Cheap Monday

For their era and price, they earned a loyal following. Cheap Monday made its name on affordable skinny jeans tied to 2000s youth culture, offering a high-street price-to-style ratio that made the look accessible. If you're after the indie-era skinny silhouette without a premium-denim outlay, that's exactly the niche the brand carved out.

Its owner pulled the plug. In November 2018, H&M announced it would close the Cheap Monday brand due to poor sales, with the wind-down completed in June 2019. The decision reflected H&M choosing to focus on its core business rather than any change in the clothes themselves.

Yes. In April 2024, H&M Group announced the brand would be relaunched, sold through their Weekday retail stores. So after the 2019 closure, Cheap Monday returns under the H&M umbrella rather than as a standalone chain.

Skinny jeans, above all. Cheap Monday is the Swedish label known for its skinny jeans and its association with 2000s youth culture. It later broadened out into sneakers, flannel, and shirts, but the slim denim is what defined it.

It's a Swedish clothing label, founded in 2004 by Örjan Andersson and Adam Friberg. It started life as a second-hand store called Weekend in a Stockholm suburb before the founders began selling their own designs.

The name traces back to the original store's opening hours. Cheap Monday began as the second-hand shop Weekend, which was only open on Sundays, and the brand name derived from that detail. It's a quirky origin for what became one of the defining denim names of the 2000s.

Its collections were distributed worldwide through stores like Urban Outfitters and Barneys New York, plus online retailers such as The Iconic, SurfStitch, and ASOS. Beyond franchise locations, the label ran four standalone stores in London, Paris, Beijing, and Shenyang, with pop-ups in Stockholm, Utrecht, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong.

On March 6, 2008, H&M announced it would acquire Fabric Scandinavien AB, the company behind Cheap Monday and the Weekday store. H&M bought 60 percent of Fabric Scandinavien for 564 million Swedish kronor from the founders, with an option to acquire the remaining shares within three to five years.

Yes, and it's a fun one. Synth maker Teenage Engineering approached then-Cheap Monday designer Ann-Sofie Back to create an affordable synthesizer. That partnership produced the Pocket Operator series, which debuted at the 2015 NAMM Trade Show and has since sold around a million units.

It's closely tied to the era's indie aesthetic. The brand is explicitly known for its skinny jeans and its association with 2000s youth culture, expanding from denim into sneakers, flannel, and shirts as it grew. That cultural moment is a big part of why the name still carries nostalgia ahead of its relaunch.