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Circularity

Designing in a linear system

In a linear fashion system, we design forwards. Design starts with a vision of an ideal product. A sketch is made, materials are created to fit it, and then it is produced, optimizing it for a single life. Typically, this means the creation of new materials (which accounts for 38% of the global fashion industry's greenhouse gas emissions).*

Designing in a circular system

In our circular fashion system, we design backwards. We start with materials that already exist—and design in reverse, creating products that are intended from the outset to both solve a problem (for example, the problem of leather scrap waste) and to live multiple lives (in order to avoid landfill). We’ve made this mindset shift part of our Made Circular principles.

From waste to raw material

But what does this look like in practice? When it comes to materials, designing backwards means we start not by thinking of the materials we want, but the materials that already exist in the world (a staggering amount). These pre-existing materials might otherwise have gone to landfill, whether it’s leather offcuts from Coach’s own production processes, scraps from the wider leather industry, or post-consumer plastics, such as bottles and packaging.

By starting with the problem of different waste sources and designing backwards to find solutions, we’ve created innovations like our UpcraftedTM Leather, made from Coach leather production scraps, Coachtopia Leather, made with recycled leather scraps from tanneries and Coachtopia Loop, a collection of products made with 100% recycled post-consumer PET plastic**—each of which was created to find uses for existing waste. We’ve flipped our mindset, from seeing waste as an unfortunate by-product to working with it as an inspiring raw material.

From one life to many lives

But it doesn’t stop there. When we talk about designing backwards, we’re also describing the way we create every Coachtopia product with multiple lives in mind—starting from the problem of end of life. Thanks to insights from Coach’s (Re)Loved program—which has given a second life to over 30,000 bags across North America, Japan and China since it launched in 2021—we’ve identified the elements of traditional luxury craftmanship that make the process of giving a product a second life, whether through repair or remaking, labor intensive—and therefore challenging to scale.

Rethinking luxury codes

We’ve had to rethink many of the codes of traditional luxury craftsmanship—another flip in mindset. For example, in many luxury bags, the handles—and the hardware that fixes them in place—are sandwiched in between the shell and the lining, which are then glued together, stitched and edge painted. This means that when the handle (often the first thing to wear on a bag) comes back for repair, we have to take the bag almost entirely apart—a process which requires highly skilled time-consuming labor.

In Coachtopia, instead of sandwiching the handles, the handles are applied on top of the shell and lining, with removable screws and their backings exposed. This means that when the handles need to be repaired or removed, it only takes minutes. The reason this practice isn’t more widespread? Because it’s considered unrefined to show the back of hardware—it’s just “not luxury.” But we are challenging those notions by making the visible back of hardware a design code in Coachtopia.

It's all in the details

This is just one of the many ways we are designing products for multiple lives. Others include the laced seams and proportional cutting on our Re-Laceable Tote—which allow it to be easily disassembled into panels and re-cut into second generation products—and the monomaterial design approach of our Coachtopia Loop products, which facilitates easy recycling as part of Coachtopia’s closed loop system.

A commitment to innovation

Designing backwards is a new idea in our industry. Though we’ve made many discoveries so far, we’re expecting to make many more as we continue not just to craft Coachtopia products, but also to reuse and reimagine them. We’ve committed to take back any Coachtopia product, whatever its age and condition, to help ensure every product can stay out of landfill and live multiple lives. The more we do this, the more we will learn about ways to scale the processes of disassembly, repair, remaking and reuse—and the better we’ll be able to design backwards as we move towards our goal of a circular future for fashion.

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