Photo: Courtesy of Nelle Atelier
The idea for Nelle Atelier, a promising new petite fashion label, stemmed from a dilemma that will sound familiar to anyone who’s short and likes clothes.
“I was looking at my 30 pairs of jeans — I’m five-one on a good day — and I was like, I hate all of these pants,” founder Madeleine Cohen recalls. “I Googled ‘best jeans for short girls’ and there were options in the mass market, but there was nothing that was aspirational from a brand perspective, premium and high quality from a materials perspective. And so I just got to work.”
As a 5’2″ woman who’s covered fashion for more than a decade, I’ve also yet to encounter a petite collection or brand that reliably meets my expectations when it comes to aesthetic, quality and fit — I wondered if such a brand could even be viable from a business standpoint, given the inherent challenges around extended and specialty sizing. Cohen seems to have figured it out.
While she does not come from a fashion background — “I’m a complete outsider,” she says — she has about a decade of experience in consumer products. She began her career in New York at Esteé Lauder, where she worked in omnichannel strategy. She later joined Casper leading market strategy, before moving to Los Angeles to become chief of staff at Bala. She left that job in November of 2022 and gave herself a three-month break before making her next move, which she thought would be in venture capital. But a few weeks in, she had her lightbulb moment.
Photo: Courtesy of Nelle Atelier
The brand launched less than a year later, in November 2023, with a small assortment of premium denim for women under 5’4″ — which is about half of all women, by the way — sold direct-to-consumer online. Already, it boasts a repeat customer rate of 40%. This week, Nordstrom became its first major retail partner.
Given her lack of experience in fashion, Cohen says leveraging her network was the key to getting the brand off the ground: “I basically called and talked to anyone and everyone who I knew that had ties to the denim industry and eventually made my way to my factory,” which is in Los Angeles, she says. “Our first collection was designed by me and someone I found on Upwork based out of San Diego. I would drive back and forth. It was super, super scrappy. It’s still very scrappy, but it’s less scrappy now.” The first hire she made, once she could afford it, was a proper designer. She largely bootstrapped the business initially, then gradually raised about $250,000 in bits and pieces.
The brand’s boyfriend, straight-leg, cropped, wide-leg and (new) barrel-leg jean styles — made from rigid denim in classic washes with just the right amount of very subtle distressing — are desirable in their own right. But the real magic (and challenge) is in the fit. “Fit is number one at Nelle Atelier, and then the trend and the style, that gets incorporated afterwards,” Cohen explains.
Photo: Courtesy of Nelle Atelier
“We adjust the rise, the knee placement, the pocket size, and the inseam. No one else does that in the same way that we do. We fit on a petite model. A petite model in standard terms is five-six. We fit on someone who’s five-two,” she adds. “People always ask me, what makes Nelle different than everyone else? It’s like, it’s literally run by a short girl. That is the difference. I pay attention to things that other people aren’t paying attention to.”
It’s easy to see why petite offerings by other brands have been lacking. Similar to extended sizing, specialty sizing (like petites), is difficult to both get right and scale. This, Cohen argues, is why it makes sense for a brand like hers to focus entirely on this niche.
“I don’t think every brand should actually do this,” Cohen says. “It would be actually crazy to have a whole standard size assortment and then do it in all petites as well, which is why the only people who can afford to do it are Gap and Old Navy, and a little bit J.Crew… it actually creates really fertile ground for a brand like Nelle Atelier because I’m kind of like, ‘you guys do your thing, I’ll do mine, and we’re going to service this customer incredibly well in a way that, even if you wanted to, you wouldn’t be able to. The financial constraints are too great.'”
The petite category also presents unique challenges when it comes to visuals and marketing: “We’ve never actually shot on a petite model,” Cohen shares. “There’s very few petite models and they’re very expensive, candidly, and we just don’t have the budget for it.” Instead, all styles are photographed on real petite women, which Cohen feels actually improves the online shopping experience and decreases the likelihood of returns.
Photo: Courtesy of Nelle Atelier
“The majority of people are not model dimensions,” she notes. “Most people are actually sizes 28 to 32, but why are we putting someone that’s a size 24 on the website and they have to use their imagination and then they get the product and it doesn’t fit how they thought it would?”
This also creates storytelling opportunities, Cohen explains. The brand tapped a group of petite, New York-based female founders to model its Fall 2024 collection and created content around them for social media and email marketing. It plans to follow a similar formula for future collections.
Cohen also attributes much of the brand’s success to influencer gifting. “With denim, sizing is all over the place. The influencers and the ambassadors do a really good job and help us solve that problem” by educating their followers on their experience with fit, she says. The brand does not pay influencers to post, but for the last few months, it’s been using ShopMy, an affiliate platform that helps brands seed more strategically by finding well-aligned, high-converting creators. “It’s been exponential for the business,” per Cohen.
Nelle Atelier denim isn’t cheap, by the way: At around $260 a pair, it sits alongside premium brands like Frame and Agolde. As such, the brand’s customer is aged 34-55 (skewing older than the influencers it works with, who tend to be in their mid-twenties). In addition to its own e-commerce and now Nordstrom, the brand is carried by a few independent boutiques like Wunderkind. It also regularly hosts pop-ups and trunk shows with likeminded retailers like, most recently, The Westside in New York City.
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After one year in business, Cohen admits there are a few things she might’ve done differently in retrospect, like wait until she actually had the funding to build the brand. “People probably wouldn’t tell you to do this this way, but it worked,” she says. “I think that’s what bootstrapping a business is…. I don’t know if there is an easy way to build a company, but this is certainly not it.”
Among many surprises along the way, the biggest, she says, has been how much people love the brand. “I thought people would be like, ‘okay, cool,’ and kind of move on,” she says. “The other day, a customer emailed me, she just purchased [her] seventh pair […] As a consumer, I’ve never bought seven of anything from someone. And so that is really humbling for me. I am very grateful.”
Cohen’s goals for Nelle Atelier extend far beyond denim — she’s already working on new categories for her petite customers, set to launch in the first half of 2025. “There’s a huge appetite for it,” she says, teasing, “I think I tried on 15 coats and I was like, this is actually second runner-up after jeans.” Ultimately, she hopes to offer most major apparel categories, which, after nailing such a hard-to-fit category as denim, should be comparatively easy to tackle.
Homepage photo: Courtesy of Nelle Atelier
Please note: Occasionally, we use affiliate links on our site. Nelle Atelier gifted me a pair of its denim for review. In no way do either affect our editorial decision-making.
Source: Fashionista.com