Julia Jentzsch and Waleed Khairzada are on the cusp. The design duo behind upstart fashion line Naum, Ms. Jentzsch and Mr. Khairzada will learn this week whether enthusiastic reviews translate into store placement and wider recognition – or if they will have to continue selling their futuristic, sculptural constructions by special order to a limited few.

“It’s time for a larger audience to react to our work. We need it as designers and businesspeople,” Mr. Khairzada said in a joint interview at the airy, garment district showroom of Greg Mills, a press and sales agent for young designers.

Naum stands at a crossroads that is not uncommon for young fashion companies. It has a financial backer, three collections under its belts, and favorable profiles in style bibles like Elle. But without its designs in stores, Naum largely exists in a fashion bubble, available only to in-the-know women who are inspired enough to book an appointment.

Naum’s challenge is to convince stores to take a risk on an untested quantity. Even fashion-forward stores like Barneys that take pride in their support of new, avant-garde designers are notoriously nervous about signing new talent. “Naum is for artistically minded people who understand clothes. It’s a more interesting road but also more difficult,” Mr. Mills, who was president of Isaac Mizrahi during that company’s formative years, said.

Where the 30-something Ms. Jentzsch and Mr. Khairzada differ from other startups is in the breadth and depth of their experience – and it shows in their edgy, classically tailored clothes, which feature modern, architectural flair, an Armani-esque sense of movement, and surprising wearability. Ms. Jentzsch has atelier training at Jil Sander and Yves Saint Laurent in Paris, and continues to hold her day job as creative director of Philippe Adec. Mr. Khairzada spent 15 years at Harve Benard, a coat and suit house on West 39th Street. Last November he left his post as design director to give Naum his full attention.

Five years ago, itching to strike out on his own, Mr. Khairzada drafted a business plan for a luxury goods company that would use high-tech materials to push fashion into the future. Then came September 11, and investment dollars dried up. A couple of years later, a friend of Mr. Khairzada’s mentioned the plan to her cousin, a businessman in Hawaii named Kosta Naum. He wanted to invest (the line is named for him).Then another friend of Mr. Khairzada’s suggested he meet Ms. Jentzsch, and arranged a cigarette-break meeting on the street.

“We found we had an unusual connection,” Ms. Jentzsch, a tall, German-born stunner, said. Quickly the pair discovered a shared reverence for the mammoth sculpture of Richard Serra, the modern dance pioneer Martha Graham, the minimalist composer Philip Glass and, most important, hightech fabrics for luxurious, sophisticated clothes that a woman could have in her closet forever. “Somebody once remarked to us that everything that we will ever do for Naum already exists in the first collection,” said Mr. Khairzada, a clear-eyed, compactly built native of Afghanistan who immigrated to New Jersey in 1981.

The pair interacts like those old-time married couples who have been creative collaborators for decades. They speak as “we” instead of “I,” and poke fun at their stars-aligning-type relationship in an industry brimming with armchair astrologers.

They also speak openly about the inherent difficulties of being a startup. As designers, they are still forging Naum’s identity – a critical component for stores, which value packaged consistency. As a two-person company, they grapple daily with budget shortfalls, filling fabric minimums, tracking down talented seamstresses, and more. Mr. Khairzada acknowledges that with the backing of a large luxury company, Naum’s collection could be “three times as large.” But up to this point they have preferred the independence that comes with a financial backer from outside the fashion industry. Now they are starting to see Kosta Naum’s outsider status as a disadvantage.

In athletic wear, high-tech fabrics are a necessity; in fashion, they can seem gimmicky. But Naum has seized the legacy of visionaries like the Japanese designers of the 1980s – not their designs, but their embrace of new fabrics and technologies. “Look at Issey Miyake,” Ms. Jentzsch said. “New fabrics are the reason he could do what he did. You cannot get a new result with chiffon, for example. It has been layered, printed, shredded, you name it, and it’s not going to do anything for you that it didn’t do for Mr. Dior. But with new fabrics, you get new shapes.”

Ms. Jentzsch and Mr. Khairzada also incorporate long-existing technologies previously unseen in fashion. For fall, they put paraffin panels in a cocoon-shaped jacket – made from wool, cotton, mohair, alpaca, and other materials – which keeps the wearer’s body at a constant warm temperature. For their next collection, they are investigating how salts used in Egyptian mummification 4,000 years ago can create new possibilities for finishings.

Of course, high-tech innovation doesn’t matter if the clothes don’t look good. The good news with Naum is that the clothes look great. But really, how much does even that matter if you can’t discover them for yourself in stores?