After seven years of selling unfussy clothes, Eunice Lee has learned something about her male clientele. "Men don't like noise," she says, recalling a pair of nylon pants she once made. The coated cotton and nylon jacket sold fine, but the zzzep–zzzep sound of one pant leg brushing past another messed with guys' sense of how unobtrusively they like to move through the world.

It was highly instructive to Lee because there was a lot of noise in the fashion industry in general that her customers were rejecting: the clamor about trends and the chatter about industry darlings. She just wanted to sell good clothes at a reasonable price to a guy who had grown out of T–shirts and jeans but had nowhere to go to keep his cool. "When my surfer friends got older, what was there to wear?" she asks. "Stüssy?" Lee's seven–year–old line, Unis, offers twills and denims and jersey staples for grown–ups who still have a sporty side but don't look at their lives as an endless summer.

Single and in her early thirties, this feisty chick who grew up in New York and New Jersey has created a niche for herself in Nolita, where other shopkeepers have come to rely on her street smarts. Over lunch at Balthazar, the indomitable cutie sets down her glass of rosé to free her hands (with their hot pink nails). She's showing me the signals she uses to alert her neighbors when shoplifters are working the block. It's just one of the ways that this former "corporate baby" (the Parsons grad is a veteran of DKNY and Joseph Abboud) asserts herself in an industry that was once less welcoming—"Testosterone City," she recalls.

At Unis, Lee succeeds not despite her gender but precisely because she's a woman. She observes men in her store carefully, like a kid with an ant farm. "They have a harder time shopping," she says, noting that year to year she always keeps her sizes perfectly consistent. "Guys are much more sensitive to those changes than women are. They need to feel safe."

Men shopping alone is one thing: They like to show off for any smiling saleswoman, and then maybe they'll buy one of something that works for them in every possible color. But when a wife or girlfriend is in tow, the dynamic becomes delicate. If the shop rep compliments his choice and the spouse wrinkles her nose, the sale is sunk. The guy can protest, try on several like it, and announce he loves them all, but to no avail. "Once a woman has decided, it's already over," Lee says.