Leap Of Faith

Flight crew: Nau executives Ian Yolles (top), vice president of marketing; Jil Zilligen, vice president of sustain­ability; Chris Van Dyke (bottom), CEO; and Mark Galbraith (right), vice presi­dent of product design.

Duds for all: To achieve the right combination of performance, sustainability, and beauty, Nau actually created 28 of the 30 fabrics used in its first collection. It’s keeping those creations “open source,” encouraging industry peers to use them.

Related Stories

• A Fashion Statement that Takes a Stand
  Nau aims to set its clothing apart by designing around a triple imperative: beauty, sustainability, and performance. Here, head designer Mark Galbraith unfolds the story behind a signature Nau item--the women's Courier Windshirt ($180).

Somewhere between 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 magazine), the message started sinking in: The cultural conversation around the environment, social change, and human rights is approaching maximum 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 goal of zero waste by 2025--the ranks of the die-hard hemp-and-granola crowd have been overwhelmed by the Prius -driving, Whole Foods --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 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 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 every 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 every 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 encourages customers to 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 inventory dramatically, and slash operating expenses. Plus, it consumes less energy and materials.