PERSONALIZATION
MADE FROM YOUR JEANS
Some jeans carry memories too valuable to throw away.
The concert you attended. The trip you never forgot. The years they became part of your everyday life. Instead of leaving them at the back of a wardrobe, let them continue the journey in a form you'll use every day.
This is how we build it.
The Commission
This isn't a build-your-own configurator. It's a conversation between you and the person who's going to cut, sew and finish your jeans by hand.
We ask questions. You make choices. Nothing is locked in until you've seen it.
Commissions open four times a year. Each one takes real time, because each backpack only gets made once.
One — The Conversation
We start by talking about your jeans — what they mean to you, what you want to keep, what you're happy to let go of.
We'll decide together:
- Size — Medium, for everyday carry. Large, for work and travel.
- Webbing colour — the straps that carry your bag
- Embroidery — a word, initials, a symbol, artwork, or none at all
- What stays — the fade, the repair, the stitch line only your jeans have
There's no wrong answer here. This part is meant to feel like choosing, not deciding under exam conditions.
Two — Embroidery, If You Want It
Up to five thread colours. Graphic artwork rather than photographic images — it holds up better on denim, and it ages better too.
A word. Initials. A shape that means something. Or leave the canvas as it is — plenty of our best pieces carry no embroidery at all.
Three — The Mock-Up
Before a single stitch goes into your actual jeans, we build a digital mock-up on denim close to yours in tone, so you can see roughly where everything sits.
We don't start production until you've said yes.
Four — Your Jeans, Our Hands
Once you've approved the design, you send us the jeans. You cover that shipping — it's the one part of this that has to come from you, because the material has to be yours.
From there, your backpack is built by hand, from that single pair, by one person, start to finish. No two ever come out the same, because no two pairs of jeans ever went through the same life.
Five — It Comes Home
When it's finished, we inspect it, package it, and send it back to you. Return shipping is on us.
CUSTOMER TESTIMONIALS
Buddy Backpack, Custom Commission — from NZ$680Why a Commission Costs More Than Ready-Made
You're paying for a different kind of attention: a real conversation, a mock-up made before we touch your jeans, one pattern cut for one person, one pair of hands on the whole build, and a garment that didn't exist in the world until you asked for it.
Ready-made starts at NZ$420, because a first-edition Buddy already exists.
A commission starts at NZ$680, because yours doesn't — yet.
Your jeans. Our hands. Nobody else's bag.
YOUR STORIES
Cynthia — France
21 days. 6 provinces. One backpack.
Cynthia's idea for the trip came from a nightmare — she woke at 4am, mind full of it, and started writing in her notebook before she even knew where she was going. One thing was already certain: whatever the route, she needed a UseDEM backpack for it.
She reached out to Xenia directly. No agency, no pitch deck — just an idea and a jean jacket's worth of conviction. Xenia said yes.
"I wanted a bag with a history," Cynthia says. "An ecological one, to be precise." A backpack built from someone's old jeans was exactly that — not a symbol of sustainability, but the material fact of it.
Waterproof, deep-pocketed, built for three weeks of a woman moving fast and packing light — the Buddy became less an accessory and more a travelling companion. "With my backpack by my side," she says, "I can finally say I'm ready to discover six beautiful provinces in China."
Some journeys start with a plan. Hers started with a bag she trusted more than the itinerary.
Steph — Staffordshire, England (via Shanghai & Beijing)
A denim designer's own jeans, converted.
Steph met Xenia the way two people who both live on the edge of things tend to meet — by accident, at Green Code in Shanghai, over a table of denim. She took Xenia's card. She got in touch the same day.
Steph isn't a casual observer of the material. She runs her own denim company, Zodiac Active, built over eight years living in Asian cities. She knows exactly what upcycling costs to do properly — and what it looks like when it's faked.
So when she finally found a home for her own first pair of jeans — a rigid, straight-leg black biker jean, "totally knackered and worn, but beautifully so" — she knew it was the right kind of ending. Not a keepsake shelved away, but a bag built to work: London, the Alps, three weeks of gear strapped on and carried through.
"It's just the thing," she says. Coming from someone who has spent a career telling the difference between design and decoration, that's not a small compliment.
Taisia — friend since 2014
Before UseDEM was a brand, it was an idea Taisia watched take shape.
She's known Xenia since 2014, back when UseDEM was still becoming what it is. Her Buddy Bag is built from her own old Levi's — jeans she wore long enough that giving them a second life felt less like recycling and more like keeping a friend around.
Now it carries her actual life: two kids, a full-time job, days with no straight lines in them. "It fits my busy life," she says, and means it literally — the bag goes from work bag to nappy bag to whatever the day demands, and still matches everything, because denim always does.
"It is just mine," she says. Not the brand's, not a designer's — hers, built from her own material, worn into a shape that only her life could give it.
That's the part fast fashion can't replicate no matter how it tries: a bag that was never anyone else's first, and now belongs to someone entirely.
Sabrina — friend from day one
She named the brand before it had customers.
Sabrina knew Xenia before UseDEM existed as a business — she was there at the very beginning, and it was Sabrina who gave the brand its Chinese name. That's not an ambassador relationship built by a marketing team. It's one built by proximity to the idea before it was proven.
She already lived by upcycling before UseDEM gave it a shape she could carry. "UseDEM let me notice to upcycle more things in my life," she says — not a lecture about waste, just a habit sharpened by a better example.
Her favourite thing about the bag is the simplest: it's useful, it's hers, and it doesn't perform sustainability so much as practise it. "Simple, fashion, useful," she says, "and make the stuff be mine."
Her advice for anyone thinking about their own footprint is equally unadorned: upcycle more than you buy. Not a campaign line — just how she's actually lived, long before it had a name.