Madewell is an American company that has made Jeans since 1937.

^{[10] [5]}The trademark of Madewell has been bought by J crew and has transformed into a "little sister" of the company.

The clothing is now specifically designed for women.

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The company began in the 1930s by Julian Kivowitz, a Jewish Immigrant from Eastern Europe who after arriving in Ellis Island he made his way up north and settled in the town of New Bedford.

He arrived there in the 1920s.

Julius, like so many of his generation, was an Entrepreneur who had a passion for financial success.

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First he opened a grocery store, earning enough money to, along with a partner from New York, move into textiles.

It was a natural move for Julius, as it was for many other Jews, who brought a centuries-long tradition of textile manufacturing with them from Europe.

Beginning around the 16th century in Eastern Europe, Russian and Polish Jews began working with wool.

By the 1860s, heavily Jewish cities like Lodz and Bialystok were textile-manufacturing centers; more than half of the textile industry in Bialystock was Jewish-owned.

This was pretty much stamped out by the 1930s, thanks to decades of violent Anti-Semitism in Russia perpetrated by independent Poland.

But Julius had already fled Eastern Europe and made his home in New Bedford.

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In 1936, Julius filed for the Madewell trademark, and in 1937 he opened his first factory.

No one seems to know why he picked — or if he himself even did pick — that name.

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