The Dream We Left in the MUD

Somewhere, probably already, someone is assembling a new slide deck. It will have a page on what went wrong, another on leasing economics, and several more on customer acquisition, inventory and cash flow. MUD Jeans will spend the next several years being taught in exactly the rooms where it used to be presented as proof that circularity could work. I first encountered the company the way many of us in this field probably did, not as a pair of jeans but as a slide of that earlier kind, a case study dropped into a deck or syllabus beside phrases such as closed loop, take back and proof of concept. I remember believing in what it represented. I suspect many of you did too. Before we allow it to become the next deck, however, we owe it something more difficult than analysis. We owe it an apology.

Today, MUD Jeans filed for bankruptcy itself. This was not a filing forced upon the company by an impatient creditor, but a decision made by its own leadership. Dion Vijgeboom, its chief executive and a co owner, told the community that this was not the ending they had fought for. The team had spent recent months trying to secure a sustainable future for the business and believed there was still a way forward until the weight of historic debt became too great to overcome. He thanked the employees, customers, retailers, suppliers, investors, partners and supporters who had believed in the company, challenged it and helped prove that fashion could be done differently. He wrote that he did not believe the story deserved to end here, and that some stories deserve another chapter. I hope this is one of them.

It will be tempting, and not entirely unfair, to conclude that the company ran a difficult business badly in places. It pursued too many initiatives at once. Its leasing model never reached the scale its founders had hoped for. Earlier this year, MUD Jeans ended the programme that had made it famous after learning that most customers preferred to buy their jeans outright, and shifted its attention towards premium denim, repair, resale and recycling. That matters because the dream did not fail only because the world was cruel to it. Some of the assumptions beneath the model did not survive contact with how people actually shop, and a strong mission does not remove the need to make a product people genuinely want at a price they are prepared to pay. Yet Vijgeboom did not use his announcement to blame consumers, investors or the market. He spoke instead about what the team had built, the people who had made it possible and the hope that there might still be a future for it. His words carried the tone of people who know the value of what they created and are now watching its financial structure become heavier than the business itself.

What tends to disappear from both the applause and the autopsy is that MUD Jeans internalised costs the rest of the industry has spent decades learning to push elsewhere. It paid for organic and recycled cotton when virgin material could be bought more cheaply. It used a washing process based on a closed water cycle without conventional chemicals, which Bert van Son has described as considerably more expensive than the industry norm. It created reverse logistics to take old jeans back at no charge and invested in repair and collection years before those activities became standard features of corporate circularity strategies. None of this was particularly visible on a customer’s receipt, but all of it appeared somewhere in the company’s cost base. A conventional brand can sell a garment and largely forget what happens next. A circular brand must think about durability, collection, sorting, repair, resale and the value left in the material once the first owner is finished with it. It must carry those obligations while competing on price, convenience, choice and marketing reach against businesses that have accepted almost none of them. When the numbers eventually stop working, we ask whether circularity is commercially viable, when the more revealing question may be whether we ever built a market in which a company behaving this way had a fair chance of becoming viable.

Circularity was never supposed to be a promise made by innovators alone. It was a contract between those prepared to design differently, retain responsibility, organise returns and recover materials without an established playbook, and those who said they were ready to buy differently, return differently and recognise that a linear price had never covered the full cost of a product. In practice, one side had to prove its commitment every day through operations, investment and risk, while the other could express support without changing very much at all. We have often described that arrangement as market transformation, but much of it has looked more like spectatorship, with the language of participation added afterwards.

Extended producer responsibility legislation, which is intended to make every company placing clothing on the market contribute to what happens after the sale, has taken years to arrive. The Netherlands is only now implementing its own framework, while European policy has moved at the pace such policy usually moves. MUD Jeans built, on its own and years in advance, parts of the system regulation would eventually ask the rest of the market to support. It carried the cost of that head start while competitors remained free to wait. The lesson is not that regulation alone would have saved the company, but that reciprocity must eventually become material. It has to appear in purchases rather than praise, in shelf space from retailers that cited the brand as evidence of progress, and in capital from investors who understand that a company built around inventory, factories and reverse logistics moves according to the realities of physical systems. It also requires policy that makes taking responsibility economically preferable to avoiding it, rather than leaving the cost to whichever business happens to move first.

This is where the apology belongs, and it is not MUD Jeans that owes one. It belongs to the rest of us, particularly those who wrote the case studies, repeated the figures in presentations, invited the founder onto stages and then returned to helping other brands speak about circularity without necessarily paying for the systems that make it real. We have treated visibility as momentum, pilots as adoption and repeated mentions in industry reports as evidence that a market was forming. We should have spent more time asking how many people were actually buying the jeans. MUD Jeans was not short of recognition. It became one of the most frequently cited circular fashion companies in the world, received certifications and awards, and raised a million euros from around eight hundred crowdfunders in 2024 from people who believed the system was worth backing. What it lacked was enough of the support that recognition is often mistaken for. Awards may bring attention, but they cannot cover a supplier invoice. A case study can build influence without building revenue. Being described as the future offers limited comfort when that future never quite arrives in time.

There is a bitter symmetry in the company’s history. Bert van Son built the MUD Jeans we came to know after buying the bankrupt denim label from its insolvency estate in 2012 and turning it into a business that the rest of the industry would spend more than a decade citing. Thirteen years later, the company he built has entered the same legal process from which it first emerged. If there is another chapter, as Vijgeboom hopes, it will require someone willing to do what van Son did the first time and take responsibility for a company others no longer believe they can carry. The difference now is that the underlying idea no longer needs to be introduced to the market. MUD Jeans demonstrated that jeans could be designed around recycled content, repair, return and continued material value. What remained unproven was whether the market surrounding that idea was prepared to reward it consistently enough to sustain the business.

There will be other companies in the same position. Founders are already working on textile recycling, repair, rental, regenerative fibres and safer chemistry, and many are discovering the same gap between enthusiasm and commitment that MUD Jeans has now fallen into. They are told their work is essential, invited to explain it at every conference and placed in every deck, while the market continues to hesitate over whether it wants to pay for the reality it claims to support. What these companies need is not another room full of people who believe the idea is important. They need buyers prepared to tolerate the limitations of an early product while the system improves, investors willing to underwrite the real timetable of factories, inventory and reverse logistics, and policy that does not require the responsible company to win a competition whose rules continue to favour the irresponsible one.

MUD Jeans will almost certainly become a case study in what did not work, and it should, because there are real lessons here that affection should not be allowed to soften. Its leasing model failed to attract enough customers. Its ambitions may have outrun its financial resilience. Its leadership made decisions that deserve to be examined with the same seriousness applied to any other company. Yet it should remain, just as importantly, a case study in what was attempted, what was made real and how much one business carried on behalf of an industry many times its size. For thirteen years, it insisted that whoever places a product into the world should not be permitted to forget it once the sale is complete. Perhaps its final lesson is that the same principle applies to promises. We said we wanted circularity, and we made one of the companies building it famous, but we did not make the responsibility it embodied normal enough to protect it.

Perhaps the last circular act MUD Jeans performs is to return something to all of us: the responsibility we kept sending back.