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.

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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 .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. Embedded in the back wall of every Webfront are two touch screens dedicated to documentary-quality storytelling (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 extension, 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 factory 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?

"Every element in our business is an opportunity to turn traditional business notions inside out."
--Chris Van Dyke

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 rubbery 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' offices, wowing potential investors with the product only to be told the business model was insane.