A Deeper Shade of Green

Posted by Polly - June 8th, 2007

I have a piece in the current issue of Fast Company on an exciting young company out of Portland, OR I’ve been following for the last year or so. Nau is an outdoor clothing retailer dreamed up by a bunch of Patagonia and Nike veterans who’ve 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. The team is nothing if not ambitious.

“We’re challenging the nature of capitalism,” contends Nau’s CEO, Chris Van Dyke. A tall, fit 56-year-old, Van Dyke came out of semiretirement–which involved sailing his 40-foot yacht, surfing, and fishing off the coast of Mexico for months at a time–to start Nau. “We started with a clean whiteboard,” he continues. “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.”

In many ways, Nau is the ultimate product of the post-Enron, Web 2.0, neogreen primordial soup. It’s the ultimate high-concept company. The founders took every progressive business buzzword—from corporate social responsibility to grassroots participation to conscious consumption to design thinking—and threw it into mix. Or rather, meticulously mapped those ideas and ideals on a “clean whiteboard” to build a brand with an impeccable backstory—the kind of brand that has a magnetic appeal for those Prius-driving, Whole Foods-shopping, fair-trade-coffee-drinking consumers who happily seek out and pay a premium to companies whose values and worldview they share. The market for “good” things (and the surge of interest in good works on the part of celebrities and business moguls alike—from Bono’s Red campaign to Richard Branson’s Virgin Earth Challenge) has put two crucial questions back on the table:

Can business be a force for positive change in the world? And can we have our affluence and offset it too?

The presumption that it can and that we can is at the heart of Nau’s re-design for business. It’s taken a disruptive point of view about the purpose of business as an active agent of social and environmental change and crafted a potentially disruptive economic model built around a retail approach it calls a “webfront.” The centerpiece of the company’s brand of “aggressive altruism” is a pledge of 5% of sales to charitable organizations dedicated to solving big-ticket environmental and humanitarian problems. That is an unprecedented and audaciously large number. To compare: the gold standard today is 1% of sales, practiced and preached famously by Patagonia, while the average percentage of sales devoted to giving by corporations is just .047%. With projected revenues of $260 million by 2010, Nau predicts it will become one of the largest corporate foundations in the world in just four years, donating a cumulative $25 million. Nau has taken its dedication to good citizenship even further by elevating the interests of “the environment, human rights, public health and safety, the communities in which it operates, and the dignity of its employees” to the same level as the interests of its shareholders in its articles of incorporation filed in Delaware.
And then there are the clothes. Nau’s leaders aren’t just interested in giving back to organizations doing good in the world, they’re committed to being good in the first place. Nau has woven sustainability and good citizenship into every facet of the organization from the ground up—from LEED certified headquarters and retail space to employees’ individual “sustainability pledge.” Nowhere has Nau pushed further on sustainability standards than in the design of its great-looking, high-performance gear. The company has at once broken new ground in its practices—from minimum age for overseas factory workers to material development (28 of the 30 fabrics in Nau’s first collection were created and commercialized by the design team)—and managed to win raves from Men’s Vogue and Rock & Ice alike for the “Helmut Lang-like” aesthetic, high-tech performance qualities, and sustainability characteristics of its product.

The Nau story is just beginning to unfold, but the entrepreneurs and businesspeople everywhere have a lot to learn from the intense thoughtfulness and creative energy of its team. Read the piece here. And don’t miss out on Nau’s blog, The Thought Kitchen.

PermaLink: A Deeper Shade of Green