Founder of Bebe and his manager's and executives

Bebe's founder, Manny Mashouf, lucked into the limelight. The onetime steakhouse owner ran his low-key apparel company, now based in Brisbane, Calif., for 15 years before becoming a fashion heavyweight. He had a loyal customer base, but sales never climbed above $6 million. "Before its affiliation with Hollywood, Bebe was just a sporadic mall operator," says Thomas Julian, trend analyst with ad agency Fallon McElligott.

Its soft-spoken chief executive dreamed of dressing young starlets in va-va-voom clothing. In 1990 Mashouf and a photographer began approaching aspiring actresses and asked them to appear in Bebe advertising for free. Mashouf sweetened the pitch by offering them Bebe clothes gratis. Charlize Theron (who has since starred in Mighty Joe Young and The Astronaut's Wife) was among the unknowns who took Mashouf up on his offer. "They liked the clothes and they liked the exposure," Mashouf, 61, says of his models.

And it did more for Bebe than the Iranian-born Mashouf (his first name was originally Manoucher) could have imagined. The actresses became walking billboards for the chain. They appeared in high-profile magazine ads. They could be seen wearing the clothes in trendy haunts around Los Angeles and San Francisco.

By 1995 Heather Locklear was sporting figure-hugging Bebe suits on the Fox Network hit Melrose Place. Bebe's first prime-time appearance surprised Mashouf, who hadn't yet courted TV wardrobe people.

Now Bebe actively pursues TV gigs. Every new season, Heather Vandenberghe, Bebe's director of marketing, evaluates the lineups, runs down the cast lists, looking for young, urban, hot actresses. Then she works with the studios' wardrobe managers and discusses what clothes they'll need for the year. That's how Bebe nabbed such stars as Jennifer Love Hewitt (Party of Five) and Lara Flynn Boyle (The Practice). The latest prospect: ABC's Wasteland. "It's a gamble," says Vandenberghe. "But we have yet to pick a show that's flopped." The exposure is free. Some large consumer goods companies pay big bucks to get their products placed in movies, but Mashouf claims he doesn't give away clothes to stars (though they sometimes get store discounts). "If the merchandise is good enough, it should be paid for," he says.

That's Mashouf the businessman, a guy who mixes well with Hollywood but is not one of them. He's got his hands full of the day-to-day operations of the company--manufacturing, retailing and, of course, picking fabric. His wife, Neda, 36, works part-time overseeing licensing of shoes and accessories, such as sunglasses, and sits on the board.

She moved to San Francisco from Iran when she was a teenager, met Mashouf when she was a college student and popped into his first boutique to make a layaway payment on a leather jacket. She still wears Bebe. Even so, surveying some of the 2,000 teeny-weeny bits of clothing--handkerchief tops and camisoles--at Bebe's headquarters, prompts Neda, a mother of two, to confide: "I'm thrilled I have boys.