Outland Denim’s apogee can be traced to Oct. 17, 2018. That was the day that Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, stepped off a plane in Dubbo, New South Wales, while wearing a pair of black stovepipe jeans known as the “Harriet.” A few days later, the erstwhile Meghan Markle wore them again, this time at an Invictus Games sailing event in Sydney Harbor with her husband, Prince Harry. (She also donned Veja sneakers, but that’s a different story altogether.)
It wasn’t long before the Queensland-based label’s phone was “ringing off the hook,” said James Bartle, its founder and CEO. He immediately flew home from Cambodia, where Outland operated two production facilities, to field a barrage of media interviews. The so-called “Meghan Markle effect” sold out the Harriet within a week, and a sizable waitlist followed. More gratifying, the 640 percent upswell in sales allowed Bartle to train an additional 46 seamstresses, many of them victims of sex trafficking and forced labor, and pay them a living wage.
“It definitely created a moment where people wanted the jeans and heard about the story [behind them],” Bartle said of Outland’s “profit-for-purpose” mission, which began in 2011 after he witnessed a young girl being sold on the streets of Thailand. “It still has a positive impact on the brand today. And we’re really grateful that she was willing to wear the product.”
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For the next couple of years, Australia’s first denim B Corp, which uses organic cotton and “zero harmful chemicals,” was flying high. Buoyed by another celebrity endorsement—Leonardo DiCaprio would only wear Outland while shooting a denim-focused magazine editorial in 2019—it was able to upgrade its Cambodian plants, land accounts with Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom in the United States, collaborate with Global Fashion Agenda, Karen Walker and Nudie Jeans, and plot an entry into ready-to-wear.
Then Covid-19 happened. In one moment, Outland was everywhere. In the next, it practically disappeared.
“We had built up pre-Covid to launch into North America and we only had about three weeks of sales on the floor at Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom [before] Covid shut the world down,” Bartle said. “We put a lot of investment into that expansion, but more so than that, we actually employed a lot of new people in Cambodia.”
Few people were thinking of buying new clothes, let alone “hard pants” like denim, during the pandemic. With orders down by 80 percent, the machines at Outland went idle, pushing the company into what Bartle described as a “really difficult financial situation.” Even the 1.3 million Australian dollars ($872,150) it raised through a bout of crowdfunding was only able to staunch the bleeding for a while.
Bartle said that the whole reason Outland existed was to give employment to women who have been exploited in various ways. Because he didn’t want to send them back into the streets, likely to a worse fate, the brand continued to cover their salaries. When it finally shuttered one of its factories in 2022, it was only because the Cambodian economy was in a better position and it knew that the 45 redundant seamstresses could find decent work elsewhere, he said.
“It was proof to the concept of what we’re trying to do,” Bartle said. “If you skill people, give them the ability to be able to go out and be independent and thrive, they really can. We’ve been grateful that we could get to the end of that period without having to send people back out into an environment where they wouldn’t have any support.”
Saving those jobs is a decision he would make again in a heartbeat, he said.
Even so, trying to keep everything together extracted a toll on Outland’s holding company, Outland Denim Proprietary Ltd., which Australian media has “falsely” reported as going into receivership, Bartle said. (It has also conflated Outland the brand with Outland the holding interest, which he said are separate entities.) It’s Outland the holding company that accumulated what he characterized as a “historic amount of debt” during the pandemic, resulting in the Australian Taxation Office, or ATO, “coming down really hard” on reclaiming what’s owed. The only option left to the Outland Proprietary was to enter into a small business restructuring process, complete with a payment plan, or else face liquidation, Bartle said.
Outland Proprietary was only able to offer the ATO, plus other creditors such as a legal firm, an accounting company and a British university, 20 cents on the dollar on what local media has reported as more than 500,000 Australian dollars ($330,325) worth of debt. Creditors were also told that Outland’s acquisition of struggling Sydney brand Nobody Denim for an undisclosed sum in late 2023 offered them “no realizable value,” the same outlets said.
“I don’t think the process is ideal—I think that it’s quite negative in a lot of ways,” Bartle said. “Obviously, the negative press isn’t good for the brand in growing and trying to achieve our mission but it is what it is and we’re just going to keep fighting regardless.”
What that means for Outland the brand is that it’s ready for its relaunch in the United States. Already, the label is coming into its third season with online retailer Moda Operandi to “great response.” At its height, Outland employed 150 seamstresses. It’s back to that number at its remaining Phnom Penh facility today, Bartle said.
“We’ve got something that we’ve been building for a long time now: a product that activates a cycle of freedom to humanity and heals the planet every single time a jean is made, sold, purchased, worn,” Bartle said. “We’re at a place now where we’re as close as we’ve ever been to having open doors and global distribution, but again, there’s a lot more room to grow. Our customer knows that they’re contributing to the greater good for humanity and also environmentally, and so we’re going to stay true to that.”
Despite this “really bright future,” Bartle is realistic about the challenges that still lie ahead of Outland, however. The brand isn’t yet profitable but it’s in growth mode, since “every unit sold is what equals having that impact,” he said. At some point, however, the focus will be on profitability.
“To be honest we’ve had to hibernate to a degree for three and a half years and we’re only just going back out into the world now,” he said. “The last four years have been absolutely the most difficult four years I’ve ever experienced in business, hands down, but they’ve also made us much stronger, and they’ve made us much more resilient, smarter, wiser.”