Digitally Printed Jeans Could Mean Big Water Savings for Denim Industry

They look and feel just like regular denim, but these jeans have a secret. They were made on a digital printer.

“This is the future. This is the digital which world which everybody is talking about,” says Dhruv Agarwal, Kontoor’s VP of Sustainability, Innovation and Development.

Not only do the digitally printed jeans look cool, they save lots of water— upwards of 2,000 gallons of water used to dye and wash a conventional pair of jeans.

“If we are looking at the future, we want to go to almost zero liters of water in making of our jeans,” says Agarwal.

This revolutionary technology, which received an honorable mention from Fast Company’s Innovation Design Awards in 2022, is helping Kontoor stride towards its ESG goal of saving a cumulative 10 billion liters of fresh water by 2025.