Roy Slaper, the Oakland craftsman behind Roy Denim, has died at 54. “I cannot think of a person with more universal acclaim in our raw denim and heritage niche than Roy,” Heddels managing editor David Shuck wrote in a tribute confirming Slaper’s passing earlier this month. His cause of death has not been publicly released.
Slaper started making jeans in 2007 with no formal training. In a 2025 interview with GQ about his history, Slaper looked back on those early days: “I didn’t know anything about anything, I just started buying sewing machines and making jeans.” He was working a day job in a metal shop at the time, sewing at night and on weekends.
Self Edge, the influential San Francisco denim retailer, was the first shop to carry Roy Denim. In a tribute on SFGate published this past weekend, Self Edge founder Kiya Babzani rememebrs how quickly Slaper’s skills developed: “Within a year, he was making the best looking jeans I’d ever seen in my life that were made by a single person. Like nobody had made jeans like this.” Babzani also notes that demand quickly outgrew what Slaper could produce—releases would sell out within 30 minutes, with lines forming outside the store and customers sometimes offering $1,000 to reserve a pair. Shops in Japan sought out his work as well.
For roughly a decade, Slaper ran the entire operation himself out of an Oakland workshop, serving as machinist, designer, sewer, and graphic artist for every piece that went out under the Roy Denim name. He explained the choice to Sourcing Journal, saying he’d watched other small denim brands buckle under their own hype: “You see them fall flat on their face because they try to scale up, and they lose the whole essence of what they had in the first place. My whole approach to the thing is just to go ahead and be myself and do my thing and hope that it resonates with someone.”
Slaper retired in 2021 and sold off his machines, though he stayed connected to the craft — helping a friend set up a solo denim atelier in Montana and spending three months at a dye studio in Tokushima, Japan, in 2023. As Slaper said in an interview with GQ months before his death, quality was always the point: “If there was one thing I would want Roy to be remembered for, it’s quality — that was the hallmark of the whole thing.”
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