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By Megan Rowe / Daily Progress staff writer
March 28, 2006

If a woman's backside looks big in a pair of jeans, Judy B. Bushkin will say so.

Still, customers keep returning to her Charlottesville store, Judy b. Jeans and Clothing.

After all, nobody wants to pay $132 (the price of the cheapest pair of jeans Bushkin sells) for something that doesn't look good.

Bushkin's been giving customers her honest advice for almost 12 years, ever since she opened a 600-square-foot women's clothing store in Scottsville. She and her husband had bought a 300-acre farm two years earlier and moved to the area from California. They owned cattle and horses and people dubbed the farm "Judy's Petting Zoo."

But Bushkin (who had never had a job) was growing bored on the farm. "I was loving every minute of it, and then it got old." She opened the store but Scottsville was just too small to keep the store open, she discovered. "You're not going to go from Charlottesville to Scottsville to buy a scarf."

After eight months, she packed up and moved to her current location off Millmont Street. This time, she stuck to jeans, which had been a top seller at her Scottsville store. Since, she and her husband also have sold their farm and moved to Esmont.

The store also sells T-shirts and lingerie. The jeans, however, are what stand out at Judy b. They dominate several tracks on the left side of the store, row after row of mostly blue denim, upscale brands that sound more like rock bands than clothes: 7 for all mankind, True Religion, Rock & Republic, to name a few. The prices go well into the $200 range; one denim skirt costs $299.

Bushkin has tried to sell cheaper jeans. Two years ago, she brought in $80 jeans. "I finally gave them to Katrina victims. I did not sell one pair."

The jeans are "too expensive to play Russian roulette with," Bushkin said. "We tell the truth. We are brutally honest. If something doesn't look right, we steer you in another direction. We've lost a lot of sales because of that, but customers come here because they trust us."

Still, she tries to remain tactful when giving advice, at least for first-time customers.

"If someone's really overweight, I usually say to them, sweetheart, we can do better."

When she knows the customer better, she's more blunt: "Get that off."

"They told one of my friends that she had a big butt and needed a larger size," Covenant School senior Eliza Van Beuren said recently.

There's no tape measure in sight at the store, but Bushkin and her employees can detect sizes just by glancing at a customer's figure. Finding the perfect pair of jeans is trial and error, employee Kris Isom said.

"It's usually the older women who come in and say, 'I dread this. I don't want to do this,'" Bushkin said. Within five minutes, they've found a pair and conclude that the experience was fun, she added.

"My daughters come down from D.C. to shop here," customer Ester Lee said. Lee, who has 10 grandchildren and said her age was "north of 60," wore a pair of jeans with blue beads on the rear as she browsed around Bushkin's store one recent Friday afternoon. The jeans are expensive, she acknowledged, but, "you get what you pay for."

"They feel good," Lee said. "You want to have feel-good jeans. You want to have jump-on-me jeans."