Nau in Fast Company
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 06. 5.07
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.
Nau advertises on TreeHugger, and the stuff looks pretty good in the ads and in Warren's posts. We learned from the June issue of Fast Company that "Based on a shared conviction that, in addition to generating profit, companies have an equal responsibility to create positive social and environmental change, the Nau team set out to reinvent the way people shop, reshape the outdoor category, redesign the corporation--and inspire the wider business community to do the same."
Says CEO Chris Van Dyke, (son of Dick)""We believed every single operational element in our business was an opportunity to turn traditional business notions inside out, integrating environmental, social, and economic factors. Nau represents a new form of activism: business activism."
Their stores act more as showrooms than stores; customers get a discount if they use it as a fitting room and then have it delivered, because the stores can be smaller and carry less inventory. They give 5% of their gross to charity and the customer gets to chose where it goes.
Van Dyke says "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."
And we thought it was just about clothing. ::Fast Company
I hope these folks are delivering their clothing by sustainable transportation. Otherwise, you'd have trouble convincing me of the math on how delivering EVERY single piece of clothing to their destination is more environmentally friendly than having someone buy the item at the store and taking it home as part of their natural way home, sometimes by sustainable forms of transportation. Great idea for the store otherwise, though.
MT,
Thanks for your interest in Nau.
We built our company by consciously considering ways to minimize our negative impacts but we’re far from perfect and continue to look for ways to decrease our impact. We’re committed to supporting and helping expand the options for energy efficient and environmentally friendly shipping and transportation options, not just for our use but for everyone
By offering customers the option to ship their purchase to their home directly and encouraging them to utilize free ground shipping from our centralized distribution center, we’re alleviating the need for shipping mass amounts of product and storing extensive back stock in our Webfront retail stores. This enables us to have smaller retail stores and rely on warehouses. We have not yet completed a life cycle analysis; however, The Center for Energy & Climate Solutions has concluded that warehouses are much more efficient than retail stores - they store more product per square foot, and use as little as 1/16th of the energy to operate. Furthermore, with our model, at season’s end, less stock will be shipped back to our distribution center reducing fossil fuel consumption, solid waste from packaging and emissions required to move that product around.
We’re also engaging with our logistics providers to track the magnitude of our green house gas emissions that result from shipping our products and to make continual improvements and efficiencies in the supply chain in order to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Nau has joined the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) “SmartWay Transport Partnership” Program, a voluntary partnership between EPA and businesses aimed at reducing fuel consumption as well as greenhouse gases and other air emissions.
We ship our customers’ purchases in compact bags that use recycled content (50% post-consumer materials). We made this decision based on the results of a study commissioned by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. EPA. The study analyzed over 20 packaging options and found that shipping items in bags resulted in the smallest environmental impact, including lower consumption of fossil fuels, less solid waste, and lower emissions. Corrugated boxes were found to have a much larger impact.
In an effort to reduce the impact of the emissions associated with shipping our products from the factories to our distribution center, and from the distribution center to our Webfront stores and customers' homes, we’ve partnered with Climate Trust (www.carboncounter.org) to purchase Carbon Offsets for 100% of those emissions. Examples of the carbon offset programs include reforestation, forest conservation projects and energy efficiency projects. We are also purchasing enough wind and solar energy credits to offset all the power needed for our retail stores and office from Bonneville Environmental Foundation (www.b-e-f.org).
Eric Brody
Sustainability Manager
Nau, Inc.