Why ‘performance jeanswear’ brand Duer is sponsoring Canada’s coach for the World Cup

When brands ink deals with spokespeople, what they surely don’t want to happen is what occurred after Chinese smartphone maker Huawei hired Wonder Woman actress Gail Godot in 2018. Godot shared a Huawei commercial she starred in on Twitter (now X) that included a stamp revealing it was sent “via Twitter for iPhone.” Although Godot subsequently deleted the tweet, explained it was sent from a publicity assistant’s iPhone, and subsequently sent more tweets from her Huawei device, the eggy-faced PR damage was done.

One brand that seems likely to avoid such a mishap is Duer, the Vancouver-based self-described “performance jeanswear” brand, which has hired Jesse Marsch, head coach of the Canadian men’s national soccer team, as a brand ambassador for the duration of the World Cup.

“I have very specific things that I like about clothes, and one of them is comfortability,” Marsch told Retail Brew. “The pants and the jeans for me are my favorite that I’ve ever worn.”

Marsch described himself as “not a big shopper,” but, “if I’m ever in any of the cities where [Duer has] stores, I’m like, ‘Hey, tell them I’m gonna stop by.’”

Marsch models Duer on the brand’s website, social media accounts, and in imagery in its stores.

“It’s about the freedom to move,” Marsch says on the Duer website where he’s photographed wearing the brand on and off the pitch. “Whatever the day throws at you, you are ready for it.”

The seat of their pants: Gary Lenett, who co-founded Duer in 2014, has spent decades in the denim business, including a 15-year stint ending as president of Pimlico Apparel, a denim manufacturer that supplied retail brands, and six years as president of the Dish Jeans brand.

The insight that led Lenett to launch Duer was that he was frequently riding his bike to meetings and finding that his favorite fabric—denim—was too binding, but that he didn’t want to arrive in bike shorts or gym clothes.

“If I had an important meeting and I still wanted to ride my bike, I couldn’t find anything I could wear that was regular jeanswear clothing, because it didn’t have any performance properties,” Lenett told Retail Brew. “It just didn’t work for me; it was too rigid.”

But Lenett, who spent most of his working life in denim, was in no rush to pull on elastic-waisted exercise clothing, either.

“The athleisure thing never worked for me,” he said.

Like countless brands, Duer adds a bit of Lycra to its cotton pants to make them more forgiving, but it also uses as much as 30% of lyocell, a plant-derived material with moisture management properties. There’s also a structural difference to many of its pants, namely a gusset. Instead of the crotch being structured like a four-way street, the gusset makes it more like a roundabout (or “rotary” as the native New Englanders among us call them) that enables more range of movement.

Unlike all-polyester tech pants that have the silhouette of chinos but whose pockets can sag when burdened with a phone, Lenett emphasized that Duer’s materials are woven, not knit.

“They retain their shape, and they look like real denim and other fabrics that you would expect” and “surprise and delight” users when they first try them on, Lenett said.

Flywheel of fortune: Along with wholesale distribution in more than 1,000 stores worldwide, Duer owns a dozen stores, eight in Canada and four in the US, with plans to grow that number to 20 by the end of the year and to 40 within three years.

While some brands hesitate to open their own stores near retail partners, lest the retailers complain they’re cannibalizing, Lennet says the exact opposite has happened with Duer: Its flagships have what he calls a “flywheel effect.”

When a Duer store opens, the company sees “a 30% lift not just in e-commerce, but in our wholesale partners,” Lenett said.

The reason the channels compliment one another, he said, is the brand-owned stores build “brand awareness” so customers in other retail stores recognize and seek it.

When a flagship opens near a retailer that carries the brand, meanwhile, its draw is variety.

“A wholesale customer is going to cherry pick…maybe 10 styles at the very most,” Lenett said. “We’ve got hundreds of styles, so our stores allow us, after they get a taste of the product, to showcase the whole brand in its multitudes.”