OUR STORY
OUR MISSION
Some materials are not at the end of their story.
They are waiting for someone who knows how to look.
useDEM exists to develop that ability — in ourselves, and in the people who carry our work.
The more you look, the more you understand.
THE BEGINNING
Shanghai, 2015
useDEM was not born in a design studio.
It was born on a factory floor — in the cutting rooms and sample archives of Guangzhou, where one of the world's most resource-intensive industries moves at speed, and leaves an enormous amount behind.
For more than a decade, our founder worked inside global denim and apparel supply chains — not as an observer, but as a designer embedded in production. She saw what happens before a garment reaches a store. She saw the fabrics that never make it. Denim produced on certified mills, tested to international standards, cut with precision — and then set aside. Not because it was poor quality. Because the system had moved on.
That observation became a conviction.
A material of this quality deserves more than one life.
In 2015, useDEM began transforming surplus and quality-rejected denim — sourced directly from certified manufacturers — into considered, lasting objects. Not recycling. Not craft.
A design practice built on the belief that value already exists. It only needs to be seen.
THE FOUNDER
KSENIA SIDORENKO
Xenia Sidorenko was born in St. Petersburg, trained in classical ballet, studied design, and spent fifteen years working at the intersection of creativity and industrial production in China.
She was always, in some sense, an outsider — someone who saw the system from within and could not accept what it normalised.
In China, she built useDEM against the grain. The brands she worked with — Levi's, Adidas, ASICS, Crocs, ICICLE, Klee Klee, Volvo, and others — trusted her not because upcycling was fashionable, but because she understood the factory floor better than most designers ever would. She knew where the value was hiding.
Then she came to New Zealand.
And something shifted.
Not because she arrived somewhere new — but because she arrived somewhere familiar.
In New Zealand, the connection between people and the natural world is not a philosophy you need to explain. It is simply present — in how people move through landscape, how they think about what they consume and what they protect.
There is a word here — kaitiakitanga — that describes this relationship: the understanding that we are not owners of nature, but its guardians.
When Xenia first encountered this concept, she recognised it immediately.
Not as something new. As something she had already been practising — alone, in a different language, in a different culture — for ten years.
Here, for the first time, she didn’t need to explain the why. People already understood it.
A NEW CHAPTER
Designed for You
useDEM’s next chapter is personal.
After a decade of working with global brands — developing upcycled collections and products from their surplus textiles at scale — we are now turning our attention to the individual.
Because the most radical act is not industrial. It is intimate.
It is the decision to carry an object that was made from something that already existed. That was designed to last. That will look better in five years than it does today. That carries the quiet intelligence of a person who has learned to see differently.
Our flagship product — the Buddy Backpack — is made from a single pair of denim. One pair of jeans becomes one backpack. The fabric comes exclusively from Prosperity Textile, our certified manufacturing partner since 2016: a world-leading denim supplier whose materials carry internationally recognised quality and sustainability certifications.
No two backpacks are identical.
No pair of denim is exactly the same.
That is not a limitation. That is the point.
We also offer a custom commission: send us your own jeans, and we will design the next life they deserve.
Inclusive Factories
We work with inclusive factories by choice — not as a favour extended, but as a strategic alliance between equals. These are the partners who give us flexible production volumes and a genuinely personalised approach, the kind of flexibility that lets us stay small-batch and specific instead of forcing our production into someone else’s rigid system.
We tell our clients how and where their products are made — not as a confession, but because transparency is what makes the relationship between us and the people who carry our work worth having. Strength recognises strength. That’s the partnership.4
TEN YEARS OF TRUST
Our B2B Legacy
Before useDEM became a consumer brand, it spent a decade proving its practice at scale — as a design and upcycling partner for some of the world’s most recognised companies.
We developed upcycled collections and products from surplus, off-cut, and quality-rejected textiles for brands including:
Levi’s, Adidas Originals, Adidas Terrex, ASICS, Crocs, ICICLE, Klee Klee, Moussy, W Hotels, KFC, Beyond Meat, Porsche, Volvo, Inditex, Hermès Paris, KPMG, Dentsu
Each collaboration was built on the same conviction: the material already has value. Our work is to reveal it.
That decade of factory-floor knowledge, certified supply chain relationships, and large-scale production experience is what makes our consumer products different. We don’t approximate quality. We know exactly where it comes from — and why it matters.
“The more you look, the more you understand.”
Something on your mind? Send Us a Message. We would be delighted to hear from you.