How Much Do Jeans Cost? The Truth About $12 vs $900 Denim

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Allow me to introduce you to the MIJ8, AKA Tokushima natural indigo hand-dyed and tangible cultural treasure selvedge denim from Naked and Famous, coming in at $880 per pair. With the leather patch on these jeans costing more than these George jeans from Walmart, making them 44 times more expensive.

The fabric for these jeans is so limited that brands have to be invited to buy the fabric and are only allowed to buy a certain amount of it due to how difficult and time-consuming it is to produce.

Even more, the process of dyeing these jeans received the honor of intangible cultural treasure by the Japanese government, which denotes high historic or artistic value for the country.

These jeans, by the way, are individually hang-dried outside in the Japanese sun before they send them to the customer. I also have a pair of $12 jeans I got from Walmart – the postman threw them at my door like a frisbee.

What makes the MIJ8 jeans worthy of being almost one thousand dollars?

How is it possible to make jeans for twelve dollars?

Today, I’m going to tell you why jeans cost money, from the specific cotton plant they use to Emma Chamberlain to Japanese trade laws and beyond. Welcome to the Iron Snail, glad to have you back. Let’s answer the burning question: how much do jeans cost?

Jeans In This Article

Features: Basic denim, low-quality rivets,
generic zipper, screen-printed label

Features: Improved quality hardware (YKK zippers),
branded patch

Features: Leather patch, selvedge denim,
shuttle loom fabric

Features: selvedge denim, varied fading patterns,
high-quality materials

Features: Shell cordovan leather patch,
100% iron buttons, Tokushima natural indigo dye

Why George from Walmart Shouldn’t Even Exist

What’s up, guys? It’s Michael back with another article. Today, we’re talking about the cheapest denim versus the not cheapest denim. It’s time to talk about our good friend George from Walmart.

George is a $12.98 pair of jeans coming from Walmart. George is a miracle because George should not be alive. George should just be cotton plants that haven’t been picked yet.

The Secret of George’s Price Tag: Manufacturing and Materials

But as you probably guessed, the first thing that makes George cheap is where George is made. George is made in Mexico. Country of origin does not denote the skill of craftsmen – there are incredibly skilled craftsmen in Mexico, Bangladesh, Japan, and the United States, but that’s not what it is.

The saying goes that if you’re not paying for it, somebody else is, so the reason that George can be manufactured so cheaply is because labor protections and worker protections are not the same everywhere in the world.

So that’s one of the things that can make it so cheap. I’m not saying that Walmart does this, I’m not saying that’s how George is made, but a lot of hyper-cheap clothes get made like that. Interestingly, though, these jeans have features that I didn’t think would be on these jeans, namely, they have rivets. That’s usually the first thing to go because that’s a very small expense that you could shave off to get the jeans cost even lower.

These jeans do have rivets and a zipper, which is kind of expected, but what you really see obviously is generic products – nothing is really branded, although the button here is branded George, and then the products are just inferior.

So the zipper is not as good, the rivets aren’t as good, they’ll probably come off easier, the zipper isn’t as strong, it’ll get stuck easier. Patches like the ones you see on Levi’s jeans with the horses pulling the jeans are also pretty expensive, so it’s no wonder George has no patch instead and uses screen printing on the inside of the jeans to save money there.

Beyond the Basics: Hardware, Construction, and Cotton Quality

What a lot of these places do, too,  is they automate certain steps of production so people don’t have to be involved. You can just buzz through a task way faster, which brings me to how the denim is made.

There is selvedge denim, and then there is denim that is made on a projectile loom, which makes denim literally four to five times faster than a shuttle loom. I also talked to Bahzad from Naked and Famous, and he said watching a projectile loom function is literally like watching a printer print paper out.

The other thing that George has is probably a million brothers and sisters because Walmart can do massive, massive, massive scale. Walmart probably says to these manufacturers, “We’re going to order 250,000 jeans in the next six months, and then six months after that, we project we’ll probably need 500,000.”

What essentially happens is that these companies are so big that these manufacturers run through Walmart to Uniqlo or something like that. So if Walmart says, “Hey, these jeans are going to cost this much now. This is how much we’re paying per unit,” the manufacturer kind of has to say okay.

And then we get to the denim. This is not good denim – it is the lowest of the lowest quality. But what do I mean by that? You may be wondering. Well, it’s easier to explain with recycled plastic. When you first have plastic, you have polymers that are long and very strong.

Then, when you recycle plastic, you shorten those polymers, and then when you recycle plastic again, you shorten it, then you shorten it, then you shorten it. Plastic can’t be recycled that many times because what happens is every time those polymers get shortened, your plastic gets weaker and weaker to the point where it’s not really usable for anything.

Cotton is similar because there’s short staple, medium staple, long staple, and extra long staple cotton. Short staple cotton is exactly what it sounds like – it’s not very long, it’s not very strong, and it’s coarse. Shorter is usually not that well-liked in most applications except when you start to get to more expensive jeans. Beyond that, there are also locations where the short staple cotton is grown.

There is one place in California where cotton is actually very highly regarded, and then there are other places, mainly Asia, where it’s grown very fast and very coarse – it’s not the best. That is where the George cotton comes from. That is why it is important to note that if you’re trying to get jeans that have maximum strength, price isn’t really the guide to that; it’s cotton staple length, and we’ll talk about Levi’s and tie all that together.

Moving Up: Enter Levi’s and Marketing Costs

Now, we move on to Levi’s denim. Levi’s denim is almost five times as much as George, but it’s made in Mexico. Is there a chance that it’s made in the exact same manufacturing factory? Yes.

There are some differences that are very important to note. Levi’s spends a boatload on marketing – they have their Brad Pitt ad, they have an ad with Emma Chamberlain, and I see Jaden Smith all over. That costs money, and that money gets added to your pants.

The most interesting part of what you see between George and Levi’s is the point of failure in construction. It’s very unlikely that the point of failure for either of these jeans is going to be the denim. It’s also very unlikely that it’s going to be the stitching, so that is also fine.

And that leaves us with the fixings, that leaves us with the rivets, that leaves us with the zipper, and that’s where Levi’s takes the cake because I don’t know how much better quality it is, but it’s definitely better quality hardware.

The buttons and the zippers are YKK, so everything is a little spec higher, so you’re less likely to have a broken zipper on your jeans, and you’re less likely for the buttons or the rivets to pop off. “With Levi’s denim, too, there’s also a higher likelihood that we’re seeing some sort of proprietary denim that is exclusive to Levi’s. George is probably just denim that is denim, and Levi’s is probably a little like, ‘No, it has to be done this way – this is Levi’s denim.’”

The Middle Ground: Unbranded’s No-Frills Approach

Unbranded is essentially Levi’s if Levi’s did the opposite of what they do. Unbranded is no marketing. It’s just, “Okay, we’re going to use overseas manufacturers and overseas denim – how can we make this the best possible version of that product?”

So now the country of origin is China, but all of the fixings and the finishings and stuff are stepped up, and that’s really what I mean about it’s not the quality of craftsmen that changes between countries or anything like that; it’s quality of the finishing details and the denim and all those great things.

Now, if we look at the Unbranded jeans, the first thing you’ll notice is that they have a leather patch. This is the first jean to have a leather patch, and now you have proprietary selvedge denim.

Now we’re on shuttle looms, which again are four or five times slower than projectile looms, so things start to slow down a little bit, and cost goes up because of that. Along with that, the denim is selvedge, so it’s just prettier looking – you have a blue selvedge stripe.

All of these jeans so far have been dyed with pure indigo, AKA synthetic indigo, and there’s a difference between synthetic indigo and natural indigo. Natural indigo is natural – nothing is exactly the same. Different batches of jeans and jackets and everything, all denim that’s made with natural indigo, have slightly different hues and variations.

Japanese Denim: Where Trade Laws Meet Craftsmanship

And now we’re into the big daddies, but still, Naked and Famous regularly comes in at a lower price point than other denim jeans. And the question you may be asking is why? How much do jeans cost? Because their fabric comes from Japan, they’re made in Canada with laborers who are making above minimum wage, but they’re still cheaper than a lot of the competition.

And that, my friend, has to do with Japanese and Canadian trade laws. There are no duties paid on the fabric coming from Japan and going into Canada – there is on Japan to the U.S., so that already raises prices for U.S. companies.

Something to also note now is that when you’re dealing with Japanese denim, really, everything in the supply chain goes up. Dying the denim is more environmentally friendly, but also, typically, Japan sources better cotton.

Japan puts a lot of resources into their denim, and what you see from that with Naked and Famous when compared to something like Unbranded, Levi’s, or George, is different fading patterns. So there’s a lot bigger gradation between blues when you get the jeans to fade from super dark blue to super light blue.

These companies, like I said, are using proprietary denim, but that’s proprietary denim – they are not using proprietary yarns that make up the denim. Remember way back when I was like, “Well, the most expensive jeans and the cheapest jeans have a lot in common”? That’s what we’re talking about now, and what they have in common is that short staple length fiber. The reason people don’t like it in mass-produced jeans is exactly the reason people do like it in very small fancy-dancy jeans. With short staple fibers, you get a very rough, interesting texture if done correctly, and now we’re getting into proprietary yarn.

MIJ Territory: Small Batches, Iron Buttons, and Sun-Dried Denim

Okay, now we are in MIJ territory, where everything is cut, sewn, dyed, etc., in Japan. Now, you start to see limited production runs. Bahzad said 800 units was a limited production run, but I made a hundred jackets for the Iron Snail, and that felt like a lot.

With MIJ jeans, we’re using fully 100% iron buttons that will rust and age with wear. Sourcing those buttons in Japan is where the price goes up because there’s only one manufacturer that makes fully 100% iron buttons in Japan – not capped, iron all the way through.

They’re also tempi-treated, which is very different from sanforizing, but they do get a lot of shrink out of the jeans. And what you do differently now is instead of getting your jeans and throwing them into a big industrial dryer or not washing them at all or sanforizing them, is you get the jeans wet and then you hang them up, and they dry in the sun so that way they shrink a lot. Picture someone being outside and drying 800 pairs of jeans in the sun.

The Final Boss: Inside the $900 Tokushima Natural Indigo Jeans

And then, of course, you get to the Tokushima natural indigo hand-dyed natural cultural treasures of Japan, United States 2023 for president – the $900 jeans, which are a different beast in and of themselves.

Obviously, we have all the fixings from Japanese denim, proprietary yarns, copper rivets, and iron buttons, but we see more additives now. So if we’re looking at the leather patch on the back, that is shell cordovan, which is the horse’s butt, really.

Then, we get to the dyeing process, which in itself is insane. Starting at the roots up, the indigo used to dye these jeans is grown in Japan. Then, once you have the indigo, which is grown in Japan, you have the fermenting process, which is what you need to actually use indigo to dye your jeans, and that takes up to a year.

Then, once this indigo is ready to go, you obviously have to dye the yarns, but you do not dye the yarns on a mass scale – you are hank dying. So you’re taking hanks of yarn, dipping them into this vat, pulling them out, checking them, letting them dry, and they continue to do this until it is the right shade and the right color, which, as you probably guessed, takes a very long time.

It is then made into denim, that denim is made into jeans, and what you are left with is the most skillfully artistically made jeans in the entire world. This is the alpha omega end-all king of kings, lord of lords denim. I’ve had a Pure Blue Japan jacket, but I don’t have MIJ8s – Naked and Famous let me borrow their sample pair for this review.

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I’m Out!

And that’s how the sausage gets made. We’ve answered, “how much do jeans cost?” Thanks so much! I really am so thankful that you read these articles. It means a bunch, and it means I could do this because I really like it, so I appreciate you all.

The Iron Snail is a men’s fashion vlog (and now article series!) starring a young man named Michael and featuring a snail no bigger than a quarter. The two are set on taking over the world of fashion by creating a clothing line to end all clothing lines. Until then, we’re here to tell you EVERYTHING you need to know about the best clothing out there, from the highest quality raw denim jeans to the warmest jackets to the sturdiest boots…the Iron Snail has got you covered.