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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  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).

Galbraith and his colleagues have made some impressive advances. In the challenging realm of high-tech, waterproof, breathable fabrics, for example, they eliminated the need for solvent-based adhesives and reinvented the soft-shell fleece. It's featured in a fall 2007 trench coat appropriately called the Shroud of Purrin for its furlike lining (a radical update on the standard nubby fleece), technical innovation (wind- and water-resistant, breathable, light, highly compressible), and flattering cut. At the same time, the designers continue to strive mightily (and transparently) in areas where they fall short, such as the use of laminates and coatings that contain fluorocarbons. As Zilligen puts it, "Sustainability isn't a milepost, it's a process. Complete sustainability is not actually achievable."

In the typical outdoor company, it takes 18 months to come out with a new line--one that generally involves 20% to 30% of the line carrying through from one season to the next, perhaps one or two completely new fabrics, and existing relationships, fit blocks, and patterns. Galbraith, on the other hand, had a "clean whiteboard" and 20 months to produce a design philosophy; create not one, but four collections (each with 100 to 150 separate styles); devise completely new fabrics; and develop product and vendor relationships (with no credit history, no brand, and the most exacting standards).

"I remember sitting down at a card table with two phones and not having much longer than the normal development cycle and thinking, 'Okay, we have to go from zero to everything,'" Galbraith recalls. "It really did feel like we were assembling a plane as we were roaring down the runway. It was a really fast, incredibly energizing, and at times quite scary endeavor."

Where Nau ultimately hopes to achieve liftoff, of course, is in customers' encounters with the products in the stores. Like Nau's clothes, the Webfronts don't scream "green." That's exactly the point, says Jeff Kovel, the up-and-coming architect and founder of the Portland-based Skylab Design Group, which worked with Nau to design the Webfronts. "Our goal was not to have a sustainable aesthetic so much as a sustainable concept." When he and his partners dug into the world of retail rollouts, they "saw it as a throwaway culture," Kovel says. "Stores come into a vanilla shell, rip it out, and start over. They're constantly putting fixtures in, tearing them down, and throwing them away. We thought a lot about how we could change that whole process rather than just use some green materials." The solution: a prefabricated, component-based environment with fully reusable fixtures that are built off-site, shipped in a flat pack, and assembled on-site in the existing store shell.

The main fixtures run the length of either wall in the long, narrow spaces preferred by Nau, starting out as a square grid and gradually deforming into a more organic shape, reminiscent of a canyon wall. Clothes hang well-spaced and gallery-like in berths of varying heights formed by the grid and from aluminum bars fixed to the ceiling. Boulderlike aluminum forms serve as display tables and a cluster of cairns made out of reclaimed wood create an environment for mannequins (made of recyclable resin) in the storefront window. The rechristened "cash bar," which is meant to evoke an outdoor bar or barbecue, forms the center of the store. On one side, sales staff serve customers at two traditional point-of-sale screens, while customers are free to check out unassisted with two touch screens on the other side.

"What does sustainable marketing look like? We haven't completely figured it out, but at the core is storytelling."
--Ian Yolles

On opening day in Boulder, a steady stream of customers pass through the store, a rich mix of thirtysomething moms with babies, twentysomething hipsters, hardened athletes right off the mountain, and retirees with dogs. Few of them "get" the meticulously designed layers of functionality and visual imagery in the store right away. On the other hand, almost everybody gets into a conversation--in fact, with its relaxed vibe and high-energy music selection, the place feels a bit like a cocktail party, even at 11 a.m. The most overheard line on the sales floor is, "That's made of recycled polyester." (Second: "That's made of corn.") And time after time, the 5% giving decision at the point of sale does exactly what it is designed to do: It raises questions, sparks debate, and gets people talking.