How Kuyichi made denim sustainable in 25 years: “We were organic, but with a huge footprint”

Denim brand Kuyichi was founded in 2001 by Solidaridad, Triodos Bank, Stichting Stimulans and Oro Blanco, a collective of Peruvian cotton farmers that no longer exists. They had a clear goal: to make organic and fair-trade cotton the norm.

The brand grew to become a pioneer in sustainable denim but ran into trouble in 2015 due to high overhead costs, prematurely opened own stores and changing leadership. Bankruptcy followed, but so did a relaunch. Sales director Peter Schuitema took over the brand with partners Floortje Dessing and Guido Keff. Later, Laurent Safi (product manager) and Bjorn Baars (brand director) also acquired a stake in the company.

Ahead of the anniversary, FashionUnited visited Vleuten to speak with Bjorn Baars, to look back and forward. After 25 years, one is arguably no longer a pioneer. What is next for the quintessentially Dutch denim brand?

Humble restart

Small but perfectly formed aptly describes the Kuyichi team's office space: its location just outside Utrecht (The Netherlands), its modest size, and its homely decor. It is an upgrade, says Baars, pointing to the years after the relaunch when they had to work from Schuitema's attic. They reviewed the first denim prototypes in the back garden. “In the second year, we had a tiny office in Amsterdam where it was almost impossible to hold meetings due to its size and acoustics.” That was eight years ago now.

Baars takes us upstairs, where a leather sofa sits among mood boards, houseplants and archival designs on clothing rails. He is busy reflecting on what exactly has happened in twenty-five years; he has been there for almost all those years, first as a sales manager, then as a designer after the takeover, and now as brand director. "I am unearthing the most remarkable designs for our anniversary," he says, stroking a pair of trouser legs. "How they were made and what they stood for; what innovations we had to make for them. Much of what is hanging here is now too bold, as well as too time-consuming and expensive – that no longer works."

Organic cotton

The story of Kuyichi begins with the plans of Solidaridad, the foundation behind the Max Havelaar quality mark, to scale up organic cotton from Peru and pay the farmers a fair wage for it. "Solidaridad went to Lima in 1998 to see what was happening in the cotton industry. They saw the heavy pesticide use, how unhealthy it was for the farmers and the soil, and the amount of water being used. The land was literally dying from it; I saw shocking videos of it later.” The foundation wanted to support those cotton farmers to work pesticide-free, for a fair wage and without intermediaries. “It was not certified fair trade, but it was worked according to those principles."

However, no brand wanted to buy that organic cotton. "Organic cotton was not yet a trend and it was more expensive,” says Baars. Meanwhile, the better denim brands were being blown away by cheap fast fashion chains, which bought cotton from non-sustainable growers and had jeans made from it in low-wage countries with a lot of synthetic stretch. Solidaridad felt this did no justice to either the makers or the sector. Let's do it ourselves, they thought. Fortunately, the right people were brought on board, including Tony Tonnaer (later founder of Kings of Indigo), Peter Schuitema as sales director and designer Jason Denham.

The first collection consisted of T-shirts made from organic cotton; in 2004, the first organic cotton jeans followed. "Since then, we have continued to experiment to make it even more sustainable with spare denims, recycled cotton, and hemp cotton. It was pioneering, and sometimes it still is."

Premium middle ground

In 2007, a Pure Premium line was launched, a kind of laboratory for sustainable innovation, but it was eventually discontinued. "That was a line with expensive Japanese fabrics, selvedge denim, and trousers from 250 to 550 euros. We were at the (former Berlin, ed.) Bread & Butter trade fair with all those trousers against a jet-black background. Everyone was impressed by it, we were literally the talk of the town, but we could not sell them."

"We knew the looks could work, but they had to be more accessible. Now those design elements are in our regular collection.” This year, Kuyichi is bringing back the premium concept, “but much more limited, and with the lesson of the past in mind: this is not how we earn our living.”

Organic with a huge footprint

Producing overly designed trousers was one of the stumbling blocks for Kuyichi in 2015. "Several things went wrong," says Baars. "The overhead was far too high. We had thirty people in the office, a large marketing budget, and brochures; we knew no limits. We had shareholders who were not involved with the brand but appointed three different CEOs in two years, resulting in completely different collections. When we started opening expensive shops on top of that, things really went wrong."

Kuyichi had to learn to be more commercial. After the takeover, the brand focused on Never Out of Stock (NOOS) and smaller collections with exclusively certified organic cotton. The production chain was re-established in Turkey: cultivation, production, washing, trimmings, labels and packaging. Every step had to be certified. According to Baars, this has reduced the footprint enormously. Fortunately so, because something about the old production chain bothered him: “The cotton came from Peru, it had to go to Turkey for the certified factory, and the laundry was somewhere else again. At the end of the day, you had an organic pair of jeans with a gigantic footprint."

Cotton in conversion

One successful project that resulted from this course is supporting cotton in conversion, together with Bossa, Kuyichi's largest fabric supplier. "The idea was to guide a cotton farmer in Turkey through the transition to organic cotton. That takes three years, because the soil has to be really clean before you can call it organic. There are no subsidies for it in Turkey, so it is a scary step for farmers to take."

"Together with Bossa, we helped such a farmer: Cengiz Karadeli. He has now fully converted to organic and his successful harvest is in several styles from the collection. We would like to expand to another farmer."

Circular denim

Another successful innovation is 100 percent post-consumer recycled (PCR) denim. "In 2023, we finally succeeded, together with Bossa. We already had a version with 20 percent PCR denim. The technical problem was in the warp: it has to be strong and for that you need long fibres. Recycled denim almost always produces shorter fibres.

Bossa managed to adapt the spinning technique. The short fibres are twisted in such a way that the yarns can still be strong and heavy." The result: the Izabella Old Blue for women and Scott Old Fashion Blue for men, which is already sold out and is being replaced by a new model. There is also a baggy version for women, Lucy Loose Atlantic Ocean. “That is currently our best-selling model."

Sale

What did not work out: never participating in sales again. Much of Kuyichi's range consists of basics. "Why should such a product suddenly become less valuable after a season?" Baars thought. Retailers were also happy with the no-sale policy. “There is nothing more annoying than losing margin because a brand goes on sale on its own website two months after delivery. "You could always reorder our collection for a fair price.” There was just one problem: Kuyichi did not have its own outlet channel. What was not sold, piled up. That is why, after skipping sales for nine years, Kuyichi was forced to participate in them in 2026.

Baars thinks it is a shame. "In any case, we have managed to structure the collection so that we are reasonably clean at the end of the season: 70 percent is NOOS, and for seasonal items we only produce what has already been pre-sold and what will be in the webshop."

Trouser leg campaign

During the rebuilding period, there was hardly any budget for marketing. Now that the brand has been relaunched, that has to come back, says Baars – and he mentions a very direct campaign that was a huge hit at the time: ‘Legs for 10 euros’, conceived by an Amsterdam PR agency. "That was a recycling campaign where people could hand in their old jeans in exchange for a 10 euro deposit. We had a workshop in Amsterdam's Red Light District with people on sewing machines and with scissors. The idea: the legs of a pair of jeans are easier to recycle than the top, because that is where all the trimmings and metal parts are. You throw the legs in a shredder and you can make a new pair of trousers from them just like that."

The campaign generated a huge amount of press attention. "Precisely because it was so direct," Baars thinks, with some doubt as to whether it would still work that way today. "If you communicate something like that in a well-behaved way, no one picks up on it.”

Regenerative cotton

The way forward for Kuyichi, for Baars, begins with the term ‘regenerative’; meaning that for cotton cultivation, you do not deplete the soil and allow the ecosystem to recover. Then life can return to the soil and the land gains resilience for when the weather becomes more extreme. Currently, about 30 percent of Kuyichi's range consists of regenerative cotton - it is also certified, which is a prerequisite for Kuyichi's German customers.

"The direction I envision for Kuyichi is a mix of regenerative cotton and 100 percent PCR denim, with organic as a supplement where needed. We want to close the loop: collect, repair, upcycle. We are already working with Mended for our repair service, but eventually we want to take that in-house."

Forzichtig leeft ook weer de droom van een eigen winkeltje in Amsterdam. "Klein en knus, geen grote flagshipstore zoals vroeger, met de intentie om ons verhaal te vertellen en als servicepunt voor de klant."

K25

If Baars has to point to one pair of trousers that shows where Kuyichi is headed, it is the K25. It is a reinterpretation of the very first pair of trousers Jason Denham designed for the brand: the K100. "At the time, those trousers were already very trendy, and now Y2K style is back in full force. Now is the perfect time to bring it back."

The trousers are made of unwashed, 100 percent regenerative cotton, and selvedge woven in the Japanese style. It is actually a fairly simple, solid model. That is what the market is looking for. "I have here the most sustainable pair of trousers I can think of,” says Baars.

Storytelling

Where is there still work to be done? “The storytelling”. But marketing is expensive, says Baars. "Our CSR manager once said: the big difference between fast fashion and slow fashion brands is that the former have huge margins and use them for marketing and storytelling. Sustainable brands put all their money into sustainable business and do not have much left over for storytelling at the end of the day. We are at very reasonably priced trousers and yet our margin is still not really high enough to get our story out there.”

"We work almost entirely with our own money and have hardly any loans. As a company, Kuyichi is finally healthy. Actually, our core jeans should also cost 150 euros. They are all premium products when you consider where they come from and how they are made. That is the whole truth of fair production."