Skip to main content

TGIF Shopping: Marc Nelson Denim Is Your New Must-Have Jean

Marc Nelson Denim is a small-batch craft denim brand that seeks to give its customers not just a pair of jeans, but an experience.

They size, mark, cut, and sew each pair of denim to achieve the ideal fit for their handmade craft, each batch of which is limited edition and uniquely its own.

Related: Four Season Comfort: The Best Travel Pants

They create 214 of each specific style to ensure exclusivity. Why 214? “My daughter was born on February 14th,” says Marc Hall, founder of Marc Nelson Denim.

Hall grew up near the old Levi’s factory on Cheery Street in Knoxville, Tennessee, where his family worked, thus giving him his initial entry point and interest into the world denim.

With a desire to restore jobs lost in the off-shoring of the American Denim industry, Hall and his team had a vision for instilling the same sense of pride Knoxville once felt.

“Denim is not only this country’s pant of choice, it is and is within the very fabric of America. For us, being authentic American makers celebrates the eclectic heritage of denim and the craftsmen who came before us.”

So what sets their product apart from the myriad of other denim collections on the market? “That would be the whiskey stained product. We take natural selvage denim from cone mills and soak 60 pair in a whiskey barrel for 30 days. We treat the denim with our secret recipe and it comes out an amazing dirty grunge.”

Marc Nelson Denim recently teamed up with the Susan G. Komen’s Tennessee affiliates to launch Project Pink, a line of t-shirts to help raise awareness within the African American community about the fight against breast cancer.

In addition to denim, MND offers bags, boots, totes, belts, boxers, flasks, razors, and more.

Check out the full selection of offerings by visiting. MarcNelsonDenim.com.

Editors' Recommendations

Evan Ross Katz
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Evan Ross Katz is a contributing writer for The Manual as well as the Managing Editor for​ ​NewNowNext. He also…
A Guide to Raw Denim Jean Selection and Care
Levi’s 501 Original ShrinkTo-Fit

How’s that old Ike and Tina Turner version of the song go? “We never ever do nothing nice and easy. We always do it nice and rough.” 

Seems like that’s an apt way to describe the way most of us approach our blue jeans. We want them to be soft and broken-in. We do it nice and easy by buying a pair that’s already been washed, ripped, and repaired, blended with stretch fiber for ease and shape retention — in plain words, letting somebody else handle the rough part. But for a more satisfying, personalized experience, we like doing it the old fashioned way: buying a pair of stiff, raw denim jeans and going through the nice and rough work of breaking them in for ourselves. 

Read more
Jomers Is Making Your New Favorite Pair of Jeans for Under $40
jomers white oak denim affordable jeans 4

There’s one brand making what just might be the most affordable pair of denim on the market, and that’s Jomers — the brand’s White Oak Cone Denim retails for under $40 on sale, and they won’t be around for long. Yes indeed, you read that right. Jomers White Oak Cone Denim will in fact set you back just $34 (not including shipping), a remarkable steal sure to please even the most exacting, intense denimheads.

Forums on the internet have popped up in the past decade to drive home the rare nature of the world’s best denim fabric, but there’s nothing out there quite like what New York City-based Jomers has been making as of late — at least, in terms of price and serious style points.

Read more
The Future of Jeans is Here with these Alternative Fabrics to Cotton Denim
lucky brand tencel

As many times as I’ve changed my personal style over the years, the one thing that’s never changed is my insistence on jeans made from 100% cotton. Anything woven with spandex, polyester, or other synthetic fibers did not, in my view, qualify as real denim. If the prospectors of Levi Strauss’ era wouldn’t have been able to wear it, then it didn’t count as real jeans.

These days, though, my views have changed. In a world where cotton agriculture and manufacture consumes more resources than any other fiber, insisting on 100% cotton seems positively un-American.

Read more