At Steve and Barry's, Fashion Isn't a Luxury

"It is about something real," Prevor said. "This is about listening to customers and responding to their demands and they come in and they say, this is a great idea, why isn't anyone doing that?"

But how do you make money on a $9 pair of jeans?

"Cotton is 60 cents a pound," Prevor said. "There are 60 cents of cotton in these jeans, everything else is profit for someone else along the way."

The clothes are made around the world in more than 20 counties, including the United States, China and India, and the owners say they're mindful of how their workers are treated.

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"We are very careful to make sure than the vendors we deal with are socially compliant," Prevor said. "We do audits, and it really has to be the mission of the vendor to be compliant."

Shore and Prevor have a billion-dollar empire riding on it, an empire that began with a childhood friendship. Prevor started selling T-shirts at flea markets in college for a dollar.

In the 1980s, they opened their first store, selling licensed collegiate gear at prices much lower than campus bookstores. By the 1990s, they expanded to a few more colleges, but two years ago, they changed everything with one shoe.

"Parents were feeling bad that their kids were coming up to them and saying, 'It's not an option, mom, it's not an option. You have to spend $100 for my shoes,'" Prevor said.

So they teamed with NBA star Stephan Marbury to create the Starbury.

While the store doesn't advertise in traditional ways, Steve and Barry's uses the backs of celebrities like billboards.

"We figured we need someone to play in the NBA every day, every night, and if someone could wear these sneakers in NBA games, then how could you argue about its durability and quality," Shore said.

Marbury and his team, the New York Knicks, may not be a very good sell right now, but that hasn't hurt the bottom line on Marbury's line, which Shore and Prevor said has sold "millions" of pairs of shoes.

Shore and Prevor now have more than 260 stores and are considered rock stars in the retail world. But you'd never know that by visiting their headquarters on Long Island.