Beauty, performance and sustainability: can clothing firm Nau redesign retail?
Can making a buck be compatible with fighting environmental meltdown? With his outdoor clothing manufacturer Nau, entrepreneur Eric Reynolds is aiming to prove that it can be.
Founded in 2005, the Portland, Oregon firm is on a mission to ‘Do well by doing good’ – and to redefine the parameters for succeeding in business.
That has meant designing Nau’s modus operandi from scratch. “We started with a clean whiteboard,” says chief executive Chris van Dyke. “Every operation in our business was an opportunity to turn traditional business notions inside out, integrating environmental, social and economic factors. We’re challenging the nature of capitalism.”
That change starts with the products themselves. Combining beauty, performance and sustainability is the design mantra. All its cotton is organic, because normal cotton is today’s most pesticide- and herbicide-laden crop. Nau has developed 35 new synthetic textiles, using both recycled polyesters as well as PLA (polylactic acid) – a polymer made from corn starch. But instead of patenting these new fabrics, Nau has made them open source. As Ian Yolles, vice president of marketing, explains: “Part of our aspiration is to be a catalyst for positive change. It would be antithetical to hold on to innovations that had the potential to benefit the broader collective.”
This spring, Nau opened four flagship stores in Oregon, Illinois, Colorado and Washington. Shoppers may not notice the biopolymers or organic cotton at first glance – but they will notice that shopping at Nau is a radically different experience.
E-commerce and traditional stores co-exist on parallel tracks. Nobody has really connected the dots Ian Yolles, Nau
Nau shops are styled ‘webfronts’, and aim to marry sustainable business goals with ambitious brand building. Crafted from recycled materials, each webfront sports rails of clothes to be viewed as in a regular store. The difference is in the purchasing. Although there are traditionally staffed sales tills, shoppers can also buy through self-service touchscreens which work like a web store, with customers incentivised to have purchases shipped to their home from a central distribution centre. The customer benefits wih a 10% discount while the company reduces operating overheads and in-store inventory, which means smaller stores – almost half the size of their competitors’ – using less energy and materials.
For Yolles, Nau’s innovative stores make perfect sense: “When e-commerce first emerged, there was hype about how it would alter traditional shopping. But 10 years later, consumers have changed their behaviour. They often start their shopping online by researching products. Then they go into a store to try on the product and make sure they look good in it. Often they turn around, go home and get online to find the product for the least cost. So consumers are changing, but what about retailers? E-commerce and traditional stores co-exist on parallel tracks. Nobody has really connected the dots – that’s where the webfronts come in.”
The feedback so far has exceeded Nau’s wildest expectations. “We assumed that 20% of customers would choose the shipping option, growing to 30% by the end of our first year,” says Yolles. “What we’ve seen in our first five months of operation is that 50% of our customers are choosing to have their product shipped to them. That’s encouraging.”
The Nau shopping experience includes a further twist: when paying, customers choose a charity to which to donate 5% of their spend – the average given to charity by business is just 0.47%.
“We wanted to give people a moment to stop and think and tell us what they really care about,” says Jil Zilligen, vice president of sustainability. In-store screens showing documentaries about Nau’s chosen ‘Partners for Change’ help shoppers decide. “We hope customers will think about some bigger questions,” says Zilligen. “What impact do our purchasing decisions have on the wider world? What’s the role of a company in society?”
What indeed? Nau has moved the goalposts so far that quantifying future success may be a tricky task, but Yolles believes that both social and economic targets can be achieved: “By 2010 we hope to have about 140 stores and revenues approaching $250m,” he says. “In the end, our credibility will be negligible if we can’t demonstrate that we have a viable and profitable business. But businesses have a much broader responsibility to the community than simply the singular, rabid pursuit of profit at the expense of everything else.”
Article first published in Design Council Magazine, Issue 3, Winter 2007