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The ethos behind the Peninsula pop-up Friends with Denim is simple: Instead of buying new clothes or accessories, try items from your community that still have plenty of life left in them.
Of course, the idea of shopping second hand is nothing new (no pun intended), but co-founders Rachelle Egan and Lisa Janny started the organization with the goal of fostering a curated and, so far, local way to go about it.
“Keeping everything in circulation … keeping it out of a landfill, it just feels good,” Egan said.
Friends with Denim holds public sales in a variety of locations, where shoppers can hunt for fashion treasures at affordable prices and save them from the waste stream. Multiple vendors participate in each sale, and no two events are the same.
Redwood City residents Egan and Janny first met at Peacebank Yoga studio years ago. Sharing an interest in fashion and sustainability, they started getting other yoga friends together for clothing swaps, with the idea that something that no longer works for one person might be the perfect new fit for another.
“It was super fun, and we just found that people were really, really into it,” Janny recalled. “We wanted to make it bigger … so we decided that we wanted to make it into more of a sale instead of a swap.”
Taking some inspiration from events in San Francisco, the first public Friends with Denim sale was held in August 2024 at The Yard Coffee in downtown Redwood City. Since then, Friends with Denim has become an ongoing series held roughly monthly and always on a weekend day so far.
It’s still centered around downtown Redwood City, with rotating venues including Courthouse Square, Peacebank, and Fireside Books, plus some expansion into San Carlos as well. The next scheduled event is Aug. 22 at Peacebank.
Shoppers can find clothes in a range of styles, from vintage glam to simple staples, and seeing that diversity of items is part of why Egan and Janny enjoy organizing the events.
“It’s interesting to see everyone’s collections and what they’ve gravitated towards,” Egan said, pointing out the coral necklace she’d scored at a past event during an interview at The Yard Coffee.
“If you’re looking for something one of a kind, if you’re looking for a dress, if you’re looking for super basic layering stuff, if you’re looking for a cool piece of jewelry, I feel like we have enough vendors now that really bring everything,” Janny said.
Those interested in becoming vendors can fill out a brief interest form linked on Friends with Denim’s Instagram account, and they’re in the process of building a website of their own. Egan and Janny vet applicants to get a sense of what they’d be selling and add those who seem like a good fit to their list, from which they source their vendors for each event.
Bigger events, such as those on Courthouse Square, can fit many vendors, while for smaller venues they handpick a more select group. Vendors pay a fee ranging from around $25-$100, depending on the venue, to secure their space.
Egan and Janny have loved seeing a community forming around the events.
“Once shoppers start coming, they meet the vendors and they create these relationships with them, and then they kind of look forward to seeing them the next time, because they’re, like, ‘Oh, I really love your style, you know, I bought this from you. I can’t wait to see what you have next time.’ It’s this really cool organic sort of connection,” Janny said.
According to an article from Earth.org, the fashion industry is responsible for around 10% of global carbon emissions, with millions of tons of textile waste going to landfills each year and microplastics from textiles polluting the ocean. The average U.S. consumer throws away around 81.5 pounds of clothes annually (and little can be recycled, according to the article).
Janny said she’s especially motivated to interest young people in the benefits of shopping second hand and upcycling from an early age. Both Egan and Janny grew up thrifting and are happy to see younger Friends with Denim shoppers embracing swaps and secondhand goods over fast-fashion purchases.
They both have long ties to the world of fashion, and they each have previous retail experience as well. Egan earned a degree in merchandise marketing from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, while Janny holds a degree in fashion merchandising from San Francisco State University. Both found themselves disillusioned by the industry and see their work with Friends with Denim as a natural, healing return.
“I did work for a couple designers right out of school, but found that the industry wasn’t what I thought it was. And so, it was not an industry I really wanted to spend any more time in,” Egan said. “But it’s always been my passion. I’ve always loved clothing. I’ve always loved textiles … I definitely feel like I’m returning home.”
Janny had a decadelong career in the industry, traveling overseas and visiting factories where fabrics were dyed or printed. At the time, she found it thrilling. Now, she thinks back and is appalled at what she knows about pollution, mark-ups and waste.
“If I knew what I know now, I probably would have not really been so keen to be doing it for so long,” she said.
Although they said their vendors tend to offer a good amount of diversity in styles and sizes, women’s clothing is dominant and they’d like to see vendors offering more men’s and children’s clothes.
Inspired by Lark, the shop in San Carlos that features goods by local makers and offers workshops on upcycling clothing and making bags (and where Friends With Denim has held sales), Egan and Janny are also interested in offering hands-on guidance for creative upcycling at future events.
Redwood City resident Laura Segura Gonzalez is the founder of 2nd Life Jeans, a Friends with Denim vendor that aims to help people get more joy and use out of clothing they already have. She came to California to earn her master’s degree in design from Stanford University. The program encouraged its students to use design to solve a problem in the world.
“I came in with a laser focus on waste. Every class I took I framed around circularity,” Gonzalez said, including taking courses with Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability.
She thought about all kinds of waste, from food to plastic, but “fashion waste is one that’s always on my mind,” she said. “I always said, ‘I’m a part of the problem.’ I’ve always loved fashion, I’ve always loved shopping … it’s easy to fall into that consumption lifestyle.”
As she delved deeper into learning about fast fashion, the clothes-filled landfills in Chile and Ghana and how only a small percentage of donated clothing goes back into circulation, she also learned that jeans are particularly resource-intensive, requiring thousands of liters of water for each pair.
“On any given day, half of the world’s population is wearing jeans,” she recalled hearing, and she also noticed that people, particularly women, often had an attachment to pairs of jeans they were no longer wearing.
What became the capstone of her graduate studies and, later, 2nd Life Jeans, “started with skinny jeans,” she said. She noticed the formerly popular style had fallen out of favor, turning up in large amounts at thrift stores, so she decided to experiment with adding a panel to a pair of her own, creating a flared leg.
“I never saw myself as a fashion designer or even an expert — I always just played with my clothes,” she said. She began altering and upcycling more jeans, sourcing from secondhand materials, and, thanks to access to the university’s sewing machines. She also started teaching workshops, helping others learn to give their jeans new life.
Gonzalez started with a goal of saving 50 pairs from the landfill and got to around 40, “but the eye-opening moment of this project was the empowerment people felt getting the sewing machine and learning how to use it,” she said. “It became way less of a physical material project and turned into something way bigger.”
After graduating, she wanted to find a way to keep the project going and happened to come across a Friends with Denim event at Peacebank. “‘Ooh, I’m a friend with denim,'” she recalled thinking. She wore her favorite jeans, enhanced with material that had once been a curtain, and introduced herself to Egan and Janny. They hit it off and Gonzalez did her first Friends with Denim event in April under the name 2nd Life Jeans.
“I wanted the name to communicate the mission. We’re giving them a second life together so it’s something you’ll hang on to longer,” she said. “Hanging on to the materials already in your possession is pretty much the most sustainable thing you can do.”
Because she no longer has Stanford’s machines available to her, she now works with clients as co-designers, deciding together how to upcycle the jeans. She then does the sewing and delivers the finished product.
She’s especially touched by the stories and sentimental value behind many of the projects people bring her. Gonzalez has created a patchwork out of a client’s late mother’s jeans and a shirt of their father’s, and a pair of jeans worn when a client was pregnant with her now-adult child. Resizing requests are common as well. She offers a menu of styles to choose from, and said she plans to create more ready-to-wear pairs to sell.
“To start selling my original ideas is the next realization,” she said. With the potential to also offer sewing and mending workshops at future events, she hopes to empower more people to use their creativity and help keep their clothes longer. Her next planned event with Friends with Denim is Sept. 26 at Peacebank Yoga.
And while they don’t foresee their own events expanding outside the Peninsula in the near future, Egan and Janny would love to see Friends with Denim branch out to other parts of the region or country.
“Everyone has friends, everyone has denim … everyone has clothes that they’re not wearing,” Janny said. “If people got inspired by us and said, ‘Oh, we want to do that,’, you can. You have friends; they have clothes; you can do this!”
The next Friends with Denim sale will be held Aug. 22, 4-8 p.m. at Peacebank Yoga, 2603 Broadway, Redwood City. Instagram: @friendswithdenim. More information on 2nd Life Jeans is available at instagram.com/2ndlifejeans.
