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For all of fashion’s talk about sustainability, no major brand has been willing to admit it has no idea how it’s going to achieve its goals, or that it needs to upend most of its existing processes — and be willing to experiment, make mistakes and then learn from them — in order to do so.
With its Gen Z-targeted sub-brand Coachtopia, Tapestry-owned leather goods brand Coach may be the first.
Brands haven’t moved past low-stakes sustainability commitments, but bigger change doesn’t happen if no one goes first.
“Brands rarely create opportunities to pull back the curtain and explain what the iterative process, of attempting to become circular, actually looks like in practice,” says Aditi Mayer, who calls herself a visual storyteller and climate activist. She is also a member of Coachtopia’s “beta community” — a network of Gen Z individuals across North America, Japan, Europe and now in China “who are feeding their opinions and ideas into Coachtopia products, messages and concepts” — and narrates the brand’s new docuseries, “The Road to Circularity”. “I thought it was really powerful for a brand to pull that curtain back and show a work in progress, and show the logistics of what it means to be circular, both on a collecting and sorting waste level, but also what it means to then design backwards based on a finite set of materials.”
The use of waste as the starting point for product design, rather than a by-product at the end of it, has been one of the defining aspects of Coachtopia since its launch last April. Simple in theory, the concept requires almost a complete reversal of the supply chain — a major undertaking for a brand with complex and firmly established production processes.
“I speak with businesses about these undertakings and it’s so complex, it brings people to tears,” says Rachel Kibbe, CEO of Circular Services Group and lead of the policy-focused American Circular Textiles Group. “The complexities of reversing a global supply chain, and commercialising it, are monumental. What they’re trying to do is excruciating, and making it trendy is huge. Because no one else is making it trendy.”
Real change means getting “disruptive and uncomfortable”
There are a few things about Coachtopia that could potentially — if executed well and over the long term — make it a case study for the type of drastic change that fashion needs to embrace.
“We realised that, to truly transform our impacts, we would have to address the core challenge of fashion, which is that it is a linear and therefore unsustainable system,” says Joon Silverstein, SVP, global marketing and sustainability at Coach and head of Coachtopia. “We had to ultimately face a hard truth — which is that [the work we were doing at Coach and Tapestry] isn’t sufficient… We can’t just improve the system we already have. We have to rethink it.”
The brand may paint an unnecessarily glossy sheen over some of what it’s doing, particularly in the case of its new docuseries that aims to take customers behind the scenes to see “rarely documented aspects of the global fashion industry”, but still feels surface level. Even so, Coachtopia is engaging in initiatives that are rooted in a spirit of curiosity, experimentation and collaboration — including a willingness, in some cases, to hand over control — and the industry would do well to pay attention to them.
First, Coachtopia has asked the creative team at KH Exports, one of its longest-standing suppliers, to work with its designers to iterate and prototype styles based on using waste. “We are designing backwards — starting from the problem we are trying to solve,” says Silverstein. “What is available at KH helps inform our design process back at our headquarters, and not the other way around.”
Mayer adds that by asking a supplier to come up with designs, Coachtopia has opened up opportunities to learn from cultures or artisan communities it may not have engaged with before. “A major takeaway for me was the culturally informed way that waste is used as a resource in India. The designers showed examples of recycled rugs and bathmats — textile factories will collect little pieces of T-shirt waste and create these products, and that was kind of like a blueprint to think about what they could do with Coachtopia,” she says. “To see how you can operationalise ideas like that into something like Coachtopia, in a legacy brand, was very special for me. As storytellers, we can point to certain cultures that have a completely different way of looking at waste — and then question, how can the dominant fashion industry create the lure or demand for a circular system?”
Coachtopia is also soliciting input and feedback in the form of its beta community from young, independent designers and sustainability influencers — such as Mayer, climate activist and artist Maya Penn, climate activist and creator Caulin Donaldson (aka Trash Caulin), and graphic designer Sabrina Lau — some of whom have a reputation not for selling fashion, but demanding more and better from it. The role of influencers involves a fairly slippery slope, with the need and potential for exposure on one hand and the risk of greenwashing, or worse, on the other. However, if Coach listens to its community and acts on its recommendations, it will have identified something that many brands haven’t: its own internal teams don’t have all the answers and that it’s counterproductive to think or act as though they do.
“What I hope this documentary imparts is the importance that brands take a more vulnerable approach to what the journey of evolution looks like. It can be scary for brands understandably, but I think in this very critical hour, we know brands need to embody a certain sense of urgency and agility,” says Mayer. “We know that the linear fashion model is broken. Why is it so hard for brands then to actually embody circularity? Showing the logistical processes and the obstacles is incredibly important. [It’s important for] brands to let folks in.”
Coachtopia is also actively experimenting within the supply chain and modelling the fact that experimentation and innovation will come with mistakes and imperfections along the way — and that’s OK, as long as there is transparency and their efforts remain focused on genuine progress and not marketing or other short-term wins.
What can’t get lost in the conversation is that fashion has to aim for end goals that align with planetary boundaries — and incremental sustainability projects often do not, says Anna Sacks, legislative chair at the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board. Sacks also posts dumpster-dive hauls to social media, including the TikTok video of Coach product destruction that went viral in 2021. Her criticisms are not specific to Coach, but relate to the industry as a whole and its lacklustre response to the urgent moment the world is in.
“If someone is making an effort, I do think it’s important to acknowledge their effort — and to say that making an effort is the least you can do. That should be the baseline,” says Sacks. “But I think it’s important to not glorify efforts that are serving, ultimately, to uphold the same mythical infinite growth system. It’s not just about Coach, it’s about every single fashion brand or other corporation that’s making objects.”
Silverstein acknowledges that everyone may not agree with the Coachtopia approach. “But we believe it’s critical to drive progress towards a more circular — and zero waste — future,” she says. “There’s so much uncharted territory in what we’re doing… By nature, rethinking the practices and mindsets of our current, linear fashion industry — underpinned by mindsets that have been deeply embedded in our culture since as far back as the Industrial Revolution — will feel disruptive and uncomfortable.”
Disruption, discomfort and even mistakes are not only OK, says Kibbe of Circular Services Group; they’re necessary. “Mistakes are part of the learning process,” she says. “It is important that we’re informed and that we support [companies that are] fundamentally trying to make shifts in their business. Because if we fault them every step of the way, as they try to take on this enormous task, we can cut them off at the legs before they even get started.”
The realities of recycled leather
In October 2023, Volkan Yilmaz, known on social media as Tanner Leatherstein, published a video claiming that “Coachtopia Leather” (Coach’s name for its leather made using tannery scraps) is not “real” leather. In seconds, he unboxes a brand-new Coachtopia Ergo bag and tears it apart at the seams, scraping the leather to its core to evaluate the quality of materials and the bag’s construction. “Upon cutting it, I realised it’s PU [polyurethane] backed with wet blue waste,” he tells Vogue Business.
Coach doesn’t deny the fact that Coachtopia Leather does not feel or function like traditional virgin leather. According to the brand, that’s by design. Silverstein says that Coachtopia Leather is the brand’s attempt to utilise wet blue leather scraps, produced at the tannery level, and that for the time being they use synthetic substances to bind those scraps together. The company is trying to refine the process so that it can be either 100 per cent leather or 100 per cent bio-based, she says, but they wanted to keep the ball moving in the meantime.
“We’ve prioritised progress over perfection,” says Silverstein. They’re attempting to choose recycled materials over using new virgin leathers, she insists, both to make use of waste materials and to reduce the carbon footprint of the final product. “Rather than waiting until we had developed the perfect 100 per cent recycled leather solution, we decided to launch with Coachtopia Leather — which, by using at least 50 per cent recycled leather scraps, already represents a significant step forward in advancing circularity.”
For Yilmaz, though, turning to petroleum-based chemicals does not count as progress. “Innovation, in my understanding, needs to solve a problem without creating new ones,” he says. It’s extra unfortunate in his view, because of the contrast with main-line Coach. “It’s one of the best brands out there. It gives you really good-quality leather, quality craftsmanship for an insanely good price. I’m a fan and customer of their main work,” he says. “I think the Coachtopia initiative is a little bit too much. Maybe it’s too early, and they haven’t gotten to the point they intended yet,” he says.
The “yet” is part of the crux here: does Coachtopia have a promising innovation in the pipeline, and it’s a matter of seeing it through until it is a full sustainability solution? Or is the use of PU to recycle leather scraps another gimmick taking advantage of the growing buzz around recycled and upcycled materials?
Silverstein says that Coach has partnered with materials startup Gen Phoenix to develop the recycled leather for Coachtopia, and recognises there are still unknowns because the task is so monumental. The hope is that they can pool their resources and expertise to develop a solution that will benefit the entire industry, she says. “Whereas Coach might typically partner with suppliers who already have proven scale to meet the current needs of our global business, in this case, we partnered and invested in a growing company based on a shared future vision and road map.”
There’s a bigger question here, however. The lack of straightforward answers for some sustainability challenges, and the uncertainty regarding what solutions will bear out and what ones will fail, point to one of the most vexing questions that the industry at large needs to grapple with: how, and when, should brands talk about the initiatives they’re engaging in, and how open do they need to be?
A decade ago, says Kibbe, most of fashion’s sustainability focus was rooted in marketing more than substance. Efforts have picked up, thankfully, and the work is more important than the talk, but that doesn’t mean communication is unimportant. The key is to keep it honest — and focused on substance, not marketing value. “I’d rather teams figure out their sustainability strategy, put in all that footwork and share what’s genuinely true. Maybe part of the question is, how much do we want brands to reveal before they’re ready, as they’re going through these really challenging tasks of fundamentally changing their business models?”
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