Coach sets its sights on Gen Z with a sub-brand of products made from recycled materials.
Coach recently launched Coachtopia, a sub-brand geared toward younger consumers — not just with its playful designs, but also its circular ethos. Its colorful, nostalgia-fuelled bags are largely made using leather scraps left over from Coach’s mainline production. Straps, closures, threads, and labels are also made from recycled materials such as industrial plastic waste. Meanwhile, garments like T-shirts or mini-skirts are made from 95% recycled cotton and repurposed denim.
The company also makes 50% recycled leather from tannery offcuts, using a patented hydro-entanglement technology developed by sustainable materials company Gen Phoenix. Hydro-entanglement is a bonding process involving high-velocity water jets that interlock fibers to create a non-woven fabric.
Coachtopia was conceived by Coach creative director Stuart Vevers and senior vice president of global marketing, creative, and sustainability Joon Silverstein. With a reported 38% of the fashion industry’s greenhouse gas emissions coming from the production of raw materials, they felt it would make an impact to use more recycled components in their products.
The design team works with a real-time inventory of the leather scraps collected from factories in India and Vietnam, meaning they design the clothes with the materials available in mind. Creative director Vevers referred to this in the press release as “‘design in reverse,’ with the end goal of circularity top of mind.” With removable hardware and detachable handles, the products are designed to be easily disassembled and repaired, making them better suited for recycling than conventional luxury leather goods.
Each product comes with an embedded NFC chip, a digital passport that gives customers insight into the product’s materials and circular design. It can be accessed by waving a mobile phone over the chip and is a technology already used by clothing brands like Loro Piana and Chloé. Alongside aiding with product transparency, this technology also helps track Coachtopia products’ subsequent lives. Each product can be traded in at a Coach retail store in exchange for credit and will then be restored or recycled.
In recent years, Coach has made an impression on Gen Z via its Pillow Tabby bag, a ballooned version of its classic handbag. Released in 2021, the #coachpillowtabby hashtag has generated 14 million TikTok views. It was influential in the current puffed-up accessories trend, with inflated products like Prada handbags and Loewe heels serving as a recurrent feature of S/S23. (Reasons for the everything-is-puffy trend include difficult times causing us to soothe ourselves with soft textures and a literal take on inflation.)
2021 was also the year that Coach combined fashion with pop culture in its Coach TV presentations. New collections were modeled on celebrities in retro cable TV-style campaigns, featuring spoofs of Mean Girls featuring Megan Thee Stallion and Match Game hosted by Bob the Drag Queen.
This year, the brand goes further by collaborating with its Gen Z customer base via a company communication channel where consumers can provide product feedback and concept ideas. One of these people, illustrator and graphic designer Sabrina Lau designed the artwork printed on the first drop of bags — cherries, psychedelic mushrooms, and invocations of “Let us take a trip!”
Coach is also supporting a new generation of design talent with its CFDA x Coach Dream It Real Circular Design Scholarship, whereby 15 students have been invited to participate in a contest to develop new creative uses for the brand’s leather scraps. Of these, select items will be made available as limited edition drops.
Clearly, the brand is committed to involving Gen Z in a way that goes beyond advertising. Or, as Coach executive Silverstein put it, “We’re building [Coachtopia] not just for our consumers, but with them.”
Image courtesy of Coach.
