INSIGHTS
- US-based fashion company Coach has launched a new sub-brand called Coachtopia that focuses on circular craft and collaborative creativity.
- The new sub-brand aims to move towards a fully circular business model with an all-gender collection of bags, accessories, ready-to-wear and footwear made with recycled, repurposed, and renewable materials.
Coachtopia is built from the outset for circularity, grounded in its Made Circular design philosophy. This philosophy includes a set of three principles that inform how the sub-brand designs, crafts, and reuses products, Coach said in a press release.
The company has launched Coachtopia with an all-gender collection of bags, accessories, ready-to-wear, and footwear made with recycled, repurposed, and renewable materials and designed with the Made Circular principles in mind.
Each product from Coachtopia comes with a unique digital passport, accessed via an embedded NFC chip, that gives customers transparency into its materials, Made Circular design, and impacts. This digital passport also provides the means to follow the product’s journey as it is repaired, restored, reused, and reimagined over multiple lives.
Furthermore, Coachtopia builds upon the investments that Coach is making to improve the end-to-end sustainability of its business, as well as the learnings and capabilities developed through the brand’s Coach (Re)Loved programme. By giving a second life to more than 20,000 Coach products since its April 2021 launch, Coach (Re)Loved has provided critical insights into the aspects of traditional luxury craftsmanship that make circularity challenging, and thus the need to design for circularity from the start in order to achieve it at scale.
The leather linings of Coachtopia bags are made with at least 50 per cent recycled leather scraps. The thread used to stitch them is 100 per cent recycled polyester. The plastic hardware in bags and small accessories is made from at least 70 per cent recycled resin. Furthermore, the ready-to-wear is crafted in 95 per cent recycled cotton or repurposed denim deadstock. Even the labels inside each product are 100 per cent recycled polyester or nylon.
Moreover, Coachtopia is being built as a community in which a new generation of fashion enthusiasts, creatives, entrepreneurs, activists, and more are invited to participate through collaborative discussions, projects and opportunities. It’s a platform for change in which emerging gen Z voices help create the future they want to see, the release added.
“Circularity is about reimagining not just the product lifecycle, but the relationship between brand, planet and consumer. That’s why we’ve created Coachtopia as both a discovery lab to pioneer circularity in fashion and a collaborative platform for change,” said Joon Silverstein, SVP, global marketing, creative and sustainability at Coach, and head of Coachtopia.
“We were inspired by our shared desire to do better for the planet by inventing new circular ways of dreaming, designing and creating,” said Coach creative director Stuart Vevers. “It’s a bigger, bolder step forward in realising our vision for sustainability at Coach, where we prioritise experimenting and learning, and ethical design intentions over cookie cutter perfection. Coachtopia takes this to a new level by challenging us to ‘design in reverse,’ with the end goal of circularity top of mind, in collaboration with the next generation and their optimistic vision for tomorrow.”
