The backstage story of Nudie Jeans

Start your own f*cking brand

by Marie Erixon

Start your own f*cking brand is the story of the Nudie Jeans company. The company was founded in 2001 and specializes in premium denim. The Nudie Jeans company was one of the first apparel companies to champion sustainability and re-usability. For example, Worldwide ‘Repair Shops’ allow owners to repair denim for free, re-sell as second-hand or even donate to the recycling program.

Nudie’s Manifesto’s

“At Nudie, we never wrote any business plan or strategy. Instead, our first document was composed on the foundation of our core values, our philosophy. The Nudie Jeans Manifesto served as a response to the question of why we started, but it also came to be a way of delimiting our expectations for the brand….

Our manifesto has developed over the years into a more concrete document and served as a foundation for the strategies and cultural documents we’ve continuously generated internally”

The manifesto’s key points include:

• Nudie Jeans Second Skin — “Besides leather, only denim has the ability to age so beautifully-formed by its user into a second skin. Indigo is the living colour that fades together with the lifestyle”
• Nudie Jeans Second Hand — “We built our brand on the life cycle from dry to reuse, where the second hand stage is the beauty of aging in life…Repairing is caring and we make high quality products worth repairing or reusing”
• Nudie Jeans Responsibility— “We strive for sustainable consumption…We have a responsibility towards all the people who take part in the production of our garments to make sure that nobody who works directly for us or as a subcontractor is deprived of his or her human rights or suffer any harm”

Happiness

“My favorite writer again, Bauman, asserts that happiness is not the same thing as an existence without worries, but rather something we attain after having tackled difficult tasks, mulled things over, discussed and reached agreement by resolving hitches and challenges”

Flow

“According to physiologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who is best known for his work on happiness and creativity, the idea stage is the simple phase. The desire and energy exist to realize the idea, but it’s all about going with the flow to achieve the idea’s true essence. It’s in the realization phase that the most important questions and decisions arise, and that takes time.

It’s impossible to hurry or force this process forward. Flow is regarded as the state of concentration when you’re completely absorbed, a kind of self-willed discipline in which you can feel yourself to be at your most alive. According to Csíkszentmihályi, the greatest threat is all forms of oppression, condescension or questioning in the course of the process.”

Kintsugi

“In Japan there’s an art form called Kintsugi that is based on an understanding that an object that has a history is even more beautiful than an object without a history. Instead of tryong to conceal a crack in a ceramic object, the crack is accentuated by repairing it with gold.

Mending jeans using Japanese techniques, with patching techniques or by sewing new motifs over the tattered one, is part of our DNA — making use of a garment, cherishing its history and finding beauty in what has been added”

Repair Shops

“In 2013 we decided, prompted by an idea form Joakim, to change the name of all of our stores to ‘Repair Shops’. We did so because it’s just as important to offer the service of repairing our jeans for free as it is to sell new ones.”