Du/er is redesigning the winter jean from the yarn up

FastCompany: If you live in a place with a cold winter, dressing for work in the middle of January is more complicated than it seems. You want to wear your jeans to the office, but ordinary denim doesn’t provide enough warmth on freezing day. The available solutions aren’t great. You could wear thermal leggings under your jeans, but you’ll start sweating the minute you leave the sidewalk to enter your heated building. Fleece-lined jeans are often stiff and bulky. [Photo: Courtesy Du/er] Du/er, a decade-old Canadian brand, has been working on a better alternative.

Today it launches Tech Fleece, a fabric that weaves fleece and denim together at the yarn level instead of attaching a separate liner inside a jean. On the exterior, the pants look and feel like a regular pair of jeans. But on the inside, the part that rubs against your skin feels soft and fleecy, while holding warmth. Du/er’s design team also focused on making the fabric stretchy, breathable, and water repellent, so it keeps you dry in rainy weather. They are releasing it in two styles, a men’s jean and a women’s utility pant, which are both available online and in the brand’s stores for $159.

Jeans for bicyclists Gary Lenett, Du/er’s founder and CEO, spent nearly four decades in denim manufacturing, working for some of the biggest players in the industry, including Levi’s. At 56, though, he felt burnt out from a career that required him to spend a third of the year in Asia, visiting factories. He decided to quit his job, retire early, and downsize his lifestyle. He gave up his car, and started biking around his hometown of Vancouver. That’s when he realized that he had nothing to wear. His jeans weren’t comfortable for biking and he had no interest in wearing activewear.

“I don’t want to wear my gym clothing throughout my day,” he says. What he was looking for was everyday clothing, like jeans and flannel shirts, that had some of the benefits of athleisure. And given his background in manufacturing, he knew how to turn this vision into reality. At the time, most men’s denim was heavy and rigid. Lenett had spent years running women’s brands, where lightweight stretch fabrics were standard, and he says the industry was skeptical about bringing them to men. “The conventional wisdom was that men were going to find them too feminine,” he says.

“But I thought that once men tried them out and saw how much easier it was to move in them, they would love them.” [Photo: Courtesy Du/er] He was right. After two years of developing the brand, he launched Du/er in 2015 with two men’s trousers. There was a “Performance Denim” that is blended with a fabric called Coolmax, which is used in athletic wear to regulate temperature and wick sweat. Then there was a “No Sweat” trouser that feels like sweatpants. The brand got traction immediately. These two pieces still make up about 70% of sales. The company has since gone into womenswear, and is rapidly expanding.

It doubled its women’s business last year, and is growing at an overall rate of 40% year over year. It has 14 stores across North America—another five are planned for next year—and also sells through 1,000 retailers, including REI and Nordstrom. Du/er has no outside investors, has been profitable since its third year, and expects to generate $70 million this year. [Photo: Courtesy Du/er] Life after leggings Athleisure dominated the 2010s and peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the category is now cooling. Lululemon—another Vancouver brand that arguably invented athleisure with its yoga pants—is feeling it.

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