Hiut Denim Company
Purchase a pair of Hiut jeans and you’ll need six months to wear them in properly. That means six months of no washing, no cold dips, no showers, and no rain (as best you can manage). You may, however, freeze the jeans, air them out on a clothesline, and take non-wear rest days. The whole point of this process is that at the end of your stiff, raw denim-clad six months, you’ll have shaped every fold, line, and crease into one of the most comfortable pairs of jeans you’ve ever owned. Hiut Denim Company founders David and Clare Hieatt have taken every measure to be sure of it.
The pair’s dedication to their product quality stems from their mantra, “do one thing well”, and from the very history of Cardigan, Wales—David’s hometown, and the manufacturing epicentre of Hiut Denim. In November 2002, multinational retailer Marks & Spencer moved a jeans factory that employed 400 of the town’s 4,000 residents to Morocco, stripping Cardigan of its title as the home of Britain’s largest jeans factory. Left behind were Hiut’s grand master sewers, skilled artisans who had previously made 35,000 pairs of jeans per week for nearly 40 years. The Hieatts’ saw a clear opportunity in the skill, knowledge, and craftsmanship that remained. All they needed was an outlet.
Now the grand masters make at most 100 jeans per week, each pair of truly superior calibre, marked with a HistoryTag—a unique number that can be entered into a corresponding app—so the stories and memories made in every one can be shared from the production floor in Cardigan to Canada via the Royal Mail’s International service, to the wearer’s closet, to perhaps a vintage shop in the future, and so on.
Occasionally, the demand for a pair of Hiuts reaches beyond the production capacity of the grand masters, so there is potential an order may come with a wait time. No matter. That is the just the true process of doing one thing well.
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