Our past NLT picks: Where are they now?

Romney Evans and Jessica Arredondo didn't launch TrueJeans.com until December 2006, six months behind schedule. But "it paid off to take our time," Evans says. The site asks users to enter their measurements and then gives them a ranking of the best-fitting jeans culled from dozens of name brands. The results are so effective that True Jeans has attracted a loyal following: it boasts a 14% conversion rate of casual browsers into registered users compared to the industry average of 2%; it is also one of the top three search results for "jeans" in Google. The average sale is nearly $200, up 50% compared to the months just after the site launched. One popular new feature: Type in the name of a celebrity to find out what brand of jeans they're wearing.

Evans and Arredondo have found that their site gets a lot of love from bloggers. When True Jeans was mentioned in Grumperina.com, a knitting enthusiast blog, its readers bought more than $20,000 in merchandise within 48 hours. True Jeans's founders invited about a dozen bloggers into the company's Woburn, Mass., facility, and they gave them ideas for new niche markets, such as plus-sized jeans, that the company pursued in 2007.