becker, co-founder and president of Mother. “And tariffs, logistically and operationally, were insane. But in spite of everything, we’re just going, going.”

Years of direct-to-consumer (DTC) data has guided the company in choosing retail locations. “Our customer is more here than it is on Melrose,” Kaeding says of deciding to open in Beverly Hills. A café inspired by roadside stops the team has visited in Europe serves coffee, matcha, tea loaves and other snacks encouraging visitors to linger. “Mother needs to serve milk and cookies at 3pm,” he laughs.

Kaeding, a veteran denim designer of Gap and 7 For All Mankind, founded the brand in 2010 with Becker, a former sales executive for Citizens of Humanity, who also built Los Angeles’s Sea showroom.

The pair entered a crowded, premium denim market during what Becker calls “a gold rush”, with a new LA jean label seemingly launching each week. But instead of just great product, Kaeding obsessed over identity, inspired by the storied sportswear brands he grew up with in the ’70s and ‘80s, including Nike, Esprit, and OP.

“It wasn’t about making jeans,” he says. “It was about building a brand. Once you have a brand, you can make anything.”

That philosophy explains why Mother has always looked different from everyone else. Kaeding insisted every jean fit, wash and collection have a story. He remembers arguing with a former colleague at another company who claimed product names didn’t matter. “I was like, ‘What are you talking about? The name is everything,’” he says, dropping some of the more memorable ones such as The Bruiser, The Bookie, and The Goodie Goodie.

The original fits were identified by archetypes: The Looker, The Rascal, The Runaway, and The Drama. Customers weren’t only buying denim; they were choosing alter egos. Over the years, the vocabulary has expanded into irreverent T-shirt slogans (“Milf and Cookies” introduced as part of a Martha Stewart-fronted campaign) and collection titles (“Hail Mary” for a collegiate sports theme), including some that occasionally made department stores nervous.

“We offend a lot of people,” Kaeding admits cheerfully. “Motherfucker” tube socks? They’re bestsellers. “See You Next Tuesday” T-shirts? Quickly pulled by one retailer, but also bestsellers.

Language has always been central to Mother’s success. “We lock ourselves in a room after we design everything and pick all the names until it’s done,” Kaeding says. “It’s exhausting.”

If words gave Mother personality, denim established its authority.

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.

“When you think, ‘That just looks so ill-proportioned,’ that’s exactly what you should do,” he says, crediting Becker’s adventuresome personal style for pushing him toward barrel legs and other fits before they hit the mainstream. “Fashion is all about changing. If you don’t change, you’re out of business.”

Today, he believes denim has entered its healthiest era in decades, where skinny, flare, barrel, straight and bootcut styles can coexist.

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.

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 “Mother Maker”.

“We actually want to physically interact with the people touching and making the clothes,” Kaeding says.

For Becker, whose business responsibilities increasingly include overseeing the company’s rapid expansion, retail has been a welcome new creative outlet.

“For 15 years, we’ve been building this world through the clothes, campaigns and stories we tell. Now, you can actually walk into it, which is pretty wild,” says Becker. “The store has also given us this completely new creative playground. We have new teams, new ideas, and so many more ways to bring Mother to life. It feels like the world we’ve been building all these years suddenly got a lot bigger.”

With just enough mischief to remind us that even after all these years, Mother still knows best.