Coach launches circular sub-brand ‘Coachtopia’
US-based brand Coach, best known for its expertise in leather craftsmanship, is taking another step towards becoming a fully circular business with a new eco-friendly sub-brand ‘Coachtopia’.
Coachtopia is focused on circular craft and collaborative creativity. The brand is first launching in the United States, Canada and the UK, with plans to expand into Asia later this year.
With a mission to advance a circular fashion system, the new range is grounded in Coach's Made Circular design philosophy — a set of three principles that inform how the brand "designs, crafts, and reuses products".
Coachtopia launches with an all-gender collection of bags, accessories, ready-to-wear and footwear made with recycled, repurposed and renewable materials. As the brand grows, it will create limited drops of experimental products that push circular craft to the limit.
What's more, each piece is equipped with a digital passport allowing transparency into its materials, Made Circular design and environmental impacts. The digital passport also allows shoppers to follow the product journey as it is repaired, restored, reused and reimagined over multiple lives.
Joon Silverstein, SVP of Global Marketing, Creative and Sustainability at Coachtopia, commented: "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.
"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."
Coachtopia is resetting the paradigm between brand and consumer, designing not only for, but with a new generation of climate-concerned consumers. The brand was co-created with a community of Gen Z individuals, including climate activists, upcyclers, journalists, film makers and fashion enthusiasts.
Stuart Vevers, Coach Creative Director, added: "It’s a bigger, bolder step forward in realising our vision for sustainability at Coach, where we prioritise 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."
This initiative builds upon Coach's investments made to improve the end-to-end sustainability of its business, such as the Coach (Re)Loved programme. This has given 20,000 Coach products a new lease of life since its April 2021 launch.
In October 2022, Coach opened its first-ever pop-up concept store in London, called ‘Tomorrow’s Vintage’. The store, which ran until 16 January 2023, celebrated the Coach ‘(Re) Loved’ programme, which was described as “a circular ecosystem for refurbishing, reimagining and recycling pre-loved products”.
