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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Which is the job of Ian Yolles, Nau's 50-year-old vice president of marketing. Yolles, a wiry surfer who sports a diamond stud in his ear and who has had a poppylike career as executive director of Outward Bound Canada, director of social inventions at the Body Shop, and director of marketing at Patagonia, is given to impressive rhetorical flights of fancy when it comes to his brand. But for all the talk about building brand and culture at Nau, Yolles and his team are applying a decidedly low-key approach. Just as the design team decided to forgo a logo on its clothes, the marketing team doesn't seem that interested in the standard tools of the trade, such as advertising, promoting store openings, and celebrity product endorsements.

"You'll hear the word 'sustainability' around here a lot," Yolles says. "At a certain point, we stumbled on the question, What would sustainable marketing look like? And it stumped us. We haven't completely figured it out yet, but at the core is storytelling. There are all kinds of interesting, authentic stories embedded in our people, their passions, the ideas behind the company, and a wider, emerging community of people who reflect the same ethos."

Yolles and crew have created a range of mechanisms and venues for that storytelling, from the Nau blog, The Thought Kitchen; to The Collective (a Web archive of documentary-style video storytelling showcasing Nau's heroes, such as Dee Williams, a woman who traded in her house for a tiny, environmentally friendly dwelling the size of a garden shed); to the Partners for Change Web pages; to the stores themselves, which are hosting a series of salonlike evenings featuring local storytellers, including alpinist/writer/photographer Topher Donahue in Boulder and bike evangelist/blogger/citizen activist Jonathan Maus in Portland.

If it all sounds a little self-conscious and bloodless (compared with, say, the slow and organic evolution of Patagonia out of founder Yvon Chouinard's own close-to-the-earth lifestyle and desire to create better, more-sustainable tools for climbers), that's the danger of bolting out of the gates with audacious ambitions and an aura of goodness. People will poke holes.

Van Dyke gets that. "We're launching this company into a culture of cynicism--and it's cynical for good reason. Business hasn't behaved itself. Our challenge is how to deal with that by designing from the ground up to try to do better in every area we can think of--and then making sure we're utterly transparent about how we're doing and where we fall short."

That doesn't mean Nau intends to pander for legitimacy. "One of our greatest goals is that a significant number of people really hate us," Van Dyke continues. "That's just perfect. You try to please everybody and you end up being nothing. The sign of a really powerful brand is one that is loved and embraced and equally hated. The deeper you pound your stake into the sand about your values, the more of both the love and the hate you're going to generate. That's what makes it exciting."

Polly LaBarre is coauthor of Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win.

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