Nudie Jeans opened its second German Repair Shop in Munich on Wednesday as part of a methodical plan to expand the company’s international profile.
The 850-square-foot space, centrally located in city’s Gärtnerplatzviertel, features a typically raw vintage interior and offers free repair services for the brand’s jeans.
“The market is tough and as a small company, we have to observe how retail works for us. We started the repair shop concept about three years ago and the customer reception is very positive, partly because it’s free. That’s why we’re opening more shops with sewing machines to cope with that. Of course it costs a lot, but on the other hand, it also attracts new customers and makes old customers come back,” Joakim Levin, cofounder and executive chairman of Nudie Jeans, said.
Related Articles
He noted that retail has grown overproportionally for the company, rising from five percent five years ago to roughly a third of the revenue generated by the Repair Shops and the Nudie online shop this year. As a result, the Munich store, the 24th monobrand unit, marks the completion of the first phase of Nudie’s retail expansion following previous openings in New York, London, Malmö and Australia. Next on the agenda to begin the next expansion phase is Amsterdam, scheduled for this year.
You May Also Like
Nudie Jeans also continues to sharpen its sustainable profile: “We move forward in transparency, but it takes more time than we expected to be able to track a specific garment thoroughly. We are slowly but surely getting there. It’s also constant work to find new alternative materials, techniques and suppliers, and in general we try to do what we are doing better rather than finding the next thing. The big thing for us is still the repair shop and I would like to go deeper into the reuse part of that. At the moment, we don’t get so many old Nudies because people rather get them repaired and in the long-term, I’d like to get a better assortment of reused jeans,” said Levin.
In an attempt to optimize merchandising cycles, the company has shifted to shorter order cycles of 18 weeks for the two main and two pre-collections since April. Core markets are Germany, the U.K., the U.S. and Australia. “Again, it’s about focusing on the relevant rather than spreading out into the world,” said Levin.