April 20, 2023 09:04 AM Eastern Daylight Time
Today, Coach launches Coachtopia, a new sub-brand focused on circular craft and collaborative creativity, catalyzing the brand’s progress towards a fully circular business model. Launching in the United States, Canada and the UK, Coachtopia will expand to Asia later this year. With a mission to help advance a circular fashion system, Coachtopia is built from the outset for circularity, grounded in its Made Circular™ design philosophy—a set of three principles that inform how the sub-brand designs, crafts, and reuses products. Harnessing more than 80 years of Coach leather expertise, Coachtopia reimagines the product lifecycle from end to beginning— reducing the creation of new materials by crafting with waste and designing products that can be reimagined, remade and recycled to live multiple lives. In so doing, it is working to create beautiful things that have a significantly reduced impact on the planet compared to conventional 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,” says 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.”
Designed for and with a new generation of consumers who are increasingly passionate about addressing the climate crisis and determined to drive change, Coachtopia is resetting the paradigm between brand and consumer, co-creating a new brand in collaboration with a growing community of Gen Z individuals—from climate activists, designers and upcyclers to journalists, film makers, entrepreneurs and fashion enthusiasts. The Coachtopian community has been actively involved in Coachtopia since its earliest founding days, with members continually sharing their perspectives on circular fashion, shaping concepts, and setting expectations of the change they want to see. As part of its mission, Coachtopia is investing in this next generation of talent through collaborative programs, harnessing and showcasing new talent to find solutions to the problems facing fashion.
“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.”
Coachtopia is a world in progress—advancing iteratively towards a continually evolving vision of circularity. It 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 program. 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. Coachtopia takes up this challenge, innovating through rapid prototyping and forming a continuous feedback loop with Coach to drive mutual progress.
Coachtopia launches today with an all-gender collection of bags, accessories, ready-to-wear and footwear made with recycled, repurposed and renewable materials and designed with our Made Circular™ principles in mind. As Coachtopia grows, it will continue to innovate through limited drops of experimental products that push circular craft ever further—with a commitment to take back every product at end-of-life for reuse, remaking or recycling. Each bag, wallet, footwear and ready-to-wear 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. This digital passport also provides the means to follow the product’s journey as it is repaired, restored, reused and reimagined over multiple lives.
Coachtopia is available today on Coach.com in the US, Canada and UK and in Selfridges, London. Coachtopia will then launch in Spitalfields, London on April 28; Coach stores across the US including Coach House Fifth Avenue, New York; N. Michigan Avenue, Chicago; The Grove, Los Angeles; and Dadeland, Miami; and additional Selfridges stores across the UK in May; Coach House Regent Street, London in early June; and Coach Soho, New York in July. Coachtopia will also expand to Asia later this year.
That’s just the short version. Take a full tour of Coachtopia, including details on its Made Circular™ principles, material innovations, strategic partnerships and launch campaign below. Learn more about Coachtopia at coachtopia.com. Connect on social @coachtopia.
