Next Coachtopia step plans Coach’s waste materials into production process

Coach is continuing to drive its sustainability journey forward via its Coachtopia product initiative with the brand on Tuesday launching its latest collection and campaign that shows new developments in eco bag-making.

The new Alter/Ego collection comes with a campaign dubbed The Wasted Parts and sees actor and Coachtopia community member Lola Tung starring in a “high-flying short film to celebrate a new range of bags crafted from the leftover leather scraps of iconic Coach styles”. 

The specific leather scraps are left over from the creation of bags including the Tabby, Hampton and Brooklyn styles that might otherwise have gone to landfill. 

The company said it’s “an emotional campaign” and that the collection “marks a bold step forward for Coachtopia in its mission to pioneer a circular economy in fashion, reflecting its ethos of not only making with waste materials, but designing out waste in the first place”.

Coachtopia was originally all about creating bags using waste leather, but its next step now is to carefully plan Coachtopia bags as part of the production process for the mainline Coach bags.

The new Alter/Ego collection comprises five new bag styles, all of which use Coachtopia’s signature Checkerboard Upcrafted Leather technique to reimagine the small and irregular scraps of leather that are left over after specific Coach bag patterns are cut from Coach leather hides. 

The Alter/Ego Checkerboard Shoulder Bag and Hobo Bag are made with the leather scraps left over from making Coach’s Quilted Tabby Shoulder Bag, while the Checkerboard Satchel Bag and Mini Satchel Bag are made with scraps from the Coach Brooklyn Bag, and the Checkerboard Wavy Baguette with the scraps from the Coach Originals Hamptons Bag. 

This means the “collection combines the best of Coach leather quality and craftsmanship with a 59-80% lower carbon footprint than comparable styles made with new materials”. It also highlighted its “exceptional value” with the price of each style “reflecting the production efficiencies of crafting with this so-called ‘waste’ material”.

It’s all part of a much more circular design process with the firm saying that by “designing into these specific production processes, Coachtopia is anticipating future Coach waste and designing it out, deepening the symbiotic relationship between the two brands. This is the latest result of an ongoing feedback loop between Coachtopia and Coach, in which experimental techniques from the circular sub-brand are being implemented at scale in the wider Coach ecosystem — from the use of materials made with recycled leather fibres to the adoption of a more circular and zero-waste mindset in the design and creation of new Coach products”.

Coactopia was originally launched 18 months ago and the company sees the Alter/Ego unveiling as “another step forward [in its]mission to pioneer circularity in fashion by reimagining waste, design and the end of life of our products”.

The driving force of Coachtopia has been Joon Silverstein, the firm’s SVP global marketing and sustainability who’s also head of the eco brand. 

She said: “We’ve gone from making with pre-existing waste to thinking forward to future waste — and finding new ways to design out waste from the outset. Most importantly, thanks to all the experimentation we’ve been doing in Coachtopia, we’ve been able to create scalable processes that will bring the wider Coach brand further along the road to circularity, taking bold steps to drive transformative change.”

So what about the new campaign? It comprises a film directed by Los-Angeles based choreographer and filmmaker C Prinz. In the film Lola Tung plays two alter ego versions of herself, “one a climate-conscious Coachtopian, the other a fashion-forward Coach girl, who are brought together in a high-flying sequence by the magnetic connection between their Coach Quilted Tabby Shoulder Bag and Coachtopia Alter/Ego Shoulder Bag”.