Nobody Denim: ‘The future of this industry is really important’
Fitzroy-headquartered, family-run Australian denim brand Nobody Denim, the country’s leading denim manufacturer, presented during Kingpins24 Flash Australia, held online from June 23-24.
Co-founder and chairman, John Condilis, introduced the brand’s documentary-style presentation by saying: “Anything you put on should inspire you to do something better”.
Following on from this, he took the viewer on a tour of Nobody’s owned denim factory and laundry, unpicking the jeans-making process piece by piece (it takes Nobody between two and two-and-a-half days to make a single pair of denim jeans from start to finish, Mr Condilis said).
The company’s denim wash and innovation lead, Sara Fletcher, also contributed to the video. On sustainability, she commented: “We are very conscious about our selections of fabrics and, you know, what we choose, where we choose it and how we treat the fabrics.
“But we’ve always had that in our brand DNA, anyway, just by working locally and manufacturing locally. We are now trying to expand that and do everything we can to keep our carbon footprints small.”
Notably, Mr Condilis discussed how the brand was “really proud” to have been able to save around 910 kilograms of waste - down to 90 kilograms from 1,000 - by implementing an automatic fabric cutting machine in recent years.
With the machine working at full capacity, Nobody can produce (with a high degree of accuracy) between 1,000 and 1,500 pairs of jeans in a single day, whereas when patterns were cut manually, separate denim panels were needed and the top limit in terms of production was around 500 pairs per day, he stated.
Each denim article “probably” passes through “around 60-70 people” before it is inspected, packed and despatched, he said, adding in a separate comment: “There is no sense of automation in this day and age - and probably won’t be for the next 5-10 years.”
The need to sustain the Australian denim industry through upskilling and offering opportunities to local people was a key theme of the presentation. “The future of this industry is really important,” Mr Condilis said.
Having previously worked with Victoria-based non-profit Social Studio on training local refugees and asylum seekers to work in its factory and laundry, the co-founder now envisions the “next phase” of Australian denim-making involving collaboration, but not through design.
“I mean collaboration through people, through institutions, through government, through all sectors,” he said. “As a collective, we can improve our industry and I think it’s really important, not only as people, but for the environment. We can only learn from and help one another.”
A Nobody-made capsule collection, released towards the end of 2020, was the pilot project of Singapore-headquartered traceability solutions provider FibreTrace. The brand’s second collection with FibreTrace followed in March of this year.
Image: Nobody Denim via Instagram.
