Coach is taking a different path to promote its Coachtopia circular fashion collection.
Wednesday, the brand will launch a new docuseries, “The Road to Circularity,” that goes behind the scenes to shine a light on rarely documented aspects of the global fashion industry.
The first episode is hosted by visual storyteller, sustainable fashion advocate and Coach ambassador Aditi Mayer, who travels to India to highlight one of the companies that collaborated with Coach on the Coachtopia line.
“Since the founding of Coachtopia, we’ve been working closely with a wide range of inspiring young leaders through our beta community — and we have heard how frustrating fashion’s lack of transparency can be to this generation,” said Joon Silverstein, senior vice president of global marketing and sustainability at Coach, and head of Coachtopia. “That’s why we launched this docuseries, ‘The Road to Circularity,’ to go places where fashion doesn’t typically go, to explore the challenges facing our industry, and to show what it means to reconsider the usual fashion narratives and systems with circularity in mind. We’re excited to share our work-in-progress because we know that to tackle climate change, we can’t be afraid to take bold if imperfect steps — and to be honest about how far we have to go. It’s our way of using brand storytelling to shed light on bigger issues and to spark conversations that have an impact beyond Coachtopia.”
In Episode One, titled “Making With Waste,” Mayer travels to Chennai, India, to visit KH Exports, a family-run leather manufacturing company that has been working with Coach since 1987 and was charged with reimagining the brand’s leather waste for Coachtopia. The film shows the production processes, from the sorting of waste in a leather scrap yard, through to product prototyping, design and production.
The film shows the techniques behind the creation of Coachtopia’s Upcrushed Upcrafted Leather, which, using heat and pressure, transforms irregular scraps of leather waste leftover from Coach production into suede-like materials, each with a unique pattern and finish.
“It’s startling to think that, because of our cultural mindset around perfection, the natural grain of leather can be seen as a defect, leading to more waste,” Mayer said to the KH team. “It makes me realize that circularity is not just about changing the way we make, but changing the way we think.”
The series will continue to tell similar stories, Coach said, in the quest to provide more visibility about how fashion products are produced.
“Coachtopia began with the inquiry of whether we can minimize the use of virgin raw materials in fashion,” Mayer said. “It’s been fascinating learning about how that quest translates to every part of the supply chain: from sorting, designing to quality control. It reveals how circularity isn’t just a shift in operations, it also demands that brands and storytellers alike champion a new culture: one that rewrites how we view ‘waste.’”
The first episode was made in partnership with production company Special Order and director Christina Burchard, and will be released on Coachtopia’s social channels. New episodes will follow later this year.
