Hartford Jeans Manufacturer Pitches For Denim Market

Three denim-clad businessmen are making a go of a 6-year-old company known for high-end jeans stitched and sewn just below street level in Hartford’s Parkville neighborhood.

Luke Davis, Marshall Deming and Dave Marcoux, plus an employee and an intern, rely on 100 or so old-fashioned sewing machines to run Hartford Denim.

Davis, sporting a denim cap, said Wednesday the $248 retail price of a pair of jeans is due to the top quality and cost of the cotton and hand labor by Hartford Denim’s owners and employee. Custom-made jeans can cost $350 or more.

“The jeans cost what they cost. We make them here,” he said. “We’re not making them with slaves on the other end of the Earth.”

The company began when Davis and his partners “were playing around” making jeans on a plastic sewing machine, he said. They soon started making jeans for themselves, relatives and associates and the business expanded with the help of $30,000 from family and friends over the past six years, Davis said.

The company that started with one sewing machine in a garage now turns out 50 pairs of jeans a week, he said.

Hartford Denim is feeding a market of consumers, some of whom are denim enthusiasts known as “denim heads” — buyers who demand top-quality jeans, even outside the U.S. A stack of jeans set aside on a table at Hartford Denim was bound for Japan, Davis said.

“Anything denim” is sought by many consumers, particularly in Japan, said Todd Shelton, owner of a clothing company of the same name in East Rutherford, N.J.

“If there’s a land of denim-heads, it’s Japan,” he said.

Todd Shelton makes top-end denim jeans that sell for $200 and pricier jeans known as selvedge, derived from “self-edge,” the edge of the denim that will not unravel and used as the garment’s outseam.

The self-edge on the outseam is an “identifier of quality,” Shelton said.

Deming has a bacherlor’s degree in business from Central Connecticut State University and has a minor in fine art, while Davis studied landscape design and building. Marcoux studied social work. None of the principals has a formal education in fashion or garment construction.

Still, Hartford Denim doesn’t have a written business plan.

“We don’t have a piece of paper or a rule book,” Davis said. “We have goals.”

A previous version of the story incorrectly stated none of the business principals had a formal education in business.

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