Daily CSR
Daily CSR

Daily CSR
Daily news about corporate social responsibility, ethics and sustainability

Coach Launches Coachtopia - a Circular Fashion Sub-Brand with a Commitment to Sustainability



04/24/2023


Coach Launches Coachtopia Sub-Brand to Advance Circular Fashion System
 
Today, Coach announced the launch of its new sub-brand, Coachtopia, which focuses on circular craft and collaborative creativity, accelerating the brand's journey towards a fully circular business model. Initially available in the United States, Canada, and the UK, Coachtopia will expand to Asia later this year.
 
Coachtopia's mission is to promote a circular fashion system, and it is founded on circularity principles with its Made Circular™ design philosophy - a set of three guiding principles that shape how the sub-brand designs, crafts, and reuses products. Drawing from over 80 years of leather expertise, Coachtopia reimagines the product lifecycle from end to beginning by reducing the creation of new materials through crafting with waste and designing products that can be repurposed and recycled.
 
By doing so, Coachtopia is committed to producing aesthetically pleasing items that have a significantly lower impact on the environment compared to traditional luxury products.

“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 know that to transform our impacts, we need to fundamentally shift mindsets—from seeing opportunity in waste to designing backwards to taking a more open-source approach to creativity. We’ve built Coachtopia as an entirely new world within Coach—an agile start-up with a mission to reimagine the end-to-end system. We’re building it not just for our consumers, but with them, inviting a growing community of hundreds of Gen Z individuals to join us on our Slack channel, collaborate with us on products, take center stage in our content and campaigns—and reimagine our future together.”

Coachtopia, the latest sub-brand launched by Coach, is designed to cater to a new generation of consumers who are passionate about addressing the climate crisis and committed to driving change. By working collaboratively with a growing community of Gen Z individuals, Coachtopia is resetting the paradigm between brand and consumer, co-creating a new brand that places a strong emphasis on circularity.

The Coachtopian community has been actively involved in the brand since its earliest founding days, continually sharing their perspectives on circular fashion, shaping concepts, and setting expectations for change. Coachtopia's mission includes investing in this next generation of talent through collaborative programs, harnessing and showcasing new talent to find solutions to the problems facing the fashion industry.

“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 realizing our vision for sustainability at Coach, where we prioritize 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.” 

Coach launches its new sub-brand, Coachtopia, as a vital component in achieving its vision of becoming a fully circular business model. The new brand focuses on circular craft and collaborative creativity and is designed to help advance a circular fashion system. Coachtopia is built from the outset for circularity, with its Made Circular™ design philosophy—a set of three principles that inform how the sub-brand designs, crafts, and reuses products. Coach's leather expertise, spanning over 80 years, is harnessed to reimagine the product lifecycle from end to beginning by crafting with waste, reducing the creation of new materials, and designing products that can be reimagined, remade, and recycled.

The Coachtopia community, made up of Gen Z individuals, climate activists, designers, upcyclers, and fashion enthusiasts, continually share their perspectives on circular fashion, shaping concepts and setting expectations of the change they want to see. Coachtopia also invests in the next generation of talent through collaborative programs, harnessing and showcasing new talent to find solutions to the problems facing fashion.
 
Coachtopia launches today with an all-gender collection of bags, accessories, ready-to-wear, and footwear made with recycled, repurposed, and renewable materials, designed with the Made Circular™ principles in mind. As the brand grows, it will continue to innovate through limited drops of experimental products, pushing circular craft further—with a commitment to take back every product at end-of-life for reuse, remaking or recycling.

Each product also comes with a unique digital passport, accessed via an embedded NFC chip, that gives customers transparency into its materials, Made Circular™ design, and impacts, providing the means to follow the product’s journey as it is repaired, restored, reused, and reimagined over multiple lives. Coachtopia is now available on Coach.com in the US, Canada, and UK, and in Selfridges, London. Coachtopia will then launch in Spitalfields, London on April 28 and will expand to Asia later this year.