Jeansland Podcast

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...

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 4 of the series, Andrew sits down with Hayato Nishi, a second-generation industry professional whose path into...

Before the garments even leave the warehouse, the damage is already done. In Episode 62, Andrew sits down again with Umer Farooq Qureshi as the industry finds itself caught in the middle of a war it didn’t start. One year after their last conversation, the same pressures are back, only now they’re accelerating. The U.S. is actively engaged in a growing conflict with Iran, and the ripple effects ar...

Before there was a denim finishing industry, there was nothing. This week, Andrew sits down with Alice Tonello, Chief Brand & Strategy Officer at Tonello, a second-generation company that helped build that industry from scratch. In 1981, her uncle Osvaldo, a maintenance technician in a dye house, saw brands trying to figure out how to wash jeans and built the first machine to do it. No roadmap...

In this short, I go back to a moment in the early 90s, sitting across from a senior executive at Calvin Klein who asked me to cancel a fabric order we had already made. I couldn’t. He understood, the goods shipped, and the order was honored as agreed.   Years later, I faced similar situations. Orders were canceled, but there was still a sense of responsibility.  In each case, the customer stepped...

Some businesses are built through planning. Others are built through history, disruption, and decisions made under pressure. In Episode 59 , I speak with Rizwan Shafi of Crescent Bahuman , one of the defining names in Pakistan’s denim industry. His family’s story begins in the years after Partition, moves through cotton trading and textile expansion, and eventually leads to one of the first fully...

This is the third installment of our Fresh Blood series . I wanted to hear directly from two young professionals who grew up around textiles and are now working in fabric manufacturing. My guests are Lucille Ix , 22, based in New York and working across China and Vietnam, and Lucas Van de Woestyne , 27, based in Ghent, Belgium and working for a denim mill in China with a focus on Europe. Their fam...

This is Part Two of our FRESH BLOOD series, where I sit down with the next generation of denim leaders and ask what they see that we may not. FRESH BLOOD is about perspective. It is about how young professionals view sustainability, transparency, collaboration, and the future of this industry. In this episode, I speak with Beyza Baykan , founder of HMS Hand Made Stone. At 26, with a background in...

This is our second two-part special, and this time I step back and listen. Fresh Blood is about renewal. Every industry either regenerates itself or slowly hardens. In this episode, I sit down with Kaela Bonaquist from Lenzing and William Wood from Material Exchange to hear how the next generation sees denim, sourcing, fibers, and technology. They are already inside the system. Upstream in fibers....

Andrew sits down with Arne Koefoed , co-founder of WINK, to talk about how throwing parties slowly turned into a creative life. Arne never planned on designing experiences. There was no event school, no formal path. It started with squats, punk parties, and rave culture, and with the realization that bringing people together could be just as creative as making an object. That first party set the t...

Andrew reflects on a new report from the Transformers Foundation , Unlocking Equity in Innovation , and why so much meaningful innovation never makes it to market. The supply chain spends years and real money developing better fibers, cleaner chemistry, and smarter processes, only to be told to prove everything in 18 months or less. Andrew shares a personal story about a breakthrough alternative t...

This is Part 2 of our two-part Jeansland special, Water: Above and Below . In this episode, we continue the conversation with Rick Kellison and Brent Crossland , shifting from understanding the water problem to confronting what it will take to address it. The focus turns to the future of the TAWC (Texas Alliance for Water Conservation) project, why its work matters, and why keeping it funded is cr...

Today’s conversation is about something the denim industry rarely wants to look at directly, and that’s water. Not recycled water in factories. Not marketing claims. But the groundwater that actually makes cotton possible in the first place. This is the first episode of a two-part Jeansland special called Water: Above and Below . For this conversation, I’m joined by Rick Kellison and Brent Crossla...