Sourcing leather at Nudie Jeans

When it comes to leather, your dad’s wardrobe is like a French wine cellar: bursting with beautifully aged treasures that, after a quick dusting off and tentative sniff, pair beautifully with a night out with friends. 

Throughout Nudie Jeans’ history, we’ve chosen to work with leather because just like denim, it’s a material that becomes more beautiful with time. However, the leather industry presents many challenges regarding chemical usage, traceability, and animal welfare. To tackle these challenges we have a strict sourcing policy, requiring our suppliers to limit the sourcing of raw hides from only certain areas. All Nudie Jeans leather accessories are made from Polish-originated bovine leather, and we only work with one tannery and one stitching supplier in Poland for our accessories. These are long-term suppliers which we have visited several times.

You're probably familiar with the old watch ad: "You don't own it, you merely look after it for the next generation." – Well, we feel the same about leather. When treated right, leather can last a lifetime – and then some.

All Nudie Jeans leather jackets are made with sheep, goat, or buffalo leather originating from India. We’re working with two tanneries and one leather stitching supplier in India, all of which are Gold Standard level according to the Leather Working group, and over the years we have made several visits to the suppliers.

Traceability within the meat and leather industry is tricky, and the leather used in Nudie Jeans products are all by-products of the meat industry. Today we have traceability to the slaughterhouse, but we lack a systematic way of tracing the leather back to the farm level. We’re working on it, promise.

To minimize the use of harsh chemicals, all our leather accessories are vegetable-tanned, and a majority of our leather jackets are as well. This is one way to decrease the use of chemicals in the leather industry. 

But until we can guarantee that the animals are from a certified organic farm, we will not define our leather products as made in a sustainable material. Instead, we see the value of creating a product that can be used for many years and even handed down through generations. 

We hope our leather jackets will fill the need for buying many different and new jackets, and in that way reduce resource use and be a part of creating tomorrow’s vintage.