Fashion house Coach launches new sub-brand with plans for full circularity

The sub-brand has now launched in the UK, Canada and the US and will expand to Asia later this year. Its product line is aimed at Gen Z consumers and features an all-gender collection of bags, accessories, ready-to-wear clothes and footwear made with recycled, repurposed and renewable materials – with a commitment to take back every product at end-of-life for reuse or recycling.

The sub-brand is based on the principles of its trademarked ‘Made Circular’ design philosophy – a set of principles that inform how the sub-brand designs, crafts, and reuses products.

Coachtopia design principles

The Made Circular™ design principles focus on three areas. Firstly, the pieces are created with recycled, repurposed or renewable materials with the goal to avoid the use of virgin materials. The production either uses waste from the Coach production process or a minimum of 50 per cent recycled leather scraps from tanneries.

Other materials used across the range include a 95 per cent plus recycled cotton for hoodies and T-shirts, a 70 per cent plus recycled resin for bag straps and hardware, a 100 per cent recycled polyester for canvas totes and webbing on footwear, and a 40 per cent bio-based renewable Sugarcane EVA for footwear soles.

Secondly, the items are created to have multiple lives with a design that can be more easily disassembled, repaired and reimagined for future lives. This includes removable screw-back hardware, detachable handles and straps, binding or seam-out constructions and mono-material design.

Finally, Coachtopia aims to create circular pathways by taking back all products in the sub-brand, regardless of age or condition which is a prerequisite for the original (RE)Loved takeback scheme. The brand will find ways to use them through restoration, upcrafting, remaking and recycling. The products are exchanged in retail stores for credit which is calculated based on the original price and current condition.

Each product comes with a unique digital passport – accessed via an embedded NFC chip – that gives customers transparency into its materials, design and impacts. This digital passport also provides the means to follow the product's journey as it is repaired, restored, and reused.

“Proving the need to design for circularity from the start”

Joon Silverstein, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing, Creative and Sustainability at Coach and Head of Coachtopia, commented: “Circularity is about reimagining not just the product lifecycle, but the relationship between brand, planet and consumer. That's why we've created Coachtopia as both a discovery lab to pioneer circularity in fashion and a collaborative platform for change.

"We know that to transform our impacts, we need to fundamentally shift mindsets – from seeing opportunity in waste to designing backwards to taking a more open-source approach to creativity.

“We've built Coachtopia as an entirely new world within Coach – an agile start-up with a mission to reimagine the end-to-end system. We're building it not just for our consumers, but with them, inviting a growing community of hundreds of Gen Z individuals to join us on our Slack channel, collaborate with us on products, take centre stage in our content and campaigns – and reimagine our future together."

The sub-brand is a continuation of Coach’s ‘(Re)Loved’ program which launched in April 2021 and offers a takeback scheme for old Coach bags. It has now given a second life to over 20,000 bags. The brand says that (RE)Loved has given insights into the aspects of traditional luxury craftsmanship that make circularity challenging – proving the need to design for circularity from the start. Coachtopia aims to take up this challenge, innovating through rapid prototyping to form a continuous feedback loop with Coach for mutual progress.