Some jeans you have for years–molding to your body over time they accompany you to the bank, the coffee shop, airports, bus terminals, second dates, doctor’s offices, movie theaters…but what do you do when that treasured pair of jeans falls apart?
Send them to Francine at Denim Therapy!
Q & A WITH FRANCINE:
Q: What is your professional background?
A. My background is actually in economics which for me meant a job on Madison Avenue doing branding and brand strategy work. So although I’ve always had a keen interest in fashion I was not formally trained as a designer.
Q: What made you decide to start Denim Therapy?
A. As they say necessity is the mother of all invention. I had a favorite pair that was torn and was not satisfied with the existing solutions (ie patches or run of the mill tailors) So in collaboration with a designer friend of mine we came up with a better process.
Q: Describe the process for repairing jeans.
A. Each pair that we receive is individually reviewed to match a yarn that closely meets the color of the denim. From there it’s a manual process of reweaving the yarn back into the denim. Although it sounds simple it requires a certain artistic view as each pair and hole is different and often a mix of different yarn is used in order to acheive the desired fade, color tone and weave direction in order to make the hole as imperceptible as possible.
Q: Tell me about how/where you started and how it expanded (I know you had to move to a bigger space outside of NYC)
A. We started about a year ago with a sewing machine in a friend’s apartment. We actually thought we’d get a few pairs a month and were not too concerned. Within a few weeks we were getting inundated with jeans and had to look for bigger space and additional employees.
Q: What was the most difficult pair of jeans to salvage?
A. Can’t recall specific pairs as we’ve seen the entire gamut. There are pairs that we’ve literally reconstructed from almost scratch. What’s actually amusing is some customers take the therapy angle seriously. We get a blow by blow of what happened to their jeans and that they will die if we can’t fix them…seriously.
One of funniest stories by far though was a blog entry written by a NYC escort who tore her jeans at the knees while “servicing a client”.
Q: How did clients learn about your company? What are your future plans?
A. We went from room to apt to bigger operation. Traffic to our site and word of mouth referrals have grown exponentially. We’ve been in publications as far as Australia, Ukraine and receive many partnership and franchising requests from all over the world. We’re looking at various ways to expand the business but nothing to share yet. Stay tuned however.
Photos courtesy of Denim Therapy
