This article applies the principles of my guide about how to buy perfect jeans as done by two experienced and successful denim retailers. If you haven’t read the guide already, I encourage you to do so first.

Christopher Åkesson and Peter Hilmersson of Meadow in Malmo — Christopher Åkesson (left) and Peter Hilmersson (right), founders and owners of Meadow in Malmo.

4 Tips for Retailers That Will Guide Your Customers to Perfect Jeans (with Peter and Christopher from Meadow)

If you’re in men’s fashion retail, you know that some garments practically sell themselves.

Sometimes, big sellers are the hippest colour of the season. Sometimes a garment or an accessory has been endorsed by a celebrity or a trendsetter. Sometimes it’s the weather, like when boots and jackets fly out the store on the first day of winter. Or when you can’t keep enough stock of shorts and flip-flops in the summer.

With jeans, it’s usually a little different.

For most men, jeans are a wardrobe staple. It’s what we wear at work, at home, out on the town and in the garden. This means we have very specific and highly individual requirements for our jeans.

Jeans should fit like a tailored suit or a pair of handmade boots. They have to match the shirts and jackets we have in our wardrobes. Sometimes, our jeans have to be a certain brand. And it never hurts if we feel we get value for our money.

I experienced this every single day when I worked in retail. Customers would come in looking for their next pair of “perfect” jeans. What I quickly learned was that selling perfect jeans is a form of art. It’s something you have to learn by doing it. Knowing how to guide your customers towards jeans they’ll actually be happy with takes a lot of practice and astute observations.

To get an inside perspective of how the sausage is made, I called my good friends and Scandinavian brothers, Peter and Christopher from Meadow in Malmo, Sweden’s third biggest city, just across the Oresund strait from Copenhagen.

I wanted to know how they run one of Scandinavia’s coolest denim shops by making sure their customers walk out with perfect jeans.