Betrabrand Yoga Pants- Perfect For Work

Cable wasn’t available in the 1980s in Chris Lindland’s hometown of Rancho Santa Fe (San Diego County), so when his parents declined to sign up for satellite TV, he did the next best thing: He created his own shows.

“Friends of mine had video cameras, so we would always make stupid home movies,” the 44-year-old said at the company’s retail shop and headquarters on Valencia Street recently. “The storytelling part that you see around Betabrand began with me doing that kind of stuff.”

Betabrand may have begun as a joke, but the joke was on him when his first product, Cordarounds, took off in 2006. Lindland was employed by an online German hotel company at the time; to bolster his resume and marketing chops he created a side project: pants whose ridges wound around the legs horizontally and a website with clever quips and faux scientific facts about how the pants lowered the wearer’s (ahem) “crotch heat index.”

Adolescent male humor has taken the company far since Betabrand launched officially in 2010, but six years into the madness, the question isn’t why goofiness is so appealing. It’s how the company sustains a creativity that seems to burn ever hotter.

After an hour of rapid-fire conversation with Lindland, a fashion disrupter appropriately born on Bastille Day — and who claims to be jet-lagged after arriving home the previous day from Europe but shows no sign of fatigue — it’s apparent the fuel is his own inner high-octane drive. It’s a unique formula composed of his experience as the co-founder of a tech startup (i-Drive data storage); a stint in Hollywood as the creator of an animated comedy show sold to Spike TV; and a Gen X perspective that grounds him in the ways that digital consumers live and think.

“The Internet has created consumers that expect the world to change every 15 seconds,” Lindland says, standing amid racks of fan-favorite silver Disco Hoodies on the sales floor.

“How can a fashion industry that says, ‘We’re going to invent what you wear two years from now’ connect with the consumer base that expects everything to be immediate, and constantly changing?” Lindland asks. “Our business says, ‘Design ideas can spring forth in two minutes; we should be striving to have people interact with that two hours later.’ Because a design is an idea, and an idea is what people consume online.”

That’s why Betabrand keeps its website dizzyingly fresh — posting 12 to 15 garments online every week, unlike traditional clothing companies that design months in advance and deliver apparel to department stores up to a year later.

To achieve the rapid turnaround, Betabrand’s in-house fashion designers make their own sketches and review hundreds of ideas submitted by outside designers. All designs are posted in a crowdfunding section of the website; if they are a success, they join Betabrand’s collection.

To manufacture at breakneck speed, Betabrand does all the back-end work first: It develops a prototype for a garment, and a supply chain for materials and vendors, and then places the garment on its website for customers to browse and order. “If we find out that 10,000 people want this thing,” Lindland says, pointing to a new plaid shirt on a rack, “production can begin two days later.”

Comedy is integral to Betabrand’s popularity, hence the emphasis on gag names like the new Weed-Tweed blazer by Matt Their found on the crowdfunding section of the company’s website. (“It’s pretty clear that pot’s going mainstream across the United States. Soon, smokers of all ages, shapes, and strains will emerge from the smoky shadows to rejoice and blaze up! And what will these legions of newly liberated tokers wear? My Weed-Tweed Blazer, naturally,” the product blurb states.)

Betabrand, which strives to be the “Facebook of fashion,” also gets new ideas from Internet chatter.

Following the success of its $78 Dress Pant Yoga Pant for women, created by Sarah James for office workers in 2014, Betabrand saw that women were wondering why nobody was making stylish, comfy apparel for traveling. That’s how a 40-piece travel collection that includes the Red Eye Wrap, travel jeans and a travel skort was born.

The pace may be relentless, but Betabrand’s employees seem to enjoy Lindland’s charismatic pressure.

In August, Lindland held the company’s first Alumni Ball, a costume party to celebrate the efforts of present and past employees.

One of those present, Steve Teeple, 28, a senior web producer, says he left Apple and took a pay cut to come to Betabrand in 2012.

“It’s an insane editorial-magazine-newspaper vibe, where Chris coming up to us saying, ‘This story isn’t working — we’re going to change it up’ and ‘We have to scramble to re-photograph things and move things around,’” says Teeple. “He wants to be the person that is saying, ‘Why can’t we do this better? Why can’t we do this faster?’ and I really respect that about him.”

One of those rip-and-redo episodes involved a campaign for a hemp-fiber shirt called the Tree Hugger, with photos of a man hugging a tree. Lindland scrapped it, feeling it was lackluster, and suggested two alternatives — The Libertarian, for the consumer who believes in guns and sustainable textiles, and the Tree Humper, about a forbidden romance between man and tree.

How does Lindland keep those new ideas coming?

“I’ve often wondered that myself,” says Benjamin Keyser, 37, Betabrand’s art director, as electronic dance music pulsed inside. “It doesn’t seem like it takes him any effort to come up with stuff — it’s all kind of mad scientist brilliant weird stuff, and not all of it is appropriate for photo shoots.”

In September, Betabrand launched YogAID, a program that donated $5 from the purchase of each pair of Dress Pant Yoga Pants to the nonprofit Techstars Foundation, working to increase diversity in the tech field, raising $100,000 for the group. Betabrand also gave those customers a free Betabrand pantsuit calendar featuring 32 local female entrepreneurs (Debbie Sterling of GoldiBlox; Stephanie Hannon, Hillary Clinton’s CTO; Caroline Ghosn of Levo) clad in pantsuits and photographed doing yoga poses.

As Betabrand launches its new Urban Outdoors line this month, it’s also preparing for the second annual Silicon Valley Fashion Week? Oct. 20-22, to be sponsored by Zappos and held at the Gantry, a new mid-Market event space in San Francisco, to accommodate an anticipated 2,500 attendees.

Lindland is focusing on the Bay Area’s Burning Man and maker roots, and he hopes the event becomes “like “Comi-con for fashion,” referring to the long-running San Diego convention attended by more than 130,000 costumed fans. “We’re the home of visual stuff and technology. That feels more like a San Francisco show than if we try to behave like a New York show; whenever San Francisco tries, it looks like a pale comparison.”

Carolyne Zinko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: czinko@sfchronicle.com

Silicon Valley Fashion Week?

Oct. 20-22: 1425 Market St. Tickets: $25 and up; www.betabrand.com. The Betabrand Pantsuit calendar is $20 at www.betabrand.com/pantsuit-calendar.html.

Betabrand’s greatest hits

2011: Disco pants; the “caperon,” a hybrid cape and apron

2012: Executive Pinstripe Hoodie, timed to Facebook’s IPO.

2014: Dress Pant Yoga Pant, the company’s best-selling item to date; Gay Jeans, with multicolored threads that fray and “come out” as the garment is worn.

Creative block? Lindland’s “environmental” tips for getting unstuck:

1. Head to a cafe. Surely the coffee aids in elevating the senses, but the environmental change is the extra ingredient. There’s always someone working away on a screenplay, start-up or thesis, and my mind feeds off the environment.

2. Take a hike. Once a month, I walk a couple projects up Twin Peaks or Mount Tam. Sounds like an excuse to blow off work, but when your job is inventing experiences (which fashion really is all about), it helps to take your brain to places folks really want to be.

3. Visit SFMOMA. Sounds pretentious, but it really isn’t. Art museums are monuments to creative thinking. It never hurts to wander through an ocean of ideas when you’re puzzling about problems — creative, professional or personal