Jeansland Podcast

For decades, the fashion industry has been auditing its supply chain. So why are so many of the same problems still there? Twenty-one years ago, a jeans factory Andrew was working for faced allegations of serious labor abuses. Orders were disappearing, the accusations were mounting, and he didn’t know what to do. He reached out to Auret van Heerden at the Fair Labor Association in Geneva. That mee...

Usually, there isn’t much to laugh about in our industry. But on September 13, funny arrived at New York Fashion Week. A PETA protest disrupted the COS runway show. CFDA CEO Steven Kolb stepped in, things got physical, the video went viral, and five days later Kolb resigned. But that’s really where this episode begins. In Episode 87 of Andrew’s Take, he looks beyond the spectacle to what PETA was...

What actually happens when an old pair of jeans goes into a collection bin? In Episode 86, Andrew is joined by Jennifer Wright, professor and researcher at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, whose work explores what really happens to textile waste after we’re finished with it. Jennifer takes Andrew through the surprisingly complicated journey of discarded clothing, from sorting and resale to ove...

My daughter introduced me to a company in New Jersey with an unusual kind of employee. It works outdoors, eats continuously, and never reads a sustainability report. It’s a goat. Across the U.S. and Europe, goats and sheep are being put to work clearing invasive plants, managing difficult terrain, and even helping create natural firebreaks. No herbicides. No heavy machinery. And what they eat come...

Angie Furlong has spent more than four decades designing clothes, building teams, traveling the world, and learning the industry from the inside out. Some things in fashion can only be learned by understanding how they’re made. In Episode 84 , Andrew is joined by designer and creative director Angie Furlong, whose career has taken her from Guess and Esprit to Lucky Brand, J Brand, True Religion, S...

I read an article about basketball this weekend that made me think about denim. Strange, I know. The argument was simple: we’re seeing more basketball and understanding less of it. Highlights, hot takes, 30-second explanations. Why understand the game when somebody can just tell you who won? I think our industry has developed the same problem. We talk constantly about sustainability, circularity,...

What if sustainability wasn’t a competitive edge, but the baseline for the entire denim industry? In this revisited conversation, Andrew sits down with sustainability expert Roian Atwood to look at what real progress in denim actually requires. A former Global Sustainability Director for Wrangler and Lee Jeans, Roian spent more than 15 years in the apparel industry developing and implementing sust...

Kingpins New York left me with a question: how many denim mills does the world actually need? Some longtime mills may be fighting for their future, while new mills keep entering an already crowded, increasingly price-driven market. Walking the show, I kept wondering what a new denim mill can offer that somebody, somewhere, isn’t already doing. My bigger takeaway goes beyond denim. With Kingpins le...

A great garment begins long before it reaches a sewing machine. In Episode 80 , Andrew sits down with Alessio Berto , founder of The Tailor Pattern Support and one of Italy’s most experienced pattern designers. Over nearly four decades, Alessio has worked across denim, menswear, sportswear, teaching, and product development for brands including Replay, Jean Paul Gaultier, DKNY Jeans, Diesel Denim...

Nearly 50 million people worldwide are estimated to be living in modern slavery. When I first read that number, I was shocked. It sounded almost too large to believe, so I decided to look into where it came from, who was behind it, and what modern slavery actually includes. What I found is that this is not simply a problem of poor countries, distant factories, or one particular industry. It exists...

Japanese denim is admired for its quality, craftsmanship, and the extraordinary care behind how it is made. In Episode 78 , Andrew sits down with Bobby Tohma , owner of Amhot Holdings and Idea Blue in Osaka . Andrew has known Bobby for more than four decades, and Bobby has spent nearly his entire career in the Japanese textile business, working across fabric export, trading, mills, weavers, and de...

For decades, developing new crop varieties has been slow, expensive, and full of trade-offs. Avalo believes better genetics, better data, and artificial intelligence can change that. In Episode 77, Andrew sits down with Brendan Collins , Co-Founder and CEO of Avalo , and Tricia Carey , Avalo’s Chief Commercial Officer and one of the textile industry’s most respected voices on fiber innovation and...

FRESH BLOOD continues with Part 8 , featuring Sean Vossen , who works with Frontline in Hong Kong. Sean grew up between Hong Kong and Milan, surrounded by the apparel business, but chose to explore other industries before joining the family trade. Today, he brings a fresh perspective to the supply chain, combining curiosity with a willingness to question how things have always been done. Andrew an...

Beau Lawrence built his career by following the work, then building a life around it. In Episode 75 , Andrew sits down with Beau Lawrence , founder of Ace Rivington, to talk about denim, entrepreneurship, retail, Santa Barbara, and what it takes to build a business that can actually support the life you want. The conversation starts in Nashville, moves through Los Angeles, design school, Guess, Th...

Pakistan’s cotton crop is recovering. But that is only part of the story. In Episode 74 , Andrew sits down again with Imran Asghar, Head of Asia Pacific at FibreTrace, to discuss cotton, traceability, sustainability, and the growing pressure to prove where products actually come from. FibreTrace uses physical tracers and real-time scanning to help verify fiber movement through the supply chain. Th...

FRESH BLOOD is about renewal. Every industry either regenerates itself or slowly hardens. In this Jeansland series, Andrew steps back to listen to the next generation already working inside denim’s supply chain, upstream in fibers, sourcing platforms, laundries, and raw materials. In Part 7 of the series, Andrew sits down with Landon Williams , denim designer, artist, and founder of Nolia James. L...

In Episode 72’s Andrew’s Take, Andrew reflects on the sale of Everlane, one of the most visible transparency-focused brands of the last fifteen years. For years, Everlane tried to bring sourcing, factories, pricing, and production into the consumer conversation. Whether you agreed with everything the company did or not, it stood apart from most apparel brands by making transparency part of its ide...

Some people enter denim through fashion. Lucia Rosin came to it through patternmaking, textiles, and the discipline of building a garment from the inside out. In Episode 71 , Andrew sits down with Lucia Rosin, founder of MEIDEA, to talk about craft, sustainability, education, and the long path from technical knowledge to industry perspective. The conversation begins in Veneto, where Lucia grew up...

Before we continue with the next episodes in the FRESH BLOOD series, we’re revisiting a conversation that helped define what the series is really about: listening to the next generation already working inside the industry. Andrew speaks with Lucille Ix and Lucas Van de Woestyne , two young professionals who grew up around fabric manufacturing and are now working inside it themselves. It is a usefu...

Paul Cowell taught Andrew a great deal of what he knows about indigo. In Episode 69 , Andrew sits down with Paul Cowell , whose career has moved through ICI, BASF, DyStar, BluConnection, and Archroma. His work sits at the intersection of chemistry, denim processing, mills, brands, and the commercial reality of making innovation work at scale. The conversation begins with chemistry. How synthetic d...

In Episode 68’s Andrew’s Take , he looks at the rise of secondhand clothing. Not as a side story in fashion, but as one of the fastest-growing parts of the global apparel business. Secondhand clothing is now growing dramatically faster than traditional apparel retail. In some cases, three or four times faster. And younger consumers are beginning to ask the question the industry never really wanted...

FRESH BLOOD continues with Part 6 , featuring Justin Bastarache , Founder of Whelk and Pipo Canada. Justin started with a sustainable headwear brand, then found the larger problem: almost nobody was making caps in Eastern Canada anymore. So he began building the factory himself. Andrew and Justin talk about what it takes to make locally in a category dominated by imports. Labor, pricing, training,...

Growth in denim follows a pattern. In Episode 66’s Andrew’s Take , he looks at what has actually driven expansion in the jeans business over time, and why it’s stalled. Every real boom came from a shift in the product itself. New machinery, new yarns, new fits, new finishes. Changes that made people stop wearing what they had and buy something new. That hasn’t happened in a while.   The industry h...

FRESH BLOOD is about renewal. Every industry either regenerates itself or slowly hardens. In this Jeansland series, Andrew steps back to listen to the next generation already working inside denim’s supply chain, upstream in fibers, sourcing platforms, laundries, and raw materials. In Part 5 of the series, Andrew sits down with Saifullah Minhas , Director of Sales and Marketing at Delta Garments ,...

The war doesn't show up where you think it does. In Episode 64's Andrew's Take, he looks at the war in Iran, not politically, but through the lens of the jeans industry. Orders were booked months ago. Prices were locked when oil was lower, freight was cheaper, and currencies were more stable. None of that is true anymore. Factories across Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Vietnam are absorb...