How Nudie Jeans Took Raw Denim Mainstream and Beyond (with Co-Owner, Palle Stenberg)

In this episode of the podcast, I’m honoured to be joined by Palle Stenberg, one of the three owners of Nudie Jeans, to talk about his story and, of course, the story of Nudie Jeans.

We talk about the origins of the brand, about what makes it different from other denim brands; we talk about organic cotton, about repairing jeans, and the challenges of being a gateway brand for denimheads.

For many raw denim enthusiasts of my generation—meaning those of us who got into it in the late 00s—Nudie Jeans has been a ‘gateway brand.’

It was one of the first brands that introduced many of us to raw denim, selvedge, and wearing our jeans for months without washing them. But, interestingly, even though Nudie Jeans started with raw selvedge denim, great fades weren’t the key motivator for the brand.

Last year, Nudie Jeans’ co-founder, Maria Erixon, who unfortunately couldn’t join Palle and me for the interview, wrote an excellent book about the story of the brand. In it, she points out that Nudie Jeans is “the middle road between fast fashion and slow jeans revolution”.

Nudie Jeans is one of the pioneers of using organic cotton. Since 2012, they’ve used organic cotton exclusively for their jeans. They’ve also made their supply chain completely transparent, allowing everyone to track where and how each garment was made.

They’re also the only denim brand of their size (at least that I know of) that offers free repairs for life on all of their jeans. So if you have a pair of Nudie jeans that need to be fixed, you can take them to any Nudie Jeans store—which is, in fact, called a ‘Repair Store’—and get them repaired. For free. No matter where you bought them.

You can listen to the interview in the embedded player above, on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, and Stitcher.

The jeans in the featured image are Matt Wilson‘s Average Joes.