Mott & Bow are looking into your jeans

Alejandro Chahin knows pants. His family runs Intermoda in the Honduras and he graduated with a degree in engineering from the University of Michigan and an MBA from NYU. Now he’s making jeans. Why? Because he wants to slap a pair of nicely priced dungarees on you via the Internet.

Mott & Bow – which I’m sure you’ve seen on Facebook – basically sells high quality jeans over the Internet. Thanks to Chahin’s experience in clothing manufacturing he’s able to offer multiple styles and sizes in skinny, slim, and regular and maintain free returns and even on try-on pairs that ship for free.

To be fair the idea behind Mott & Bow isn’t new. However the shipping options and quality are on par with similar solutions like Warby Parker and Bonobos. I ordered a pair of the slim jeans to try and they came quickly and were on par with similar department store brands. The fit, after a bit of futzing, was Ok as well. One thing that’s refreshing? The lack of pretense. Mott & Bow doesn’t talk about how their jeans are hand spun in the Appalachian foothills by 90-year-old garment workers who made jeans for Harry Truman. They talk about quality and shipping and reducing the length of the supply chain.

“There was no one offering premium jeans for a fair price because brands were locked into wholesale markups, or unable to integrate the supply side,” said Chahin. “I saw that we had an opportunity to bring a product to the market that solved this problem. We could disintermediate the supply side, due to my family heritage and manufacturing expertise, and then offer direct-to-consumer; thus bypassing all middlemen.”

“Bypassing the middleman” is obviously a tired phrase in the canon of disruptive clothing companies but it seems to be working. The site sees 150,000 a month since the end of 2016. They’re expecting to grow further in 2017.

Jeans, as we all know, either cheap or wildly expensive. High end denim can hit $400 or more and you can also get a pair for less than $100. Chahin is looking to land right between those price points, offering convenience and quality to a consumer that might not want a company that is dripping with faux-authenticity but also don’t want to blow out their pants after a month of heavy walking.