Coachtopia, the circular fashion sub-brand of Coach, has launched a new documentary web series designed to educate consumers about the impact of fashion’s growing waste problem and how the budding brand is tackling it head-on.
The Road to Circularity, hosted by sustainable fashion advocate and Coachtopia community member Aditi Mayer, brings consumers behind the scenes of the brand. In each episode, Mayer ventures to a different part of the globe to meet partner companies and individuals who are collaborating with the brand to make circularity at scale possible. New episodes will launch through 2024 on all Coachtopia social channels.
“Since the founding of Coachtopia, we’ve been working closely with a wide range of inspiring young leaders through our Beta Community — and we have heard how frustrating fashion’s lack of transparency can be to this generation,” said Joon Silverstein, SVP of Global Marketing and Sustainability at Coach, and Head of Coachtopia, in a statement. “That’s why we launched this docuseries to go places where fashion doesn’t typically go, to explore the challenges facing our industry, and to show what it means to reconsider the usual fashion narratives and systems with circularity in mind.”
In Episode 1, “Making with Waste,” Mayer goes to Chennai, India to visit KH Exports, a family-run leather manufacturing company that has worked with Coach since 1987. Now, the company works with Coachtopia to reimagine Coach’s leather waste as a unique raw material. Viewers go through the entire process — from the waste sorting process in a “leather scrap yard” through to product prototyping, material design, production and more — and hear the personal stories of the designers, craftspeople and producers who play a role in KH Exports operations.
Throughout the episode, viewers can get a behind-the-scenes look at the proprietary techniques behind Coachtopia’s Upcrushed™ Upcrafted Leather, which uses heat and pressure to transform irregular scraps of leather waste that are left over from Coach production into beautiful, suede-like materials.
Although Silverstein admitted that, like many retail businesses, Coachtopia’s circularity work is still very much in progress, she reaffirmed that the brand “can’t be afraid to take bold if imperfect steps — and to be honest about how far we have to go. It’s our way of using brand storytelling to shed light on bigger issues and to spark conversations that have an impact beyond Coachtopia.”
Advertisement
