Perspective is not something you can fake. It’s earned, and usually the hard way.
“Most people selling design or consulting have only ever done one piece of the job. I have raised the money, signed the lease, recruited the talent, met the payroll, found the factories, sketched the product, approved the lab dips, developed the washes, and even built the store it’s sold in.”
Scott Morrison
Founder, owner, operator, chief executive and creative director. Thirty years in premium and designer apparel.
About
Scott Morrison has spent thirty years building premium apparel brands from nothing more than an idea, and then running them. He founded Paper Denim & Cloth in 1999 (at twenty-six), Earnest Sewn in 2004, 3x1 Denim in 2011, and RADMOR in 2020. In 2009 he was brought in to lead Evisu, the global Japanese brand, as its first American CEO and Creative Director.
He grew up in Palm Springs, played Division I golf at the University of Washington, interned in fashion during his college summers, and wrote his first business plan, as a junior in college, to start a golf brand. After school he focused on denim and started his denim education by traveling to mills, factories and laundries.
Within eighteen months of launching Paper Denim & Cloth he was well on his way to creating a new category of denim, the one now called “premium denim,” and he took that brand from $0 to $40 million in four years. With Earnest Sewn he reintroduced America to American heritage mingled with Japanese culture. Then he built a working factory inside a SoHo store, behind glass walls so everyone could see the process, and made jeans to measure there for some of the biggest athletes, celebrities and success stories in the world.
His work has never stopped. At 3x1, he collaborated with Nike on a series of selvedge denim Air Force 1s. Across his companies, he led a team of creatives in designing every store, showroom, and atelier, giving the spaces the same attention as the product. Building a brand meant thinking through all of it: what you make, where you sell it, and how people experience it.
Most recently he’s been focused on changing the golf industry and leading it to a more sustainable future, which brings that first business plan from college full circle, and fully realized.
Today he still works on RADMOR and consults wherever he’s needed, and calls Seattle and New York home. Most of his time goes to his consulting practice, Ten-Hut Denim, working with brands large and small. He also takes board and advisory seats.
The complete picture
I am not just a design consultant.
A design consultant typically hands you a collection and leaves. The questions that decide whether a brand lives start the day after that: what it costs to land, who will actually sew it, what the mill's minimums do to your cash, what it does to margin at the price you need to hit, and whether anyone will pay that for it.
I have answered those questions as the person on the hook for them. Four brands founded with my own name on the risk, one global brand led as CEO, and every one of them carrying a P&L and creative direction I owned rather than advised on.
That means I have sat in every chair at the table: the founder who started it, the owner who funded it, the operator who ran it, the chief executive who answered for it, and the creative director and designer who had the vision in the first place. Those are usually five different people, and most of what goes wrong in any business is what happens in the gaps between them.
I work in those gaps. It is the reason a sourcing decision and a brand decision are the same conversation with me, and why a creative direction I give you is one I already know can be made, costed, shipped and sold.
So when I look at a brand, I am not looking at a mood board. I am looking at the customer, the mill, the factory, the margin, the calendar, and at whether the thing on the hanger is worth what you’re asking for it and whether it will make a difference.
Founder
Four brands started from scratch: Paper Denim & Cloth, Earnest Sewn, 3x1 and RADMOR.
Owner
Carried the risk and the equity. Raised the capital, deployed it, and lived with every call made after.
Operator
P&L, payroll, inventory, wholesale, DTC and retail. Paper Denim ran from $0 to $40M in four years on a lean team while creating a new category: premium denim.
CEO
Led Evisu across Asia, Europe and America through a massive rebrand and reorganization, all with the discipline to advocate for exiting the United States and focusing on Asia. Tough pill to swallow but a necessary one.
Creative Director
Designed or directed the design of, every product, store, showroom and atelier at every brand I owned or worked for.
How I work
Ten-Hut Denim is my consulting practice. Most of the time I work alongside the team a company already has, bringing what I’ve learned from building brands and running a business. My job is to make that team better: clearer direction, better decisions, and a higher standard for the work which leads to better outcomes.
Your designers still design. Your developers still develop. I help set the direction, push the work, and bring the experience, people, and relationships that can help us get there.
Building teams and identifying talent has always been one of the most rewarding parts of what I do. Matthew M. Williams, Catherine Holstein, Brendon Babenzien, and Benjamin Talley Smith all came through my teams before going on to build or lead incredible businesses of their own.
I’ve also gotten plenty wrong over the years. Every company I’ve built has had failures, and I don’t think you can build anything worthwhile without taking risks along the way. Sometimes things won’t work the way you dreamt them up, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. I tried introducing selvedge denim at Paper Denim & Cloth, and again at Earnest Sewn. It didn’t take either time. By the time I started 3x1, I understood a lot more about what it would take to make it work, and it finally did.
I take on a small number of engagements each year. Not to be pretentious, but because I only have a certain amount of bandwidth, and winning is important to me. I approach each engagement the same way I would my own business, with the same care for the decisions and responsibility for what comes next. Most span more than one of the four areas below, and last for a minimum of six months because that’s how the work actually happens.
Brand & Creative Direction
Giving the team a point of view to design against.
- Brand positioning & identity
- Creative direction your designers work to
- Collection architecture & seasonal intent
- Editing the line: what stays, what goes
- Trend, color & wash direction
- Reviewing the work and raising the standard
- Retail, showroom & atelier concepts
- Campaign & lookbook direction
Product & Development
Better product, through the people already making it.
- Fit, construction & finish reviews with your team
- Line planning & assortment strategy
- Fabric, wash & finish direction
- Raising the bar on prototypes & approvals
- Tightening the development calendar
- Teaching designers what to look for in denim
- Mentoring & building the design team
- Evaluating & hiring design talent
Sourcing & Production
Opening the doors, then helping your team work the relationship.
- Mills, laundries and factories in Japan, Italy, Turkey, China, Vietnam, Peru and the United States
- Assessing current vendors & where they fall short
- Domestic & international sourcing strategy
- Sustainable fiber & process direction
- Costing & margin strategy
- Negotiating terms & minimums
- Quality standards your team can hold suppliers to
Operating & Growth
Where the brand meets the business.
- Wholesale, DTC & retail strategy
- Go to market & launch planning
- Key accounts & sales leadership
- Store & showroom rollout
- Collaborations & brand partnerships
- Org design, staffing & hiring
- Board & advisory seats
In film wardrobe, Paper Denim & Cloth on Charlize Theron in The Italian Job, and in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, both 2003.
“Largely credited with introducing luxury denim to the U.S.” Forbes
“Morrison can explain the properties of indigo in, literally, microscopic detail.” Fortune
“To create one cult denim brand might be considered good fortune, to repeat the trick, as Earnest Sewn’s Scott Morrison has done, is surely jeans genius.” The Independent
“I was immediately struck by his honest craftsmanship.” Jack Dorsey, in the Financial Times
“Scott is a legend in our industry having started not one, not two but three successful brands.” Andrew Olah, founder of Kingpins
“One of the earliest and most successful high-end denim pioneers.” Surface
“The man behind nearly every denim brand we’ve ever loved.” Coveteur
Featured in Vogue, GQ, Italian Vogue, Elle, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, W, Forbes, Fortune, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, Surface, Safari, Nylon, Paper, Business of Fashion and WWD, to name a few. Also named People magazine’s Sexiest Businessman (2002).
On camera, ABC, NBC, CNN and MSNBC, the Martha Stewart show discussing fashion trends, and GQ’s Fine Points breaking down the denim of Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, Pharrell Williams and Virgil Abloh.
In print, profiled in Bluemasters, ISKO’s book on the people who make denim, alongside Renzo Rosso of Diesel, Vivienne Westwood, Adriano Goldschmied and François Girbaud.
Common Thread, a documentary series on where denim goes next, produced with 3x1 and Convicts. Scott hosted the 2019 pilot, filmed across Italy with Renzo Rosso of Diesel, the Candiani mill and the finishing house Tonello. It premiered in Brooklyn in July 2019.
“The goal of this series is not to tell an entirely 3x1 story.” Scott Morrison, Cool HuntingThe Denim & Boots Podcast, Denim Hunters, on denim’s roots and future (2019) · Blue Cast, Lenzing, on the move from denim to sustainable golf apparel (2021) · Denim Talks, Kingpins, with Andrew Olah on the making of Common Thread (2024)
Richemont Annual Group Conference, Geneva · Microsoft Envision, New Orleans · Fashion Institute of Technology, New York City · SCADstyle, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah
Plus trade and sourcing shows across the decades, among them Bread & Butter Berlin, Liberty Trade Fair, Collective and The Coterie.Helmut Lang, brand consulting ahead of the Evisu role (2009) · AYR, alongside the founders through a funding round (2018) · NYDJ, Board of Directors through the sale of the business to Sunrise Brands (2019) · American Rec, the creation of a cannabis brand for a Boston company (2019)
Contact
Consulting
Ten-Hut Denim LLC. Brand and creative direction, product, sourcing and operating work for companies building or rebuilding a premium product business.
Start a projectBoard, advisory and leadership
Board and advisory seats, senior brand and creative leadership, and conversations with investors who care how things are made.
Start a conversationinfo@tenhut.us Where Seattle · New York City Elsewhere Wikipedia · LinkedIn