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).

After raising $14 million in two early rounds from individual investors, including Seagate chairman and avid outdoorsman Steve Luczo and Nike alum and current Nau chairman Stephen Gomez, Van Dyke needed more to take his company through launch. Facing resistance to a valuation of $51 million (without a dime of revenue), Van Dyke refined his pitch. "I decided we're cheap! Look at what we've done for $14 million: hired great people, developed great products, built fully scalable HR, IT, and supply-chain systems. We're actually a bargain at $51 million." The VCs weren't convinced. But Nau's original backers were still keen--and just as cash-flow concerns grew acute late last year, many of them kicked in more to help the company close a $10.5 million round.

Luczo, for one, likens Nau's retail approach to Apple stores, which today boast the highest sales-per-square-feet in the retail universe. "Clearly, that has a lot to do with the design of the [Apple] stores, the way the staff interacts with customers, and the fact that many buyers walk in predisposed to be fans of the company," he says. "Nau has a lot of the same elements. Is it risky? Absolutely. Nau is at the leading edge of a new kind of retail rollout. It's an aggressive experiment."

Nau does open a store, in Boulder. It's where Nau founder Eric Reynolds, an accomplished mountaineer and one of the original founders of outdoor-gear maker Marmot, spent years incubating the idea of a direct outdoor-clothing company and the Webfront concept. In the summer of 2003, he "had an epiphany" around how those ideas connected up with a much bigger idea about what he calls the "for benefit" corporation, an entity that operates for the benefit of its shareholders, its employees, the environment, the communities it operates in, and the wider world, equally.

Reynolds registered his fledgling company in his home state of Colorado as UTW (which stands for "unf--k the world") and promptly set out to recruit a team to help breathe life into those ideas. (He stepped down as chairman in early 2006.) The first recruit was Mark Galbraith, a former top designer for Patagonia, who speaks in a slow drawl and with a tart wit. For all of the lofty ideas behind Nau, Reynolds realized that "unless we have kick-ass, gorgeous, appealing stuff, none of this would matter."

By all accounts, Galbraith, now Nau's vice president of product design, and his crew of industry veterans have delivered: Their first collection, ranging from $32 boxers to the $248 "urbane jacket," has won glowing praise from Men's Vogue and Rock & Ice alike. Nau spent countless hours wrestling with the question, "Who is our customer?" The distillation of those conversations is what Nau people refer to as "our poppy"--interlocking circles that represent three customer archetypes: the multidimensional outdoor athlete, the "new activist," and the "creatives." In turn, those archetypes map to the three elements of Nau's design philosophy: performance, sustainability, and beauty. The company resolved to achieve all three--a leap in an industry where combining two of those qualities is rare.

"The challenge for us was to blow up baked-in assumptions--if you have fashion, you can't get performance, or if you want sustainability, it won't be good-looking," says Galbraith. "If you care about making a sustainable product, you don't do different sets of clothes for different sports and activities. It's not about the proliferation of SKUs and feeding the consumer disease. It's about designs that are timeless rather than trend-driven and colors that work over multiple seasons and situations."

The big challenge: how to get performance and beauty out of sustainable materials that typically got low marks on both counts. Nau's solution was to grow its own: It designed, developed, and commercialized (with partners such as Malden Mills) 28 of the 30 fabrics used in the first collection-- materials conceived specifically to deliver on the promise of high-tech performance, beauty, and sustainability. It considers all of those new fabrics "open source" and, in keeping with its mission to create positive change, has encouraged its peers and competitors in the industry to make use of them.

Working with Zilligen's sustainable- practices team, the design group established ideal product criteria, developed a restricted-substances list, and established a partner code of conduct, all third-party audited and verified. So Nau uses only renewable natural fibers--100% certified organic cotton and wool from "happy sheep"--recycled and recyclable synthetics, and recyclable renewable resources such as PLA (polyactic acid), the first commercially viable biopolymer (essentially distilled and polymerized cornstarch) with fast-wicking qualities.