There’s a story we never told you
We’re going to talk about our 2022 denim launch and how it nearly killed us.
This is the story behind the story you might already know.
Why denim has been “out of stock” on our website for as long as you can remember.
And why that’s about to change.
On the 2nd February 2022, we thought denim seemed like a good idea.
One year earlier we’d sold over 4,000 organic, ethical T-shirts in a month to launch Yes Friends.
After that, denim was our top requested product, so we thought we could do the same again. It was a chance to show we couldn’t just do ethical T-shirts for the price of a pint in London, we could do anything.
So we sent out an email and told you about our plan.
As long as we could sell 2,500 jeans and denim jackets in a month, we could hit the big green button on an order for the most affordable, sustainable and ethical denim on our planet.
There was one catch.
Anything less than 2,500 jeans bought, and our factory wouldn’t be able to make the denim affordable enough.
This was going to be a challenge, but we’d sold 4,000 T-shirts in a month before, right?
Here’s how it went down.
Denim, take one. Lights. Camera. Action.
Pre-campaign, we did a photoshoot and filmed an ad where we set some jeans on fire (it seemed like a good idea at the time too) and it announced that denim could be ethical, sustainable, and affordable.
And as our ad said, the key to making all of this possible was “an economy of scale, baby, whatever that means.”
The edit of the ad still hadn’t come together mere days before the pre-order campaign launched, so we hitched a train to London in the early hours of the morning to get it where it needed to be.
We were hustling and scrambling to get this campaign off the ground…
We rounded up our biggest fans – the top 31% most engaged Yes Friends customers – to help get the hype train out of the station. We made late night phone calls and hit our heads against not-quite-working software.
Right before launch, we were the kind of tired that makes you prop your eyelids open with matchsticks, but we kept going until midnight before the campaign, when it finally came together at the last exhausted second.
Then we went LIVE. We had one month to get 2,500 orders in. 
Cue one of the hardest weeks of Yes Friends.
The thing we learned from our first pre-order campaign was… you drum up 50% of your supporters in the first five days.
Over the next 25 days, the first flood of supporters becomes a slower trickle.
So when our first flood sold less than 500 jeans and jackets in five days, we knew it was going to be almost impossible to sell the 2,000 extra pairs we needed to.
It was a gut punch.
Hours upon hours of work and we weren’t going to make it.
We tried everything we could. We reached out to influencers, launched a killer deal for US customers, and hashed out every idea we could think of from cinema ads to a billboard on our founders house.
But it was a slow march to the end… and we sold around 1,000 out of the 2,500 pairs we needed to sell.
A little while after, if you were there back in 2022, you’ll have received an email from us titled “good news”... Despite falling way short of our target, our factory still agreed to make the denim order – those 1,000 pairs of jeans and jackets would still exist.
But we were going to take a big hit financially.
And we didn’t know if we would recover. Back then, things were real different at Yes Friends.
We were only a year in from launching our very first T-shirt, and while that was a huge success, our other projects weren’t punching quite as hard.
So when denim didn’t work, the question became: would Yes Friends work?
We didn’t know. It was a big low. The kind of low that makes you want to disappear, and start all over again.
So we discontinued denim. And we lived in denial.
You might have noticed over these last three years that we couldn’t bring ourselves to take denim off our site.
Instead, we lived in out-of-stock purgatory, receiving request after request to bring denim back and refusing to give up the promise we’d launch denim again – one day.
But it was a reality check
And in the absence of rivets and any sort of profit margin, we started over – dreaming a little smaller and steadier.
We stopped doing big pre-order campaigns. And we started scribbling down ideas for how we could move forwards… how we could grow in a more organic, less dramatic way.
We struck up a relationship with a new factory, led by Mihir and his team, who have been with us since. We started slow: launching underwear, then coloured tees, then fleeces.
It was tentative, but it was working. Day by day, orders kept coming in slowly but steadily, growing with each new drop.
Then we hired a designer in house: Hope – she’s awesome. And the quality of what we were sending out into the world hit a new high. Soon we weren’t just making ethical clothing affordable, people were saying things like “these are the best chino shorts I have ever seen” and “best white tee I've ever had.”
So, we doubled down on not just making ethical affordable but making premium affordable too.
And over time you, our friends, doubled in numbers.
Because even when denim failed, you didn’t give up on us.
You’ve been growing this dream organically ever since. Not just by buying into all the hype of pre-order campaigns, but by showing up at each new launch, telling your friends about us and cheering us on, every step of the way.
And so thanks to you, we just had our best year ever. You helped us launch canvas jackets, pyjamas, sportswear and our first dress. You’ve been all over the reviews, telling us again and again: you don’t want the fashion industry to stay the way it is.
So we started thinking, maybe it’s time for denim take two
Last November, we got in touch with a few different ethical factories, sending out feelers. What would be possible?
There was still a big minimum order on jeans: 2,000.
And it was still pretty daunting. But this time, we knew we wouldn’t need to rely on a big pre-order to get denim off the ground. Over the last 3 years, because of your backing, we’re now able to have thousands of pairs of jeans in stock – so you can buy denim anytime you need it.
And if we do sell out in a few weeks, we’ll get more made straight away.
You’ll never need to wait three years for Yes Friends jeans again.
The denim samples arrived at our office earlier this year, and we began breathing in the organic cotton like we were seventeen and inhaling a bunch of Valentine roses sent from a college crush.
And when you get this denim in your hands we hope you might feel the same kind of giddy.
It’s not just the quality that makes this denim collection so special, it’s the wild ride we’ve been on together.
Together, friends, we’ve found a way to make ethical affordable.
And this is the pay off.
DENIM TAKE TWO: Coming 20th September