Mud Jeans, the Dutch brand known for its circular denim, has discontinued its rental platform Lease A Jeans and launched ReLoved, a verified resale platform.
When Mud Jeans introduced Lease A Jeans in 2013, the concept was counterintuitive enough to become a fixture in every circular economy presentation about fashion: a customer paid a monthly fee for a pair of jeans and, at the end of the lease term, could return them, keep them outright, or swap them for a new pair. Returned jeans went back into the circular system — repaired and resold as secondhand, or eventually broken down and recycled into new fabric. “We call it Lease-A-Jeans because it sounds nice,” Bert van Son, Mud Jeans’ founder, said at the time. “For me, it was about the thought: we want to be, as MUD Jeans, responsible for our products. We want to be responsible for the raw material. Let’s get it back after use.” The Dutch brand was not the first to propose a product-as-a-service model for clothing, but it was among the first to make one commercially real, and for over a decade, it served as the example people reached for when they wanted to argue that fashion could function like a library rather than a landfill.
Mud has announced it will discontinue Lease A Jeans. In its place, the brand launched ReLoved — a verified resale platform where items sell at up to 70 percent off retail price, drawing from two sources: private sellers who originally bought Mud Jeans pieces, and the brand’s own archive. Every listing is reviewed by a member of the Mud Jeans team before it goes live.
“With Mud ReLoved, you can resell the Mud Jeans you no longer wear, or discover a pre-loved pair ready to be worn, styled, and loved again,” the company said in an Instagram post. “By extending the lifespan of each garment, we make better use of what already exists. More wears per garment means a lower impact per wear.”
The company says that since 2012, it has worked from one guiding principle: “denim should never become waste.”
“We collect worn-out jeans, recycle the fibres and turn them into new premium denim. With Mud ReLoved, we are expanding our circular model by focusing on garments that are no longer worn, but not yet ready to be recycled.”
The pivot to resale is a sign of the times. Clothing rental, as a model, requires proprietary infrastructure: a return logistics system, a reconditioning operation, ongoing customer relationships, and a mechanism for tracking garments through each cycle. For a premium independent brand operating in a niche category, that infrastructure is expensive to build and expensive to sustain at scale. Resale, by contrast, connects to a behavior that already exists. People sell secondhand clothing on Vinted, Depop, and dozens of other platforms without any encouragement from the brand that made it. ReLoved offers a verified, brand-sanctioned, provenance confirmed, listing quality checked experience where the brand is present in the product’s afterlife without owning the return infrastructure. The pricing is genuinely accessible, too: a pair of jeans retailing at €130 might appear on ReLoved for under €40, which is closer to the price point of the fast-fashion brands Mud Jeans explicitly positions itself against.
For Mud, Re Loved also acknowledges where its customer already is. The brand’s buyers are predisposed to secondhand; 62 percent of Gen Z made a secondhand purchase in the past year, according to ThredUp’s 2026 Resale Report, and nearly half of that cohort now uses AI tools to discover resale finds. Meeting them in the secondhand market — with brand verification, price accessibility, and a direct connection to Mud Jeans’ circular mission — is a more direct value proposition than asking them to reconsider their relationship to ownership.
Lease A Jeans was a proof of concept that changed how the industry talked about circular fashion. ReLoved is an acknowledgment of how circular fashion actually moves today. “At Mud Jeans, we believe every denim has a past and a future,” the brand said on Instagram. “A pair of jeans may no longer be worn by its first owner, but that does not mean it has reached the end of its story.”
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