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Born to be buried — Swedish brand Benim Denim is looking to redirect the fashion industry
How do you start a fashion brand when being well aware that the fashion industry accounts for 8-10 per cent of global emissions? Swedish creatives Haisam Mohammed and Noah Bramme spell it Benim Denim, but don’t get too familiar with the name, it will soon be gone forever.
By WILMA HALL
25 Jan 2023

”Expect your clothing returns to be thrown out”. These words were stated in a report recently published by researchers at the international climate institute at the Swedish University in Lund. The researchers have studied e-commerce brands and in what way they handle the clothes that consumers buy and specifically the ones that we return. The clothes themselves are many times not expensive, but the labour that supposedly should take care of the returns is. In that sense, it is cheaper for companies to throw clothes at the dump rather than recycle them. The study is made through anonymous interviews with key people in the industry.

Being aware of this kind of wastage but also being a creative and dreaming of creating his own fashion brand, Swedish creator and entrepreneur Haisam Mohammed scratched his head determined to find a solution. Eventually, he and co-founder Noah Bramme landed the brand Benim Denim, the world’s first start-up designed to be shut down. 

The idea behind the brand is to shut it down as soon as possible. They will keep it going until their 170-meter repurposed dead stock denim roll, itself made partly from Circulose® recycled from worn-out jeans, runs out. 

The two Swedish creatives birthed the idea when collaborating with the award-winning textile-to-textile recycling company Renewcell. Haisam and Noah got introduced to Nora Eslander at Renewcell and the company’s revolutionary recycled textile material Circulose®. Renewcell had salvaged 170-meter excess dead stock from a previous collection made with Circulose®, and the duo was asked if they were interested in creating something out of it. Benim Denim was born, only to be buried. 

Renewcell was founded in 2012 by innovators at Stockholms KTH Royal Institute of Technology and is today a multi-award-winning sustain tech company. Through innovative technology, they’re able to recycle cellulosic textile waste, an example of that being worn-out cotton clothes or production scraps, and then make it into the new material called Circulose®. Circulose® was included in TIME Magazine’s list of the 100 Best Inventions 2020. 

Benim Denim serves to explore what could be a possible concept for the future of fashion brands. 

— When companies scale up, production does as well. And even the most clairvoyant operations are likely to overorder or overproduce from time to time, leaving the company with inventory that can’t be sold — otherwise known as dead stock. Our idea was to take the dead stock at hand and turn it to life. Starting a brand that is only running as long as the dead stock denim roll allows us to. As soon as we’re out of the 170-meter roll, we’re shutting down the brand for good, explains Noah.

Benim Denim ”funeral”.

Haisam and Noah hope to inspire other creatives to renew their way of thinking. No drop B, No Planet B.