Arriving at Nudie Jeans’ headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden, the building still carries the quiet elegance of more than a century of history. Its heavy wooden doors, polished staircases, and time-worn window frames give the entire place a calm and grounded presence.
A soft woody scent lingers through the office, while warm and cool lighting shifts subtly from one workspace to another. The atmosphere feels almost like a bar. Walking into the space, it is hard to immediately associate it with the headquarters of a global denim brand.
But perhaps it is exactly this kind of environment that makes Nudie Jeans feel a little different from the start.
As the interview began, we found ourselves bringing up something right away.
In fact, we have known Nudie Jeans for 15 years and worked together for nearly 9, yet this was the first time we had actually made it to their headquarters in Gothenburg and met the full team behind the brand in person.
“It’s kind of funny,” we said to Joakim Levin, co-founder and CEO of Nudie Jeans.
“I can’t believe this is the first time I’m meeting the whole Nudie ‘family.’”
Joakim smiled and replied, “Actually, I think ‘family’ is a pretty fitting word.”
In his eyes, the company has always carried something of a family atmosphere. After all, Nudie Jeans began with just two founders, himself and Maria Erixon, who were married at the time. Even as the company grew, they continued to build it in much the same spirit.
Take Thin Finn, for example. The style was literally named after a former employee named Finn. Peter Replica, meanwhile, was a complete reproduction of a pair of heavily worn jeans owned by Peter. And in the early days, even the people appearing in their lookbooks and campaign imagery were mostly people from within the company. Even now, despite having grown into a much larger brand, they still try to work in that same way whenever possible. It feels honest, unforced, and real.
In Joakim’s mind, Nudie Jeans has never been a traditional business built purely around revenue. It has always been a group of people brought together by a shared passion, trying to create something and move in the same direction.
Starting a Denim Rock Band
The birth of Nudie Jeans did not begin with some grand business plan.
Looking back on that time, Joakim said it all started as a very small project.
Back then, Maria Erixon was working as a design manager for Lee Europe. Even though she was already in an industry she loved, there were still things she wanted to do that simply were not possible within a large brand structure.
She wanted to work with premium denim fabrics and collaborate with Italian laundries, with the goal of making jeans rooted in quality rather than products driven purely by sales and market demand.
Joakim, meanwhile, happened to be standing at a personal turning point of his own.
Before founding Nudie Jeans, he had been the drummer in the Swedish punk band Räserbajs (pictured far right below), and had enjoyed a certain level of recognition. But over time, he became tired of that world.
“I just wanted to do something I could have more control over,” he said. So the two of them decided to begin a new project together.
Joakim described that moment in a way that felt especially fitting: “To me, it was like starting a new band.”
Only this time, what they were making was not music, but jeans.
A Denim Market Beyond Expectations
Looking back today, the premium denim market can feel like something that has always existed. But 25 years ago, that was far from the case.
Joakim recalled that there was barely such a thing as a true premium denim market at the time.
Evisu from Japan may have started to gain some attention, and Levi’s had released a few vintage-inspired lines, but overall, jeans were still a highly commercial product category, with far less emphasis on craftsmanship and detail.
So when Nudie Jeans sold close to half a million pairs in its first three years, even Joakim himself was genuinely surprised.
“Honestly, we were completely unprepared,” he said. In the years that followed, demand kept rising, and the company found itself constantly trying to keep up.
“That period felt like a runaway train.” By around 2010, Nudie Jeans was producing close to one million pairs of jeans a year.
The company expanded quickly, the team grew, and the organization became increasingly complex. Managing all of it was enough to leave anyone overwhelmed.
When Joakim looks back on that period now, he sums it up in just one word: “chaos.”
The Second Decade: Figuring Out Who They Were
As the company matured, Nudie Jeans entered a new phase altogether, something Joakim describes as the brand’s second chapter.
If the first decade was about rapid growth, the second was about redefining what the brand actually was.
The company began building out its retail structure and placing greater emphasis on storytelling. At the same time, many of the ideas now seen as core to the brand gradually took shape during this period.
That included using organic cotton, offering free jeans repairs, and developing a wider range of environmental and sustainability-related initiatives.
“Sustainability had always been part of our thinking from the beginning, but this was when it really started to expand in a bigger way,” Joakim said.
Over those ten years, Nudie Jeans gradually became the brand it is today.
A Brand Built on Contradictions
When talking about the core philosophy of Nudie Jeans, Joakim returned to one word in particular: contradiction. In his view, the brand is built on a whole series of them.
On one hand, the company has to be profitable. On the other, it wants to reduce its environmental impact as much as possible.
On one hand, the brand carries a spirit of rock ’n’ roll and punk. On the other, it also has to remain highly disciplined and professional.
“That is both the most beautiful and the most difficult part of the brand,” he said.
Because running a company like this means constantly balancing different values. People naturally want simple answers, but Nudie Jeans has always operated in the opposite way. It is precisely that tension, stretched between two sides, that has made the brand stand apart.
Creating Tomorrow’s Vintage
A few years ago, the team at Nudie Jeans sat down to ask a simple but important question: what kind of company are we, really?
By that point, they realized the brand was doing far more than simply making jeans.
They were repairing worn denim, selling reused jeans, pushing living wage initiatives, and taking part in climate action. And honestly, if they were just a jeans brand, why would they be doing all of that? So the team began trying to bring all of those actions into one clearer idea.
Eventually, they arrived at an answer:
Create Tomorrow’s Vintage.
In other words, everything they do is meant to help jeans be worn for as long as possible, until they eventually become someone’s own personal vintage. Through that idea, Nudie Jeans hopes to create a sense of meaning in an often chaotic world.
Finding a Place Between Fashion and History
Jeans have existed for well over a century, but fashion never stops changing.
From loose fits to slim silhouettes, from workwear to fashionwear, denim has been redefined again and again in every era. So in a world where style is always shifting, how has Nudie Jeans managed to keep its own identity while still attracting such a loyal following?
Joakim laughed and said that if he had to put it in one somewhat cliché phrase, it would be this: staying contemporary. But the hard part is not simply keeping up with the times. It is figuring out how to do that without losing yourself.
As mentioned earlier, Nudie Jeans is, at its core, a very pure project. It was born out of a genuine love for denim, including its history and everything that has grown from it.
Take Levi’s, Lee, and Wrangler, for example. These classic names are starting points for almost every denim enthusiast, and in many ways, Nudie Jeans was born out of that same cultural background.
So at the simplest level, Nudie Jeans began as a project rooted in a love of jeans. At the same time, they were always aware that they were not the kind of brand interested in perfect historical reproduction.
Many Japanese denim brands devote themselves to studying the fabrics, stitching, and construction of very specific eras, then recreating them as faithfully as possible. Joakim has enormous respect for that approach, but he is equally clear in saying, “That’s not the road Nudie Jeans wants to take.” Their place lies somewhere else.
On one hand, they want to preserve the spirit of real denim culture. On the other, they also want the brand to remain appealing to people in their twenties today.
That means Nudie Jeans has to live in a delicate balance at all times: one foot in history, the other in the present.
Sometimes they may lean too far into fashion. Other times, they may appear too rooted in the past.
But when the brand is at its best, the two come together just right. It still feels like real denim, yet it also carries a contemporary shape and attitude.
And that balance is never something you find once and keep forever. It requires constant reflection and constant adjustment.
“Some years, we’ve done it very well. Other years, maybe not quite as well,” Joakim said. That, in a way, is what makes the brand interesting.
If Nudie Jeans became too obsessed with denim detail, it could turn into a brand only a small group of purists truly understands. But if it chased fashion too aggressively, it would lose the very foundation that matters most.
“After all, our name isn’t just Nudie,” he said.
“We’re Nudie Jeans.”
Building a Company They’d Want to Work For
When we asked Joakim what had allowed the brand to hold onto these values for so many years without losing them, he pointed to something fundamental: financial independence.
Today, many companies are built from the very beginning with the goal of being sold one day, or reaching the highest possible valuation. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. It simply reflects a different goal, and naturally leads to very different outcomes.
Nudie Jeans, however, was self-built from the start. They never wanted to rely on outside resources to grow. No investors, no capital pressure, and that has allowed them to make decisions many other companies would find difficult.
For example, one day they could simply say, “Alright, let’s repair jeans for everyone for free.”
Even without fully calculating the cost first, they could still try it and see where it led.
“If I had five investors sitting around me back then, I probably wouldn’t have had the energy to do these things,” Joakim said.
He knows very well that the company might have grown faster if it had taken on outside capital early on. But in that case, Nudie Jeans might not have become what it is today.
What he really wanted to build was a company he himself would want to work for. In today’s business world, that idea may sound a little old-fashioned, but it is also exactly what has made Nudie Jeans such a distinctive brand.
Sometimes we forget that the things which last are rarely the ones that began with the pursuit of success alone. More often, they begin with a group of people who simply wanted to do one thing well.
This journey, which began with passion, is still going. And it continues to invite others to join in and help create tomorrow’s vintage.
