With her long blonde hair, stylish beach cover-up and designer sandals, Aerin Kwait-Taubin looks as if she could be a model. She’s in the fashion business, it’s true – but she’s the one hiring the models. The pretty 35-year-old Ridgewood wife and mother of two young sons is the founder of Aerin Rose Swimwear, a company that grew out of her desire to own a perfectly fitting, but still chic swimsuit.

“I used to buy suits that I liked and take them to a tailor to be altered,” says Kwait-Taubin. One of her innovations was bikini tops with hidden underwire, which provides support but doesn’t affect the fashion element. Aerin Rose designs are also available in many more sizes than usual.

“Women always want to buy ‘cute’ bathing suits, but they don’t always look ‘cute’ when they try them on,” explains Kwait-Taubin. “My suits do.” All of the swimwear is made in the United States with fabric imported from Europe. “I would say 99 percent of my customers are very happy,” she says proudly of the products she sells both online and at stores throughout the U.S. and as far away as Singapore.

In 2000, when Kwait-Taubin first decided to try her hand at designing, she was a television producer with credits including the Sally Jessy Raphael show, The People’s Court with Ed Koch, and CNN’s Showbiz program. “As a producer, I was used to putting things together, and I have a real entrepreneurial side,” she notes with a smile, remembering the lemonade stands she ran while growing up in Teaneck. She went on to graduate cum laude from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a degree in marketing.  

Kwait-Taubin’s lack of fashion-design classes didn’t deter her from creating the first suit. “It was one of those ‘throw you in the water and see if you can swim’ situations,” she remembers. “I wanted to make a suit to sell, so I found an expert pattern-maker to teach me, and learned while we were in fittings or while I was overseeing things in the factory. It was a better education than any fashion school, because it was real life.”

Her “lucky” break came when InStyle magazine featured her very first design in a quarter-page layout. “The reaction was incredible,” she recalls. “I was getting calls nonstop on my home phone with orders coming in.”

Since that time, Aerin Rose Swimwear has survived a factory fire and major thefts to grow by leaps and bounds. This year, business has tripled over 2007, and the suits continue to be featured in fashion magazines including Glamour, Allure and Seventeen. Tyra Banks even featured the figure-flattering line on her television show.

“Looking good in a bathing suit always makes for a good show,” Kwait-Taubin says.