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Meet Nau, the ultimate over-the-top, high-concept business. It makes striking, enviro-friendly clothing. It gives away 5% to charity. Can it save the world−and give us the perfect twill capri?
Somewhere bet we en the Oscar for Al Gore's planetary-disaster epic, An Inconvenient Truth, and the canonization of Angelina Jolie by the United Nations (in association with People (NYSE:TW X) magazine), the message started sinking in: The cultural conversation around the environment, social change, and human rights is approaching ma ximum velocity. What is arguably urgent has become inarguably hip.
While celebrity moguls and business leaders of all stripes race to unleash one good work after another−from Bono's Red campaign to Wal-Mart's (NYSE:WMT) goal of zero waste by 2025--the ranks of the die-hard hemp-and-granola crowd have be en over whelmed by the Prius (NYSE:TM) -driving, Whole Foods (NASDAQ:WFMI)−shopping, fair-trade-coffee-drinking set. The new bohemians may express their values through what they buy, but they can also most likely place Darfur on a map and rattle off the relative merits of local versus organic farming. The market for "good" things that they fuel puts two questions back on the table: Can business be a force for positive change in the world? And can we have our affluence and offset it too?
The presumption that business can, and that we can, is at the heart of a new enterprise emerging from that hotbed of green goodness, Portland, Oregon. To say that Nau (Maori for "Welcome! Come in") is a new outdoor-clothing company would be a little like saying Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX) started out just to sell a cup of joe. The ideas Nau promotes are as important as the clothes it sells.
Two and a half years ago, ideas were all Nau had. They took form in the heads of a small group of executives who had left big jobs at Patagonia and Nike (NYSE:NKE) to huddle together in the Urban Grind coffee shop in Portland's Pearl District and dream. Based on a shared conviction that, in addition to generating profit, companies have an equal responsibility to create positive social and environmental change, the Nau team set out to reinvent the way people shop, reshape the outdoor category, redesign the corporation--and inspire the wider business community to do the same.
" We're challenging the nature of capitalism," contends Nau's CEO, Chris Van Dyke. A tall, fit 56-year-old, Van Dyke came out of semiretirement--which involved sailing his 40-foot yacht, surfing, and fishing off the coast of Mexico for months at a time--to start Nau. "We started with a clean whiteboard," he continues. " We believed ever y single operational element in our business was an opportunity to turn traditional business notions inside out, integrating environmental, social, and economic factors. Nau represents a new form of activism: business activism."
Today, Nau is a business with three months of sales under its belt by way of the Web and four retail stores (in Boulder, Colorado; Portland; Chicago; and Bellevue, Washington), 92 people, $24 million raised in capital, and four clothing collections in various stages of production . The business plan projects $11 million in revenue this year, growing to $260 million and 150 stores by 2010.
Those are ambitious targets, but what's more striking is how Nau's core leadership team designed a disruptive business from the ground up. It has opted out of the industry norm at nearly ever y turn--from the invention of its own fabrics to the reinvention of its relationship with consumers.
It starts with a retail concept that combines the efficiencies of the Web with the intimacy of the boutique. Called a " Webfront," the Nau store integrates technology in a striking gallery-like setting. The central mechanism is a self-serve kiosk that transfers the online shopping experience to a touch screen and e n c o u r a g e s customers t o have their purchases sent home, with the incentive of a 10% discount and free shipping.
The advantage: If customers use the store as a fitting room and push purchases to the Web, Nau can build smaller stores (2,200 to 2,400 square feet compared to the traditional outdoor specialty store's 4,000-plus square feet), reduce in-store inventor y dramatically, and slash operating expenses. Plus, it consumes less energy and materials.
Then there's the centerpiece of the company's " aggressive altruism": its pledge of 5% of sales to charitable organizations dedicated to solving big-ticket environmental and humanitarian problems. That is an audaciously large number, unprecedented in business. The philanthropic gold standard today is 1% of sales, practiced and preached most famously by Patagonia; the average among all corporations is 0.047%.
Just as important , Nau is putting the giving decision in the hands of its customers. At the point of sale, shoppers are presented with a menu of "Partners for Change" and asked where they'd like their 5% to go . E m bedded in t he back wall of ever y Webfront are two touch screens dedicated to documentary-quality story telling (also available on the Nau site) about each partner organization so that customers will be inclined to dig deeper.
By designing a conscious choice about giving into the moment of getting, Nau is calling its customers out, daring them to connect the dots. Jil Zilligen, its vice president of sustainability, is a member of the original Urban Grind team and another veteran of Patagonia (more than half of Nau's top leadership team hails from Patagonia, a company they count as an inspiration and, in some cases, "family "−and now also a competitor), where she directed all environmental initiatives and created the One Percent for the Planet foundation. " We wanted to give people pause, a moment to stop and think and tell us what they really care about," she says. "By ex tension, we hope they will think about some bigger questions as well−how do our purchasing decisions impact the wider world? What's the role of a company in society?" That moment of transaction, she says, "is not where people expect to have a values confrontation. And because it's unexpected, it's powerful."
There's more. Nau's leaders aren't just interested in giving back to organizations that do good, they're committed to being good in the first place. Zilligen and her team have engaged the broader organization in approaching every aspect of Nau's operations with a sustainability and social-justice filter−from how the company designs, sources, produces, and distributes clothing to Webfront and home-office design to training (every employee undergoes sustainability training and signs a personal "sustainability pledge").
In many cases, Nau has pushed current standards to break new ground in its practices−from a minimum age for overseas factor y workers to LEED-certified leased retail space. In fact, Nau puts its interests in the "environment, human rights, public health and safety, the communities in which it operates, and the dignity of its employees" on the same level as those of its shareholders; that commitment is actually written into its articles of incorporation.
All this can come across as absurdly lofty−or just a little too much. But in many ways, Nau is the inevitable product of our post-Enron, Web 2.0, neo-green era. The founders have taken all of the progressive business buzzwords--from corporate social responsibility to grassroots participation to design thinking—and thrown them into the mix. Or rather, meticulously mapped those ideas and ideals to build a brand with an impeccable backstory, the kind of brand that has a magnetic appeal for those Prius-driving, Whole Foods--shopping "conscious consumers" who happily seek out and pay a premium to companies whose values they share. Over the top or not, that's a market of some 50 million Americans alone (as documented in Paul Ray's study, "The Cultural Creatives") and worth $229 billion, according to the LOHAS Journal. The question is, can success actually be designed on the scale to which Nau aspires?
On a blustery spring day in Portland, Chris Van Dyke is sitting at the lobby conference table in the light-filled, open-plan Nau home office, reflecting on what happens when high concept meets harsh reality. Nau's first store was originally slated to open today outside of Portland, after endless delays, fraught real estate negotiations, epic weather, and shipping fiascoes. But just days before, yet another municipal-code hassle forced a further delay.
Recalling the road that brought him to this point, Van Dyke, who's wearing a Mr. Bill T-shirt under his Nau work shirt, lets out a burst of laughter that bears a striking resemblance to that of his father, actor Dick Van Dyke (the rubber y expressiveness of his face and buoyant attitude are two other dead giveaways). "Launching a startup is a true Mr. Bill experience," he says. He spent 20 "sleepless" months getting tossed out of venture capitalists' of fices, wowing potential investors with the product only to be told the business model was insane.
After raising $14 million in two early rounds from individual investors, including Seagate (NYSE:STX) chairman and avid outdoorsman Steve Luczo and Nike alum and current Nau chairman Stephen Gomez, Van Dyke needed more to take his company through launch. Facing resistance to a valuation of $51 million (without a dime of revenue), Van Dyke refined his pitch. "I decided we're cheap! Look at what we've done for $14 million: hired great people, developed great products, built fully scalable HR, IT, and supply-chain systems. We're actually a bargain at $51 million." The VCs weren't convinced. But Nau's original backers were still keen--and just as cash-flow concerns grew acute late last year, many of them kicked in more to help the company close a $10.5 million round.
Luczo, for one, likens Nau's retail approach to Apple (NASDAQ:A APL) stores, which today boast the highest sales-per-square-feet in the retail universe. "Clearly, that has a lot to do with the design of the [Apple] stores, the way the staff interacts with customers, and the fact that many buyers walk in predisposed to be fans of the company," he says. "Nau has a lot of the same elements. Is it risky? Absolutely. Nau is at the leading edge of a new kind of retail rollout. It's an aggressive experiment."
Nau does open a store, in Boulder. It's where Nau founder Eric Reynolds, an accomplished mountaineer and one of the original founders of outdoor-gear maker Marmot, spent years incubating the idea of a direct outdoor-clothing company and the Webfront concept. In the summer of 2003, he "had an epiphany " around how those ideas connected up with a much bigger idea about what he calls the "for benefit" corporation, an entity that operates for the benefit of its shareholders, its employees, the environment, the communities it operates in, and the wider world, equally.
Reynolds registered his fledgling company in his home state of Colorado as UTW (which stands for "unf--k the world") and promptly set out to recruit a team to help breathe life into those ideas. (He stepped down as chairman in early 2006.) The first recruit was Mark Galbraith, a former top designer for Patagonia, who speaks in a slow drawl and with a tart wit. For all of the lofty ideas behind Nau, Reynolds realized that "unless we have kick-ass, gorgeous, appealing stuff, none of this would matter."
By all accounts, Galbraith, now Nau's vice president of product design, and his crew of industr y veterans have delivered: Their first collection, ranging from $32 boxers to the $248 "urbane jacket," has won glowing praise from Men's Vogue and Rock & Ice alike. Nau spent countless hours wrestling with the question, "Who is our customer?" The distillation of those conversations is what Nau people refer to as "our poppy "--interlocking circles that represent three customer archetypes: the multidimensional outdoor athlete, the "new activist," and the "creatives." In turn, those archetypes map to the three elements of Nau's design philosophy: performance, sustainability, and beauty. The company resolved to achieve al three−a leap in an industry where combining two of those qualities is rare.
"The challenge for us was to blow up baked-in assumptions−if you have fashion, you can't get performance, or if you want sustainability, it won't be good-looking," says Galbraith. "If you care about making a sustainable product, you don't do different sets of clothes for different sports and activities. It's not about the proliferation of SKUs and feeding the consumer disease. It's about designs that are timeless rather than trend-driven and colors that work over multiple seasons and situations."
The big challenge: how to get performance and beauty out of sustainable materials that typically got low marks on both counts . Nau's solution was to grow its own: It designed, developed, and commercialized ( with partners such as Malden Mills) 28 of the 30 fabrics used in the first collection− materials conceived specifically to deliver on the promise of high-tech performance , beauty , and sustainability. It considers all of those new fabrics "open source" and, in keeping with its mission to create positive change, has encouraged its peers and competitors in the industry to make use of them.
Working with Zilligen's sustainable-practices team, the design group established ideal product criteria, developed a restricted-substances list, and established a partner code of conduct, all third-par t y audited and verified. So Nau uses only renewable natural fibers−100% certified organic cotton and wool from "happy sheep"− recycled and recyclable synthetics, and recyclable renewable resources such as PLA (polyactic acid), the first commercially viable biopolymer(essentially distilled and polymerized cornstarch) with fast-wicking qualities.
Galbraith and his colleagues have made some impressive advances . In the challenging realm of high-tech, waterproof, breathable fabrics, for example, they eliminated the need for solvent-based adhesives and reinvented the soft-shell fleece. It's featured in a fall 2007 trench coat appropriately called the Shroud of Purrin for its furlike lining (a radical update on the standard nubby fleece), technical innovation (wind- and water-resistant, breathable, light, highly compressible), and flattering cut. At the same time, the designers continue to strive mightily (and transparently) in areas where they fall short, such as the use of laminates and coatings that contain fluorocarbons. As Zilligen puts it, "Sustainability isn't a milepost, it's a process. Complete sustainability is not actually achievable."
In the typical outdoor company, it takes 18 months to come out with a new line--one that generally involves 20% to 30% of the line carrying through from one season to the next, perhaps one or two completely new fabrics, and existing relationships, fit blocks, and patterns. Galbraith, on the other hand, had a "clean whiteboard" and 20 months to produce a design philosophy; create not one, but four collections (each with 100 to 150 separate styles); devise completely new fabrics; and develop product and vendor relationships (with no credit history, no brand, and the most exacting standards).
"I remember sitting down at a card table with two phones and not having much longer than the normal development cycle and thinking, 'Okay, we have to go from zero to ever y thing,'" Galbraith recalls. "It really did feel like we were assembling a plane as we were roaring down the runway. It was a really fast, incredibly energizing, and at times quite scary endeavor."
Where Nau ultimately hopes to achieve liftoff, of course, is in customers' encounters with the products in the stores. Like Nau's clothes, the Webfronts don't scream "green." That's exactly the point, says Jeff Kovel, the up-and-coming architect and founder of the Portland-based Skylab Design Group, which worked with Nau to design the Webfronts. "Our goal was not to have a sustainable aesthetic so much as a sustainable concept." When he and his partners dug into the world of retail rollouts, they "saw it as a throwaway culture," Kovel says. "Stores come into a vanilla shell, rip it out, and start over. They're constantly putting fixtures in, tearing them down, and throwing them away. We thought a lot about how we could change that whole process rather than just use some green materials." The solution: a prefabricated, component-based environment with fully reusable fixtures that are built off-site, shipped in a flat pack, and assembled on-site in the existing store shell.
The main fixtures run the length of either wall in the long, narrow spaces preferred by Nau, starting out as a square grid and gradually deforming into a more organic shape, reminiscent of a canyon wall. Clothes hang well-spaced and gallery-like in berths of varying heights formed by the grid and from aluminum bars fixed to the ceiling. Boulder like aluminum forms serve as display tables and a cluster of cairns made out of reclaimed wood create an environment for mannequins (made of recyclable resin) in the storefront window. The rechristened "cash bar," which is meant to evoke an outdoor bar or barbecue, forms the center of the store. On one side, sales staff serve customers at two traditional point-of-sale screens, while customers are free to check out unassisted with two touch screens on the other side. On opening day in Boulder, a steady stream of customers pass through the store, a rich mix of thirty something moms with babies, twenty something hipsters, hardened athletes right off the mountain, and retirees with dogs. Few of them "get" the meticulously designed layers of functionality and visual imager y in the store right away. On the other hand, almost everybody gets into a conversation--in fact, with its relaxed vibe and high-energy music selection, the place feels a bit like a cocktail par t y, even at 11 a.m. The most overheard line on the sales floor is, "That's made of recycled polyester." (Second: "That's made of corn.") And time after time, the 5% giving decision at the point of sale does exactly what it is designed to do: It raises questions, sparks debate, and gets people talking.
Which is the job of Ian Yolles, Nau's 50-year-old vice president of marketing. Yolles, a wiry surfer who sports a diamond stud in his ear and who has had a poppy like career as executive director of Outward Bound Canada, director of social inventions at the Body Shop, and director of marketing at Patagonia, is given to impressive rhetorical flights of fancy when it comes to his brand. But for all the talk about building brand and culture at Nau, Yolles and his team are applying a decidedly low-key approach. Just as the design team decided to forgo a logo on its clothes, the marketing team doesn't seem that interested in the standard tools of the trade, such as advertising, promoting store openings, and celebrity product endorsements.
"You'll hear the word 'sustainability' around here a lot," Yolles says. "At a certain point, we stumbled on the question, What would sustainable marketing look like? And it stumped us. We haven't completely figured it out yet, but at the core is storytelling. There are all kinds of interesting, authentic stories embedded in our people, their passions, the ideas behind the company, and a wider, emerging community of people who reflect the same ethos."
Yolles and crew have created a range of mechanisms and venues for that storytelling, from the Nau blog, The Thought Kitchen; to The Collective (a Web archive of documentary-style video storytelling showcasing Nau's heroes, such as Dee Williams, a woman who traded in her house for a tiny, environmentally friendly dwelling the size of a garden shed); to the Partners for Change Web pages; to the stores themselves, which are hosting a series of salonlike evenings featuring local storytellers, including alpinist/writer/photographer Topher Donahue in Boulder and bike evangelist/blogger/citizen activist Jonathan Maus in Portland.
If it all sounds a little self-conscious and bloodless (compared with, say, the slow and organic evolution of Patagonia out of founder Yvon Chouinard's own close-to-the-earth lifestyle and desire to create better, more-sustainable tools for climbers), that's the danger of bolting out of the gates with audacious ambitions and an aura of goodness. People will poke holes.
Van Dyke gets that. " We're launching this company into a culture of cynicism--and it's cynical for good reason. Business hasn't behaved itself. Our challenge is how to deal with that by designing from the ground up to try to do better in ever y area we can think of−and then making sure we're utterly transparent about how we're doing and where we fall short."
That doesn't mean Nau intends to pander for legitimacy. "One of our greatest goals is that a significant number of people real y hate us," Van Dyke continues. "That's just perfect. You try to please everybody and you end up being nothing. The sign of a real y powerful brand is one that is loved and embraced and equal y hated. The deeper you pound your stake into the sand about your values, the more of both the love and the hate you're going to generate. That's what makes it exciting."
去看看阿尔 · 戈尔主演的《难以忽视的真相》和联合国以及《人物》杂志共同推崇的安吉莉亚 · 茱莉 ,你会发现有种信息正在传递和蔓延 : 有关自然环境、社会变迁以及人权的文化对话正在以最快的速度接近。
这个曾经被争议是否是最紧急的话题已经当仁不让地成为敏感话题。
名士和商业领袖们的生活方式与平民毕竟还是有区别。
市场上认为的那些“有益” 的东西有两个问题引人深思 : 商业究竟是否可以成为改变世界的一种积极力量 ? 我们可否影响和补偿环境 ?
Nau, 概念化的制衣公司。名字取自毛利语中“打开 ,请进”的意思。
Nau 拥有 92 名雇员、4 家零售店面和 240 万美元的销售额增长。预计 2010 年开到 150 家店 , 达到 2600万美元收入。
Nau 引人注目的环保衣物销售所得中有 5% 捐助给慈善机构。波兰的这家制衣公司和星巴客的运营理念有相通之处。
它的核心价值就是认为商业可以有效地改变环境 ,而人类也可以对环境做出影响和补偿。
Nau 主管产品设计的副主席 Galbraith和他经验丰富的设计团队已经发布了他们第一季的设计作品 , 从 32 美元一条的拳击短裤到 248 美元一件的供雅皮士穿着的夹克应有尽有。
他们经常会对自己发问 : 谁是我们的客户 ? 谁是参与我们实践的行动分子 ?
他们的作品把两个群体交集在一起 ,决定了他们设计所要传递的意思 : 表现可持续性和美。
两年半前 Nau 刚刚开始推行这个理念 ,认为在赚取利润之余 , 公司还有责任担当起社会与环境变迁带来的积极意义 , 所以他们重新设计了店面的外部货架以及公司结构 ,以期造成更大的商业影响。
Nau 的 CEO,Chris Van Dyke 说 :“ 我们几乎是在挑战资本主义的本质。我们相信商业的每个元素不是传统意义上的创造利润 , 而需要与环境、社会和经济的因素结合起来。于是我们就像白板一张那样大张旗鼓地开始了。Nau 其实代表的是一种新式的实践形式 : 商业形式主义。”
看似野心勃勃的计划 , 关键是 Nau 的核心领导团队在起作用。
他们在一开始就懂得把网络的普及性与时装门店的展示效果完美结合。
他们希望的方式是 : 如果顾客已经慢慢习惯把店面当做试衣间来看效果 , 再转到网络上去购买衣服的话 , 他们就可以改开小型的门店。在大量削减店内陈设和运营费用的同时 , 还可以节减能量和材料的损耗。
公司利他主义的核心表现在 : 它将 5% 的销售所得捐助给慈善组织 , 以解决环境代价和人道主义问题。
Nau 还将慈善捐助的决策权交给顾客 : 顾客在 Nau 提供的参考“捐助菜单”上选择 , 决定 5% 资金的走向。Nau 做的不光是这些 , 还亲身参与慈善机构的活动。
Nau 似乎是网络 2.0 时代和新绿色主义产生的必然产物。但在从个体投资者那里募集了 140 万美元以后 ,Van Dyke 还需要更多的资金来发展项目。
Galbraith 回忆说 :“我记得自己曾经坐在空空的桌前守着两部电话机跟自己说 , 好吧 , 现在什么都没有 , 但是我们将会经历从零到拥有一切 !”
Nau 非常清楚 , 肯定会有一部分人不喜欢他们的做法。
Van Dyke 说 :“如果你想取悦每一个人 , 结果往往是没一个高兴的。而一个真正有力的品牌证明它自己有力量的标志就是 : 它获得的喜爱和厌恶都同样深刻。”
(C) 2007 MANSUETO VENTURES LLC, AS FIRST PUBLISHED IN FAST COMPANY MAGAZINE. DISTRIBUTED
BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES.
Canonization 推崇offset 补偿disruptive 分裂的
premium 额外费用Activism 实践主义
opt 选择
slash 削减veteran 老练的 impeccable 无瑕疵的
lofty 高贵的
Somewhere bet we en the Oscar for Al Gore's planetary-disaster epic, An Inconvenient Truth, and the canonization of Angelina Jolie by the United Nations (in association with People (NYSE:TW X) magazine), the message started sinking in: The cultural conversation around the environment, social change, and human rights is approaching ma ximum velocity. What is arguably urgent has become inarguably hip.
While celebrity moguls and business leaders of all stripes race to unleash one good work after another−from Bono's Red campaign to Wal-Mart's (NYSE:WMT) goal of zero waste by 2025--the ranks of the die-hard hemp-and-granola crowd have be en over whelmed by the Prius (NYSE:TM) -driving, Whole Foods (NASDAQ:WFMI)−shopping, fair-trade-coffee-drinking set. The new bohemians may express their values through what they buy, but they can also most likely place Darfur on a map and rattle off the relative merits of local versus organic farming. The market for "good" things that they fuel puts two questions back on the table: Can business be a force for positive change in the world? And can we have our affluence and offset it too?
The presumption that business can, and that we can, is at the heart of a new enterprise emerging from that hotbed of green goodness, Portland, Oregon. To say that Nau (Maori for "Welcome! Come in") is a new outdoor-clothing company would be a little like saying Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX) started out just to sell a cup of joe. The ideas Nau promotes are as important as the clothes it sells.
Two and a half years ago, ideas were all Nau had. They took form in the heads of a small group of executives who had left big jobs at Patagonia and Nike (NYSE:NKE) to huddle together in the Urban Grind coffee shop in Portland's Pearl District and dream. Based on a shared conviction that, in addition to generating profit, companies have an equal responsibility to create positive social and environmental change, the Nau team set out to reinvent the way people shop, reshape the outdoor category, redesign the corporation--and inspire the wider business community to do the same.
" We're challenging the nature of capitalism," contends Nau's CEO, Chris Van Dyke. A tall, fit 56-year-old, Van Dyke came out of semiretirement--which involved sailing his 40-foot yacht, surfing, and fishing off the coast of Mexico for months at a time--to start Nau. "We started with a clean whiteboard," he continues. " We believed ever y single operational element in our business was an opportunity to turn traditional business notions inside out, integrating environmental, social, and economic factors. Nau represents a new form of activism: business activism."
Today, Nau is a business with three months of sales under its belt by way of the Web and four retail stores (in Boulder, Colorado; Portland; Chicago; and Bellevue, Washington), 92 people, $24 million raised in capital, and four clothing collections in various stages of production . The business plan projects $11 million in revenue this year, growing to $260 million and 150 stores by 2010.
Those are ambitious targets, but what's more striking is how Nau's core leadership team designed a disruptive business from the ground up. It has opted out of the industry norm at nearly ever y turn--from the invention of its own fabrics to the reinvention of its relationship with consumers.
It starts with a retail concept that combines the efficiencies of the Web with the intimacy of the boutique. Called a " Webfront," the Nau store integrates technology in a striking gallery-like setting. The central mechanism is a self-serve kiosk that transfers the online shopping experience to a touch screen and e n c o u r a g e s customers t o have their purchases sent home, with the incentive of a 10% discount and free shipping.
The advantage: If customers use the store as a fitting room and push purchases to the Web, Nau can build smaller stores (2,200 to 2,400 square feet compared to the traditional outdoor specialty store's 4,000-plus square feet), reduce in-store inventor y dramatically, and slash operating expenses. Plus, it consumes less energy and materials.
Then there's the centerpiece of the company's " aggressive altruism": its pledge of 5% of sales to charitable organizations dedicated to solving big-ticket environmental and humanitarian problems. That is an audaciously large number, unprecedented in business. The philanthropic gold standard today is 1% of sales, practiced and preached most famously by Patagonia; the average among all corporations is 0.047%.
Just as important , Nau is putting the giving decision in the hands of its customers. At the point of sale, shoppers are presented with a menu of "Partners for Change" and asked where they'd like their 5% to go . E m bedded in t he back wall of ever y Webfront are two touch screens dedicated to documentary-quality story telling (also available on the Nau site) about each partner organization so that customers will be inclined to dig deeper.
By designing a conscious choice about giving into the moment of getting, Nau is calling its customers out, daring them to connect the dots. Jil Zilligen, its vice president of sustainability, is a member of the original Urban Grind team and another veteran of Patagonia (more than half of Nau's top leadership team hails from Patagonia, a company they count as an inspiration and, in some cases, "family "−and now also a competitor), where she directed all environmental initiatives and created the One Percent for the Planet foundation. " We wanted to give people pause, a moment to stop and think and tell us what they really care about," she says. "By ex tension, we hope they will think about some bigger questions as well−how do our purchasing decisions impact the wider world? What's the role of a company in society?" That moment of transaction, she says, "is not where people expect to have a values confrontation. And because it's unexpected, it's powerful."
There's more. Nau's leaders aren't just interested in giving back to organizations that do good, they're committed to being good in the first place. Zilligen and her team have engaged the broader organization in approaching every aspect of Nau's operations with a sustainability and social-justice filter−from how the company designs, sources, produces, and distributes clothing to Webfront and home-office design to training (every employee undergoes sustainability training and signs a personal "sustainability pledge").
In many cases, Nau has pushed current standards to break new ground in its practices−from a minimum age for overseas factor y workers to LEED-certified leased retail space. In fact, Nau puts its interests in the "environment, human rights, public health and safety, the communities in which it operates, and the dignity of its employees" on the same level as those of its shareholders; that commitment is actually written into its articles of incorporation.
All this can come across as absurdly lofty−or just a little too much. But in many ways, Nau is the inevitable product of our post-Enron, Web 2.0, neo-green era. The founders have taken all of the progressive business buzzwords--from corporate social responsibility to grassroots participation to design thinking—and thrown them into the mix. Or rather, meticulously mapped those ideas and ideals to build a brand with an impeccable backstory, the kind of brand that has a magnetic appeal for those Prius-driving, Whole Foods--shopping "conscious consumers" who happily seek out and pay a premium to companies whose values they share. Over the top or not, that's a market of some 50 million Americans alone (as documented in Paul Ray's study, "The Cultural Creatives") and worth $229 billion, according to the LOHAS Journal. The question is, can success actually be designed on the scale to which Nau aspires?
On a blustery spring day in Portland, Chris Van Dyke is sitting at the lobby conference table in the light-filled, open-plan Nau home office, reflecting on what happens when high concept meets harsh reality. Nau's first store was originally slated to open today outside of Portland, after endless delays, fraught real estate negotiations, epic weather, and shipping fiascoes. But just days before, yet another municipal-code hassle forced a further delay.
Recalling the road that brought him to this point, Van Dyke, who's wearing a Mr. Bill T-shirt under his Nau work shirt, lets out a burst of laughter that bears a striking resemblance to that of his father, actor Dick Van Dyke (the rubber y expressiveness of his face and buoyant attitude are two other dead giveaways). "Launching a startup is a true Mr. Bill experience," he says. He spent 20 "sleepless" months getting tossed out of venture capitalists' of fices, wowing potential investors with the product only to be told the business model was insane.
After raising $14 million in two early rounds from individual investors, including Seagate (NYSE:STX) chairman and avid outdoorsman Steve Luczo and Nike alum and current Nau chairman Stephen Gomez, Van Dyke needed more to take his company through launch. Facing resistance to a valuation of $51 million (without a dime of revenue), Van Dyke refined his pitch. "I decided we're cheap! Look at what we've done for $14 million: hired great people, developed great products, built fully scalable HR, IT, and supply-chain systems. We're actually a bargain at $51 million." The VCs weren't convinced. But Nau's original backers were still keen--and just as cash-flow concerns grew acute late last year, many of them kicked in more to help the company close a $10.5 million round.
Luczo, for one, likens Nau's retail approach to Apple (NASDAQ:A APL) stores, which today boast the highest sales-per-square-feet in the retail universe. "Clearly, that has a lot to do with the design of the [Apple] stores, the way the staff interacts with customers, and the fact that many buyers walk in predisposed to be fans of the company," he says. "Nau has a lot of the same elements. Is it risky? Absolutely. Nau is at the leading edge of a new kind of retail rollout. It's an aggressive experiment."
Nau does open a store, in Boulder. It's where Nau founder Eric Reynolds, an accomplished mountaineer and one of the original founders of outdoor-gear maker Marmot, spent years incubating the idea of a direct outdoor-clothing company and the Webfront concept. In the summer of 2003, he "had an epiphany " around how those ideas connected up with a much bigger idea about what he calls the "for benefit" corporation, an entity that operates for the benefit of its shareholders, its employees, the environment, the communities it operates in, and the wider world, equally.
Reynolds registered his fledgling company in his home state of Colorado as UTW (which stands for "unf--k the world") and promptly set out to recruit a team to help breathe life into those ideas. (He stepped down as chairman in early 2006.) The first recruit was Mark Galbraith, a former top designer for Patagonia, who speaks in a slow drawl and with a tart wit. For all of the lofty ideas behind Nau, Reynolds realized that "unless we have kick-ass, gorgeous, appealing stuff, none of this would matter."
By all accounts, Galbraith, now Nau's vice president of product design, and his crew of industr y veterans have delivered: Their first collection, ranging from $32 boxers to the $248 "urbane jacket," has won glowing praise from Men's Vogue and Rock & Ice alike. Nau spent countless hours wrestling with the question, "Who is our customer?" The distillation of those conversations is what Nau people refer to as "our poppy "--interlocking circles that represent three customer archetypes: the multidimensional outdoor athlete, the "new activist," and the "creatives." In turn, those archetypes map to the three elements of Nau's design philosophy: performance, sustainability, and beauty. The company resolved to achieve al three−a leap in an industry where combining two of those qualities is rare.
"The challenge for us was to blow up baked-in assumptions−if you have fashion, you can't get performance, or if you want sustainability, it won't be good-looking," says Galbraith. "If you care about making a sustainable product, you don't do different sets of clothes for different sports and activities. It's not about the proliferation of SKUs and feeding the consumer disease. It's about designs that are timeless rather than trend-driven and colors that work over multiple seasons and situations."
The big challenge: how to get performance and beauty out of sustainable materials that typically got low marks on both counts . Nau's solution was to grow its own: It designed, developed, and commercialized ( with partners such as Malden Mills) 28 of the 30 fabrics used in the first collection− materials conceived specifically to deliver on the promise of high-tech performance , beauty , and sustainability. It considers all of those new fabrics "open source" and, in keeping with its mission to create positive change, has encouraged its peers and competitors in the industry to make use of them.
Working with Zilligen's sustainable-practices team, the design group established ideal product criteria, developed a restricted-substances list, and established a partner code of conduct, all third-par t y audited and verified. So Nau uses only renewable natural fibers−100% certified organic cotton and wool from "happy sheep"− recycled and recyclable synthetics, and recyclable renewable resources such as PLA (polyactic acid), the first commercially viable biopolymer(essentially distilled and polymerized cornstarch) with fast-wicking qualities.
Galbraith and his colleagues have made some impressive advances . In the challenging realm of high-tech, waterproof, breathable fabrics, for example, they eliminated the need for solvent-based adhesives and reinvented the soft-shell fleece. It's featured in a fall 2007 trench coat appropriately called the Shroud of Purrin for its furlike lining (a radical update on the standard nubby fleece), technical innovation (wind- and water-resistant, breathable, light, highly compressible), and flattering cut. At the same time, the designers continue to strive mightily (and transparently) in areas where they fall short, such as the use of laminates and coatings that contain fluorocarbons. As Zilligen puts it, "Sustainability isn't a milepost, it's a process. Complete sustainability is not actually achievable."
In the typical outdoor company, it takes 18 months to come out with a new line--one that generally involves 20% to 30% of the line carrying through from one season to the next, perhaps one or two completely new fabrics, and existing relationships, fit blocks, and patterns. Galbraith, on the other hand, had a "clean whiteboard" and 20 months to produce a design philosophy; create not one, but four collections (each with 100 to 150 separate styles); devise completely new fabrics; and develop product and vendor relationships (with no credit history, no brand, and the most exacting standards).
"I remember sitting down at a card table with two phones and not having much longer than the normal development cycle and thinking, 'Okay, we have to go from zero to ever y thing,'" Galbraith recalls. "It really did feel like we were assembling a plane as we were roaring down the runway. It was a really fast, incredibly energizing, and at times quite scary endeavor."
Where Nau ultimately hopes to achieve liftoff, of course, is in customers' encounters with the products in the stores. Like Nau's clothes, the Webfronts don't scream "green." That's exactly the point, says Jeff Kovel, the up-and-coming architect and founder of the Portland-based Skylab Design Group, which worked with Nau to design the Webfronts. "Our goal was not to have a sustainable aesthetic so much as a sustainable concept." When he and his partners dug into the world of retail rollouts, they "saw it as a throwaway culture," Kovel says. "Stores come into a vanilla shell, rip it out, and start over. They're constantly putting fixtures in, tearing them down, and throwing them away. We thought a lot about how we could change that whole process rather than just use some green materials." The solution: a prefabricated, component-based environment with fully reusable fixtures that are built off-site, shipped in a flat pack, and assembled on-site in the existing store shell.
The main fixtures run the length of either wall in the long, narrow spaces preferred by Nau, starting out as a square grid and gradually deforming into a more organic shape, reminiscent of a canyon wall. Clothes hang well-spaced and gallery-like in berths of varying heights formed by the grid and from aluminum bars fixed to the ceiling. Boulder like aluminum forms serve as display tables and a cluster of cairns made out of reclaimed wood create an environment for mannequins (made of recyclable resin) in the storefront window. The rechristened "cash bar," which is meant to evoke an outdoor bar or barbecue, forms the center of the store. On one side, sales staff serve customers at two traditional point-of-sale screens, while customers are free to check out unassisted with two touch screens on the other side. On opening day in Boulder, a steady stream of customers pass through the store, a rich mix of thirty something moms with babies, twenty something hipsters, hardened athletes right off the mountain, and retirees with dogs. Few of them "get" the meticulously designed layers of functionality and visual imager y in the store right away. On the other hand, almost everybody gets into a conversation--in fact, with its relaxed vibe and high-energy music selection, the place feels a bit like a cocktail par t y, even at 11 a.m. The most overheard line on the sales floor is, "That's made of recycled polyester." (Second: "That's made of corn.") And time after time, the 5% giving decision at the point of sale does exactly what it is designed to do: It raises questions, sparks debate, and gets people talking.
Which is the job of Ian Yolles, Nau's 50-year-old vice president of marketing. Yolles, a wiry surfer who sports a diamond stud in his ear and who has had a poppy like career as executive director of Outward Bound Canada, director of social inventions at the Body Shop, and director of marketing at Patagonia, is given to impressive rhetorical flights of fancy when it comes to his brand. But for all the talk about building brand and culture at Nau, Yolles and his team are applying a decidedly low-key approach. Just as the design team decided to forgo a logo on its clothes, the marketing team doesn't seem that interested in the standard tools of the trade, such as advertising, promoting store openings, and celebrity product endorsements.
"You'll hear the word 'sustainability' around here a lot," Yolles says. "At a certain point, we stumbled on the question, What would sustainable marketing look like? And it stumped us. We haven't completely figured it out yet, but at the core is storytelling. There are all kinds of interesting, authentic stories embedded in our people, their passions, the ideas behind the company, and a wider, emerging community of people who reflect the same ethos."
Yolles and crew have created a range of mechanisms and venues for that storytelling, from the Nau blog, The Thought Kitchen; to The Collective (a Web archive of documentary-style video storytelling showcasing Nau's heroes, such as Dee Williams, a woman who traded in her house for a tiny, environmentally friendly dwelling the size of a garden shed); to the Partners for Change Web pages; to the stores themselves, which are hosting a series of salonlike evenings featuring local storytellers, including alpinist/writer/photographer Topher Donahue in Boulder and bike evangelist/blogger/citizen activist Jonathan Maus in Portland.
If it all sounds a little self-conscious and bloodless (compared with, say, the slow and organic evolution of Patagonia out of founder Yvon Chouinard's own close-to-the-earth lifestyle and desire to create better, more-sustainable tools for climbers), that's the danger of bolting out of the gates with audacious ambitions and an aura of goodness. People will poke holes.
Van Dyke gets that. " We're launching this company into a culture of cynicism--and it's cynical for good reason. Business hasn't behaved itself. Our challenge is how to deal with that by designing from the ground up to try to do better in ever y area we can think of−and then making sure we're utterly transparent about how we're doing and where we fall short."
That doesn't mean Nau intends to pander for legitimacy. "One of our greatest goals is that a significant number of people real y hate us," Van Dyke continues. "That's just perfect. You try to please everybody and you end up being nothing. The sign of a real y powerful brand is one that is loved and embraced and equal y hated. The deeper you pound your stake into the sand about your values, the more of both the love and the hate you're going to generate. That's what makes it exciting."
去看看阿尔 · 戈尔主演的《难以忽视的真相》和联合国以及《人物》杂志共同推崇的安吉莉亚 · 茱莉 ,你会发现有种信息正在传递和蔓延 : 有关自然环境、社会变迁以及人权的文化对话正在以最快的速度接近。
这个曾经被争议是否是最紧急的话题已经当仁不让地成为敏感话题。
名士和商业领袖们的生活方式与平民毕竟还是有区别。
市场上认为的那些“有益” 的东西有两个问题引人深思 : 商业究竟是否可以成为改变世界的一种积极力量 ? 我们可否影响和补偿环境 ?
Nau, 概念化的制衣公司。名字取自毛利语中“打开 ,请进”的意思。
Nau 拥有 92 名雇员、4 家零售店面和 240 万美元的销售额增长。预计 2010 年开到 150 家店 , 达到 2600万美元收入。
Nau 引人注目的环保衣物销售所得中有 5% 捐助给慈善机构。波兰的这家制衣公司和星巴客的运营理念有相通之处。
它的核心价值就是认为商业可以有效地改变环境 ,而人类也可以对环境做出影响和补偿。
Nau 主管产品设计的副主席 Galbraith和他经验丰富的设计团队已经发布了他们第一季的设计作品 , 从 32 美元一条的拳击短裤到 248 美元一件的供雅皮士穿着的夹克应有尽有。
他们经常会对自己发问 : 谁是我们的客户 ? 谁是参与我们实践的行动分子 ?
他们的作品把两个群体交集在一起 ,决定了他们设计所要传递的意思 : 表现可持续性和美。
两年半前 Nau 刚刚开始推行这个理念 ,认为在赚取利润之余 , 公司还有责任担当起社会与环境变迁带来的积极意义 , 所以他们重新设计了店面的外部货架以及公司结构 ,以期造成更大的商业影响。
Nau 的 CEO,Chris Van Dyke 说 :“ 我们几乎是在挑战资本主义的本质。我们相信商业的每个元素不是传统意义上的创造利润 , 而需要与环境、社会和经济的因素结合起来。于是我们就像白板一张那样大张旗鼓地开始了。Nau 其实代表的是一种新式的实践形式 : 商业形式主义。”
看似野心勃勃的计划 , 关键是 Nau 的核心领导团队在起作用。
他们在一开始就懂得把网络的普及性与时装门店的展示效果完美结合。
他们希望的方式是 : 如果顾客已经慢慢习惯把店面当做试衣间来看效果 , 再转到网络上去购买衣服的话 , 他们就可以改开小型的门店。在大量削减店内陈设和运营费用的同时 , 还可以节减能量和材料的损耗。
公司利他主义的核心表现在 : 它将 5% 的销售所得捐助给慈善组织 , 以解决环境代价和人道主义问题。
Nau 还将慈善捐助的决策权交给顾客 : 顾客在 Nau 提供的参考“捐助菜单”上选择 , 决定 5% 资金的走向。Nau 做的不光是这些 , 还亲身参与慈善机构的活动。
Nau 似乎是网络 2.0 时代和新绿色主义产生的必然产物。但在从个体投资者那里募集了 140 万美元以后 ,Van Dyke 还需要更多的资金来发展项目。
Galbraith 回忆说 :“我记得自己曾经坐在空空的桌前守着两部电话机跟自己说 , 好吧 , 现在什么都没有 , 但是我们将会经历从零到拥有一切 !”
Nau 非常清楚 , 肯定会有一部分人不喜欢他们的做法。
Van Dyke 说 :“如果你想取悦每一个人 , 结果往往是没一个高兴的。而一个真正有力的品牌证明它自己有力量的标志就是 : 它获得的喜爱和厌恶都同样深刻。”
(C) 2007 MANSUETO VENTURES LLC, AS FIRST PUBLISHED IN FAST COMPANY MAGAZINE. DISTRIBUTED
BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES.
Canonization 推崇offset 补偿disruptive 分裂的
premium 额外费用Activism 实践主义
opt 选择
slash 削减veteran 老练的 impeccable 无瑕疵的
lofty 高贵的