When are the Honest Jeans coming back?

Do you remember the Honest Jeans that we launched back in 2021? They arrived a bit late and especially the first production round had its share of quality issues. But also they were well-loved by many!!

Now three years later we often get the question: when are the jeans coming back?

Short answer: not yet!

We do definitely want to bring them back. Because we love and wear denims every day. And we think there should also be honest jeans at honest price points in the market.

However for now, since we’re a small company with quite limited resources, we’ve decided to focus on the products that we can make. Rather than spend time, energy and money in chasing the elusive dream of bringing back our honest jeans.

Back in 2021 and early 2022 we had a lot of troubles with the factory that made the first and second production rounds of our honest jeans. Both production rounds were heavily delayed (about two months each) and there were a lot of communication issues. Ajay, our quality manager in India at the time, visited the second production multiple times to try and speed things along, while also improving quality standards. Still the process was so painful for us that we decided not to work with this factory anymore.

Delays in production are very difficult for us as a small brand to handle. There is an optimal sales season for jeans (February - May and late September - early December). In summer jeans sales slow down a lot, because it’s too hot. So if our production is delayed by two months and we get the products only in May instead of March, not only do we miss 2 valuable months of sales. But also we’re forced to sit on stock and wait out the summer. Which is financially very tough to handle.

In 2022 and 2023 we mobilised our network in the fashion industry and tried to find a new factory that could produce honest jeans for us. We had conversations with factories in Vietnam, India and Egypt. We even visited factories in Turkey and China. All to see if we could make it work. But unfortunately all without the desired result.

The problem: the 3 things we require are hard to find and seemingly impossible to combine. We need 1) low prices, 2) low production quantities and 3) high levels of sustainability.

Usually we can get at least 2 / 3, for example high levels of sustainability and low production volumes. But then prices would be too high for us and we end up with € 79.90 jeans, which is definitely also not a direction we want to go.

One-by-one the conversations with new jeans factories stopped. Overall the conclusion we have to draw, is that our requirements at our scale, are simply not feasible. Each new conversation does cost us time and sometimes also money. And we do have a great set-up for other product groups already, such as t-shirts, hoodies, knits and underwear.

Therefore we decided to first focus on growing these existing product groups into bigger successes. Once our brand has grown a bit more, we’ll for sure try to relaunch Honest Jeans. For now, all we do is keep our eyes open in case the right factory might come along.

If you’re looking for sustainable jeans at the moment, we recommend to check-out Mud Jeans from the Netherlands and Dawn Denim from Berlin. Both do great things in terms of sustainability!