Nudie Jeans supports its sustainable denim with greener IT

Nudie Jeans relies on Citrix in the cloud for secure, sustainable IT with global reach

Nudie Jeans is an internationally acclaimed brand specializing in sustainably sourced and produced denim. The company takes pride in its socially and environmentally responsible production process and operations. Dedicated to a “wear, tear and repair mindset”, rather than fast fashion, it operates repair and re-use centers for its jeans.

Nudie Jeans’ move to cloud computing started when it opened direct operations in America.

“We didn’t realize how much the distance would cause latency issues for users in the U.S.,” says IT Coordinator Martin Sandklef. “Performance was just too poor, and productivity suffered. Our new employees couldn’t work effectively on our corporate systems.

The company partnered with Citrix Gold Solution Advisor Xenit to design a new IT infrastructure to provide all employees, wherever they are, with access to the apps and information they require while also supporting Nudie Jeans’ sustainability goals.

Using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and Microsoft Azure, Xenit centralized Nudie’s apps and data to give employees secure, real-time access to company resources regardless of device. Xenit mirrored Nudie’s important on-premises database in Gothenburg with the Azure installation to ensure performance. The solution used Citrix ADC to secure the delivery of apps, desktops, and shared documents using granular, role-based policies based on users’ Active Directory profiles.

Providing secure access to central systems with no performance issues

Nudie’s U.S. employees now use the same tools and systems as the firm’s other employees around the world with no performance issues when accessing corporate resources.

The new virtual desktop benefits employees everywhere, making mobile and flexible working a practical reality, as Nudie Jeans’ IT and Systems Manager Sandra Hansson says,

“Citrix has created the opportunity for our office staff to easily work remotely but still have access to all the tools and systems they need. This means that we can reduce the number of trips. Now we can easily work and hold meetings anywhere and only travel when we really need to.”

The solution also ensues business continuity, as Nudie Jeans discovered during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Having Citrix made it easy for our 80 employees from headquarters to work from home,” Hansson says. “People could access their work using either a personal device or their work computer.”

Citrix benefits the IT team, too.

“We have no IT department at our regional offices,” Sandklef says. “With the Citrix desktop, it’s really easy to support our user environment, Employees can have whatever device they choose – a personal laptop or MacBook, a tablet device, or a corporate laptop. We support the virtualized apps from Sweden, and if users have hardware problems, we just ask them to get it fixed locally.”

Citrix and Azure provide a sustainable solution

Sustainability is at the core of Nudie Jeans’ ethos. It plans to be carbon neutral for its offices, repair shops and cars in 2020, extending that to all of its operations and those of its main suppliers in 2021. By 2025, Nudie Jeans wants to be carbon neutral across its entire supply chain.

Moving to the cloud with Citrix and Microsoft has given Nudie Jeans a more sustainable IT platform that contributes to its environmental goals in four ways:

• Longer life – Using Citrix extends the life of existing endpoint devices.
• Low-energy devices – When PCs are eventually replaced, Nudie Jeans replaces them with lower cost, low-energy devices.
• Reduced travel – With employees able to work as effectively from home as in the office, Nudie Jeans has reduced commuting-related carbon costs. It also reduces business travel with video-meetings and a lower requirement for IT-related travel.
• Azure datacenters – moving to cloud means Nudie Jeans switches to Microsoft’s environmentally-friendly datacenters. Microsoft aims to use 100% renewable energy by 2025.

“We work with partners who share our core values and who have a strong sustainability strategy,” Hansson says. “Using Citrix contributes to sustainability. Equipment has a longer life because we do not have to look at the performance so much. All of the processing happens on the Citrix servers. The fact that equipment has the longest possible life is an important part of our sustainability work.”

Creating an easily scaled, easily managed service for users across continents

Deploying Citrix has given Nudie a desktop service that balances an excellent user experience with cost-effective, sustainable IT management. The firm has avoided the cost of deploying and managing physical servers in the U.S. and Sandklef manages everything from Sweden.

As Tony Berholt, senior consultant at Xenit, explains, “It was much easier and cheaper to replicate Nudie Jeans’ structure in the cloud than to try and deploy local servers in the U.S. With Citrix, it’s very easy to provision an environment on Azure. We couldn’t achieve the same results with other virtual desktop solutions. Management is easier, too; we can conveniently control everything from Sweden.”

Nudie Jeans’ Citrix on Azure solution is easily scalable. If the firm decides to take over other distributor operations, or as its U.S. operations grow, the infrastructure can be scaled up or replicated to create additional regional hubs.

In fact, the solution has proved so successful that Nudie Jeans will shortly move all of its IT operations to Azure and Citrix Cloud service.