Denim Talks

Sanjeev Bahl is tired of talking about sustainability.

As the founder and CEO of Saitex, a fully vertical textile company that spins and weaves denim from yarns they have dyed with sewing factories in Ho Chi Minh City and Los Angeles, he has received numerous recognitions for the company’s socially and environmentally conscious stance. But he said, the goal from the outset was just to do the right thing. And today, Bahl is still waiting for apparel to commit to making the necessary investments to stop the “race to the bottom” that’s impeding advancements and adoption of available climate solutions. In the meantime, he’s committed to taking a holistic approach to environmental and social stewardship.

Here, Kingpins founder Andrew Olah and Bahl, let us in on one of many insightful conversations the two have shared over the years as they’ve grown and evolved their businesses. The two old friends discuss their similar outlooks on life, why measuring success based on a country’s GDP is insufficient and how AI will really transform the denim business.

If anyone can shed light on what’s happening in denim today, it would be Jerome Dahan. For the founder of both Citizens of Humanity and 7 for All Mankind the focus on price points is undermining the industry, allowing denim to drift too far away from the creativity that propelled brands like his to success.

Andrew Olah, founder of the Kingpins trade show and the Olah Inc. agency, has known Dahan for decades and credits him for bringing innovation to what had been a stale category. “Part of it is timing. Timing is everything. He had the perfect comprehension of the customer at the moment,” Olah said. “There was no slub denim, no differentiation. There were a few at the time: AG, Paper [Denim & Cloth], True Religion and Paige, each with a different take. It was a moment when jeans went from $50 to $180.”

Those pricey jeans helped make denim fashion. “That was a huge moment of history where everything changed,” Olah said. “It’s difficult to replicate now. No one understands the consumer and the consumer doesn’t have a propensity to want to wear jeans.”

Leveraging experience at his first company, Circa, as well as a stint at Lucky Brand, he launched 7 for All Mankind with Michael Glaser in 2000. Next, he created Citizens of Humanity in 2002, which he said in some ways was an even bigger feat. “When I started Citizens, it was a challenge because I left  7 for all Mankind, and I was like, ‘Okay, am I gonna be able to do it again? It’s like, you don’t know until you do it.’” And he did.

Here, Olah and Dahan sit down to discuss the industry, how it’s evolved and their shared love of denim.

In 2019, my friend Scott Morrison made a pilot for what he hoped would be a series of shows about jeans. YouTube indicates that 460,000 people have seen it to date, but I’ve never heard one person mention it. Plus, the few people I asked about the show all said they had never heard of it — let alone seen it.
 
Scott is a legend in our industry having started not one, not two but three successful brands: Paper Denim & Cloth, Earnest Sewn and 3x1 Denim. The 3x1 Soho store shuttered pre-Covid at the end of 2019, as did the brand itself. Scott left our industry and moved to golfwear — which is a bit like Tiger Woods leaving golf to be a pro tennis player.
 
I called Scott recently to ask if I can share his jeans pilot to our newsletter audience (at least, to those of you who are not among the 460K).
 
I hope you like our conversation. I miss Scott. We used to have breakfast almost every month and catch up on the industry and our personal lives, which were funny at that time. In the year of insanity 2020, he moved (I can’t believe I am writing this) to Seattle and I moved to Houston. Who would have predicted that? Never came up once in years over our bacon and eggs.

Enjoy the movie here.

Kingpins Founder Andrew Olah recently talked with Shannon Mercer, CEO of FibreTrace, to discuss traceability tools to help brands gain insight into where their materials are coming from, as well as the role of consumer influence and compliance with international legislation aimed at ensuring responsible sourcing. 

As consumers, we have the tiniest window into how the products we use are made. Maybe you get a single country of origin or the fiber content, but that hides the many other chemicals, countries, and suppliers that contributed to its production. Andrew Olah has been in the upstream world of denim and clothing production for nearly 50 years and has run the Kingpins Show, one of the biggest markets and informational resources for denim and jeans manufacturers, since 2004. We talk with Andrew about everything from his early days in the denim business, how to run a trade show during a pandemic, and how clothing manufacturing can actually become sustainable in the future.

This week, Denim Talks is proud to introduce to a special project we’ve been working on with Lee. 

In the first episode, Lee’s Roian Atwood and Kingpins founder, Andrew Olah, explore each step of the denim supply chain, discussing the sustainability challenges and potential opportunities to make denim better for the world, better for the environment and better for you.

New Indigood episodes will be available every other Friday. Stream The Indigood Podcast on the kingpinsshow.com website or wherever you get your podcasts.  

Visitors to Kingpins’ Denim Days in New York will remember Studio 189’s bold prints and indigo-dyed textiles. The New York-based company, founded by fashion executive Abrima Erwiah and actress Rosario Dawson, was a regular exhibitor at the consumer-facing denim festival.  We sat down with Erwiah at the festival last year to hear the story behind Studio 189 and to discuss the company’s sustainable mission. 

Sanjeev Bahl, owner of Saitex, has created a denim factory considered the cleanest in the world. Fair Trade-certified, as well as a Benefit Corporation, Saitex is constantly evolving as Bahl works to make the business cleaner, safer and more equitable. Bahl talks to us about the industry's need for a reset and what to consider to move forward. 

Paul Guez talks about the early days of designer denim, how he introduced French-style jeans to the U.S. market and that time he got Elton John to rewrite a song for him. 

For the launch episode of Kingpins podcast series Denim Talks, we sit down with Andrew Olah, the founder of Kingpins, to talk about the history of the denim supply chain trade show, as well as the denim and jeans business' efforts to be more sustainable (and the challenges of defining that term). Plus, Andrew tells us how he got hooked on denim.