With The Launch Of Coachtopia, Coach Commits To A Future Of Circularity And Sustainability

For a few seasons now, Stuart Vevers has been using the Coach runways to experiment with more sustainable design. Recent collections have included leather jackets and skirts made with odd-shaped pieces of scrap leather; Aran sweaters put together from other knits and visibly mended with bright colourful thread; embroidered jeans constructed out of recycled denim; and even sneakers cobbled from “a little worse for the wear” 1970s Coach bags.

The process has long been of interest for the designer, but it’s one that until recently, he didn’t feel was his to take on. “I saw it as the responsibility of the production teams to make better choices in the background,” he said during a conversation at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas late last year. It was becoming a father that got him thinking about ways that he could actually make an impact. “This is sometimes an intimidating area because you do one initiative that’s positive and [people] are quick to point out the things you’re doing that aren’t,” he said. “But I truly believe we have to face this. We have to put ourselves out there because every small step forward counts.”

With the launch of Coachtopia, a Coach sub-brand whose bags, shoes, small leather goods, and ready-to-wear are designed and constructed to be circular – the pieces are produced with little-to-no new materials and built so they can be easily repaired or recycled later on in life – Vevers and Coach are now officially out there.

“Everything we create is going to be our responsibility at some point, and we’re trying to find creative and inspiring ways to keep those pieces working in the world,” Vevers recalled during the panel at Crystal Bridges. “Our most significant discovery,” he added in an email, “was that we had to learn to ‘design in reverse,’ with circularity in mind from the start, rather than starting with the design and sourcing the materials to match.”

The Wavy Dinky, one of Coachtopia’s inaugural designs, features core design elements that ensure it can have a long life in the real world. Take the bag’s binding, or contrasting trim, which is generally one of the things that first shows wear and tear. Here, it’s easily removable without having to take the entire bag apart (bindings are usually sandwiched between layers of leather or other material). The handle, another piece susceptible to age, has been made from 70 per cent recycled resin and is detachable, which also allows for possible customisation and personalisation.

“Coachtopia was inspired by learnings from our Coach (Re)Loved program and circular designs for our Runway,” Vevers explained in an email. (Re)Loved launched in 2021 and allows customers to bring in their old Coach bags – in whatever state they’re in – to be repaired or exchanged for a new one. Older bags from the 1970s and 1980s tend to be harder to repair since the trend at the time involved hiding construction elements, which also often involved glue. These styles that aren’t fixable are instead taken apart and their materials repurposed into new pieces, like the aforementioned sneakers. (Every item bearing the Coachtopia label will be equipped with an NFC chip that will allow it to be tracked as it is “repaired, restored, and reused,” no doubt feeding useful information about consumer behaviour to the company in the process.)

Working towards a zero-waste future means that using smallish scraps to make patchworked clothes and accessories, à la the checkerboard Wavy Dinky, cannot be the only way forward. Solving for this issue led to one of Coachtopia’s most exciting technical developments: a process in which the inevitable detritus of bag making – the thin straps of leather that are the result of trimming or shaping something to size (the scraps of the scraps) – are “pressed” together to create a new material. The Jackson Pollock-like result is used to create colourful, one-of-a-kind handbags.

The whole Coachtopia project has a “distinctly Gen Z-feel,” and that’s by design. With Vevers often mentioning how inspiring he finds today’s younger generations, an in-house focus group of Gen Z individuals was assembled to give feedback at various steps during the design, creative, and marketing processes. Christened the “Coachtopia Beta Community,” they influenced everything from the exposed hardware on the bags to the illustrations featured in the ready-to-wear drop. Sabrina Lau, a 25-year old graphic designer and Coachtopia Beta Community member, is responsible for the graffiti-inspired illustrations bearing childlike images of rainbows, clouds, and stars that adorn a collection of 95 per cent+ recycled cotton baby tees and 100 per cent recycled polyester canvas totes, among other things. “To be able to contribute to the launch of a special brand like Coachtopia is even crazy to think about,” she explained via email. “I just feel incredibly grateful to be a part of it all; seeing my art on the clothes and bags has definitely been one of the most rewarding feelings.”

Danny Vogwill, a model and Beta Community  member, appreciated the honest back-and-forth between Coach and the community: “I was surprised to discover I had been onboarded as a founding member during the early development of Coachtopia, [because] I felt at the time I had been rather harsh with some of my critiques,” they added. “Instead, I was welcomed with open arms. That set the tone.” Additionally, Coach has partnered with the CFDA to create the CFDA X Coach Dream It Real Circular Design Scholarship, which has been awarded to a group of 15 students with an interest in circular fashion. The students have been invited to participate in a contest in which they imagine new uses for Coach leather scraps with the possibility of the results being sold at Coach stores as limited-edition drops.

For Vevers, the feedback has been eye-opening. “At Coach,” he said, “we’ve designed under certain assumptions about what defines a luxury piece, but we had to make different choices when designing with circularity in mind. In reviewing these decisions with our community, we found that they often didn’t care about things that we considered symbols of luxury; what they cared most about was the piece’s impact on the environment – that this, in their minds, is what made it luxury.”