Introduction
Nearly the future now.

Someone just told me she considers the
week before Christmas the end of the year. "It's all a blur after,
like, the 20th. Then it's a race to buy, wrap, give, cook, clean up,
give thanks, maintain calm, and somewhere in there is that day, and the
presents opening up, which I always dream about the night before as so
many bright tinsel flowers exploding into the room."

I'm going
with it. Regardless of what holiday you celebrate, 'tis the season when
time rushes through a silvery funnel and comes out the other side of
January. Therefore, today is the first of my year. And the theme of
the year: doing good. We at MOLI have declared this the season of
virtuous actions, whether in the form of consumption or gumption, and
I'm hereby extending it for 12 months.

First I'll get over my
premature New Year's hangover. Then, tomorrow morning, I'll embark on a
week-long article all about doing good and looking good and feeling
good while doing it. It's a look at an outerwear company that's got its
heart and its business model in the right places. And makes pretty sexy
stuff: as body-conscious as it is globally conscious. Its website is as
seductive as it is inspiring. Call it Earth-flirt.

The company's called Nau, a Maori word that means, "Welcome, come on in." As in come on into this ultra-warm, technical, gorgeous parka made out of recycled polyester. Come on into the arms of this guy in the super-cozy, modern, but understated sweater.
Come on into this entirely new model of doing business, in which an
outerwear company takes seriously its love of the outdoors and tries to
not screw up the environment anymore than possible. And is it really
more expensive than some other high-end outerwear makers? We'll see. I
think not. This one is self-propelling and self-retailing, and
self-correcting. When it has a problem meeting its own standards, it
doesn't whitewash. It admits it. There are a lot of ways to meet your
own standards, but you have to toe a pretty hard line. And be honest.

Nau
was created to be a company of the future by people who are outside
enough to keep the oxygen flowing to their brains. It strives to be
entirely sustainable, low-impact, small-footprint, minimal carbon
usage, and substantially charitable: Five percent of every single
purchase, be it a hat or snowboard pants, goes to the nonprofit partner
of your choice. If you can't decide between local and far-reaching --
between a food bank in Chicago and Heifer International -- they'll pick
for you. But they never slack on the mission.

A lesson for the year to come.

**

Part One
Lost and Found

Every time I type the word Nau,
which is the name of the Portland-based sustainable and eco-friendly
active- and outerwear manufacturer, I misspell it and write “Now.” The
pun wasn’t lost on the people who started the company, certainly. If
anything, it was seized as a win-win, though perhaps not in that kind
of blatant, '80s me-me speak.

“That was then, this is Nau,” CEO Chris Van Dyke told a reporter during the throes of seeking investors.

Van Dyke is the son of TV star Dick Van Dyke,
and had a do-good streak from an early age, tempered over decades by
some disillusionment: Having witnessed more than a few failures of the
two meanings of "green" trying to find each other, he was waiting, some
say, biding his time until he found another opportunity to align work
to purpose. In one of the charmingly rugged details that lace up the
story of this company, he came off a comfortable semi-retirement on his
sailboat to help steer this very progressive, risky ship.

Nau
is a Maori word for “Welcome, come on in” as in, “Welcome to a brand
new kind of clothing company.” Yesterday, in my cheeky little rhapsody
about the New Year and the Nau, I looked at it from a more intimate
perspective: "Come on into my ever-strong, ever-sustainable,
recycled-polyester or organic-cotton arms."

Today, we're
looking at the business side, but softly. The soft side of a pretty
hard sell when it came to venture capitalists, the money motors that
drive our 2.0 world. Van Dyke's declaration didn't fall on the moneyed
ears the way he'd hoped. But this is a group of undaunted folks. They will summit, and they'll summit their way, even if they have to find another route up Mount Retail.

Flash back to the initial bean sprout a few years ago.

The concept of the company (this was pre-name) came to founder Eric Reynolds as a kind of carpe diem, outerwear brainstorm in 2003. That was a year in which California was hit by megafire, sea temperatures were undeniably rising, and the Bush league was practicing the art of denying everything as usual.

Before the world goes to hell and we lose it all, Reynolds thought, why not build an outerwear company that makes a difference?
This one would have minimal environmental impact, superb aesthetics,
sustainable fabrics, high-performing garments, and a deeply charitable
bent. And one more thing: It would be profitable. Would be; will be.
The time was right, he felt, for recyclable parkas with soul.

Those
I spoke to at Nau mention Reynolds with reverence -- as a visionary,
but not a manager. Among other feathers in his forward-thinking cap was
co-founding Marmot, another outerwear company known for high-end
quality and progressive, elegant design. Reynolds’s first name for his
new venture was UTW, as in “Unfuck the World” (from a Spearhead song). It was a very boomer, very right-on concept, and people began to come on board.

Jump to Portland in 2005, where it was probably raining, and where veterans of the outerwear world (from Patagonia, Nike, the North Face, Marmot)
assembled to chart Nau's course. But there were no spreadsheets, no
business plans, no target-market stats, no patterns or even sketches of
jackets. According to Ian Yolles, Nau's very articulate VP of brand
marketing, “This was anything but a stereotypical startup -- anything
but two guys in a garage.” Sitting round the roundtable were decades
of practical experience on the front lines of some very try-hard,
do-good companies, including a large segment of the brain trust at
Patagonia.

So what did they discuss? I asked Yolles, and I can
hear him say, "Call me Ian, please." Existential questions, he said,
like “Who are we?” and “Forget what’s been done. Forget what apparently
can’t be done. What do we want to do for the world?”

“It’s
a bit counterintuitive,” Yolles admitted on the phone the other day,
“but we really distilled a clear point of view.” Over rounds of coffee
and flip charts, Nau took form. The goal was simple: To change the
world — in whatever way an outerwear company can.

Part Two

Nice and Warm Nau

Nau
is part of the new wave of world-changing, trickle-down and trickle-up
companies that behave like they owe something back to the earth. This
movement believes in conscious commerce. So the old trope of the evil corporation (this dates me, I know, but I remember Reagan, so there) is being replaced by a new trope (a Nau trope) that corporations can help. Can they?

I’m mulling this over; literally wearing
the question, as I stand in a foot of snow in 20 degrees — with a
serious wind chill factor — on the side of a mountain, clad in Nau’s Asylum jacket in a serene shade of blue called "sea."

I’m
in the middle of a Search and Rescue training day, which involves
setting up “problems” for trailing and air-scent dogs in 300 acres of
Shawangunk wilderness in upstate New York. It’s noon but the sun is
casting no warmth, only an icy brightness between the pine and hemlock
stands. I'm playing "subject," which some of us keep insisting should
really be called "victim." But no one's a victim today, except by their
own driven hand. We’ve been running problems since 7 a.m., when we
bundled up and laced our boots and headed into the woods. If we're
cold, it's our fault. No blaming it on the equipment either.

It’s
freezing and beautiful and very, very still. Leaves are clad in ice
like sweaters in cellophane. We have GPS units and compasses and radios
and the mountain is crawling with search dogs and people, so there’s
little chance of being in danger. But underneath that is a more primal
awareness, a palpable sense of smallness, of that usual cliché: We are
mere specks in a vast and unforgiving landscape. Yet despite standing
beneath a hemlock for half an hour, waiting for a sharp-nosed dog to
track me down, I’m not cold. I’m toasty warm. It makes me want to stay
out here and never leave. I look up at the tree tops and feel just
fine.

Can an outerwear manufacturer convince a human being to
replace her unsustainable clothing for sustainable garments -- however
gorgeous, however bright? What about at a ratio of every three items of
silly clothing manufactured quickly in response to a trend, shipped
into retail stores, then bought on impulse, probably on sale, for one
item of very earnest and subtle clothing that is bought on a dreamy
eco-website with great intent and great stories and a sense of purpose?


And if you're not comfortable buying a high-end sustainable
jacket without trying it on, and you happen to live near one of Nau's
four "webfronts," then you can walk into these sustainably designed and
super tech tricked-out retail-as-source-for-good-deed meccas, and try
something on and learn all about it and swipe a card and learn even
more about it, and then either buy it on the spot or save 10 percent
just by ordering the garment to be shipped to you instead. No matter
which way you do it, don't forget that five percent of the purchase goes to a nonprofit "partner for change" (there's a display and interactive area for those too).

How
good can we be? And how good do the clothes have to be before they move
to front and center of our wardrobe? I had another jacket to wear on
training day, my old reliable bright orange baggy shell from an
unmentionable company whose catalogues are as ubiquitous as they are
wasteful, and I never once considered putting it back on. Despite the
zippers of the Asylum jacket being stiffer than I like, and the sleeves
being longer, and the jacket feeling a little heavier, three things
made me fall in love with it:

1. The side pocket alongside the
zipper is big enough for my GPS unit and no bigger. Which means I will
never load the pocket up with anything else and therefore have that
cluttered pocket chaos and will always know where my GPS is. Seems
remarkably purposeful, so intentional, and somewhat European that there
is only enough room, no extra. The pocket is the opposite of American
sprawl and I love it.

2. The sleeves being longer means that
when I have to take my gloves off to dig out the GPS, or get on the
radio, or log time and distance, my hand stays warm. Particularly the
top of my hands, which hate getting cold. And if I need to keep a glove
off and keep the radio handy, I can pull my sleeve down over the radio
and hand, and the whole thing stays toasty.

3. The hood is like
the canopy of a very fancy building. It is like a tent for the head. It
is shaped to surround the head but not block the view. It is taped and
seamed in such a way that nothing scratches. It can be pulled closer,
but it does not come over your eyes like a rude lid. It loves to be a
hood. It agrees to be a hood. And it is strong: When a chuff of snow
collapses off its perch on an overhanging branch and plonks on my head,
I barely feel it. It slides off the head and loses all its sense of
harm or consequence. Same later, with water: The jacket's waterproof
skin is strong as a shark's.

The jacket is superior. It is
engineered. It is thought out. It makes me think less of other jackets
I've had over the years. Far less. So the jacket is starting to do its
job. Which is to take over. I am getting with the program.

Part Three
Mark Galbraith

"I
really felt like we were on the verge, from a technological and market
trend standpoint, to really up the level of sustainability," Galbraith
told me one night. He was talking about the beginning in that
sweepingly broad-stroke, big-picture, grand-gesture way that Nau people
talk, without any note of grandiosity or hubris. He was talking with the clarity of an annual report and the vision of a white board scribble.

But
what I'm gathering is that those wonderful ground-floor brainstorming
sessions that so many corporations have at the get-go did not get
shelved in Nau's case. They did not get red-lighted. They did not get
reality-checked. The head design poobah did not come storming into the
offices — the bottom line LEDing in bright red letters across his
forehead — and tell his design team that they have their heads in the
clouds.

Not at all. The top, in Galbraith's case, has climbed
enough mountains to know that it takes a lot of strength and focus and
grit and teeth-grinding to get your head in the clouds in the first
place. And what some people might dismiss as soft-tissue daydreaming
was in this case a hard commitment to a possibly, probably, much harder
route up.

From the beginning, Galbraith explained,
sustainability meant way more than clothing. It meant the entire
structure of the company. So let's just look at the beginning.

"When
[founder Eric Reynolds] shared the basic business plan with me,"
Galbraith continued in his bright voice, "I felt like we could really
push it and do something crazy. Be completely different about how we do
business."

"So you're seeing design as something far larger than a cut or a color?" I asked. Just checking.

"It's
not guys in berets with a little color palette, sitting in the corner
and sketching," he said. "It's a fundamental approach to tackling a
problem that includes creativity, technical knowledge, engineering,
business structure, planning."

"A holistic view," I offered.

"And if you separate yourself from that, you don't understand what your impact is," he said.

I
waited. I could hear his wheels turning on the phone. Then he gave me
three words I've been walking around with ever since: the mantra.

"Design has consequences, " he said.

Part Four
Looks Like Lang, Feels Like —

I am on an island the middle of Park Avenue on the Upper East Side of
Manhattan, waiting for the light to change, carrying a shopping bag of
presents for my city-dwelling kin. To stand here is to submit to a
strange hiccup in the momentum of this neighborhood of wealth and
forward motion. We're a mixed, impatient cluster: me, a sleek mother
and her pink-parka'd, pigtailed daughter, a dowager in mink and day
heels, a fifty-ish man in running clothes.

Normally I
chameleon into more urban garb for city visits. But this time it was a
mad rush from walking my dog to rushing out the door for the trip down
the mountains. But I happened to be wearing The Jacket. Which is
keeping me warm as I wait in the icy rain on the island among the
millionaires.

"Is that Lang?" I hear from behind me.

It's the mother. As her daughter tap dances in place, she's giving my jacket the eye.

"It's
not Lang," I say. A storm of yellow cabs whiz by, flinging dirty spray.
Little gray drops pearl up and roll off my jacket's impervious skin.

"What, then?" she says. "I'm looking for something exactly like that."

That's how it starts, all weekend. People give The Jacket approving, longing gazes, trying to label it.

"Is it Japanese?"

"Jil Sander?"

"Looks
like a cross between urban, like Kenneth Cole, maybe, and snowboard. Is
someone [meaning a designer] doing a thing with a snowboard company?"

In my conversations with Nau's
head designer Mark Galbraith, he emphasized Nau's goal of designing a
sense of movement and mystery into the clothes. Now in his late
forties, he has decades of outerwear experience behind him and speaks
with the energetic articulations of a designer who views his job as
both an art form and a mission.

"Clothing should not be a
one-shot read," he stated, expressing unadulterated scorn at snowboard
gear that makes the wearer look like "they're jousting with some
armored suit" and cycling gear featuring "crazy sublimation prints."

Unlike
some designer's declarations, which have all the staying power of
confetti, Galbraith's intentions are actually contained the way he
wanted them to be. The clothes ask you to ask. They have a Garbo thing
going on: classic, great lines, eluding category. They have a swiftness
to them: They look streamlined, like you'd go fast.

Perhaps
Galbraith's insistence on designed-in intrigue has stuck because
everyone I've spoken to who works at the company shares this vision,
from the writer in Portland (Otis Rubottom) to the shop manager in
Chicago (Ashley Pfannenstiel) to the male "voice" at the end of the
toll-free number (Mark McCambridge, who assured me that his female
cohort would say exactly the same things). Nau is an intensely
consistent point of view. Everyone talks about the clothing as being an
invitation to a closer read, to a conversation. By looking like but
unlike anything else, each piece works as a form of intimate viral
marketing. It might look vague, but that's totally on purpose.

And
the sense of movement Galbraith speaks of has to do with the body's
movement, but also with moving from place to place, as in moving from
the icy woods to the fancy elevator.

That's where I am when the
professional stylist who lives in the same building as my father (and
bakes him cookies often: rich, buttery, very fattening cookies I doubt
she allows herself to eat) glides in. She drops her boutique bags on
the elevator floor and blinks brightly at The Jacket.

"Whoa," she says. She squints as she fingers the material. "Nice tooth. Not Calvin, but it reminds me."

I
tell her what it is, who the head designer is, where the company is.
She says she reads Lang, Jacobs, Watanabe. I tell her those are
designers Galbraith cited as favorites.

"Then he's brilliant,"
she says with a snap of her head. "He makes The North Face look like
Wal-Mart." She purrs at the name of the dusty, rich blue: sea. "How
utterly eco," she says. Which leads to a conversation about the New
Green Designers. "They're the new moderns. They're going to make Ralph
[Lauren] look like a sweatshop merchant," she says.

I am wearing
sustainable, durable, technical outerwear, but I wind up feeling like a
representative of the future, writing down "nau.com"
on napkins and the backs of business cards, explaining the importance
of sustainable industry. Inversely, I am forced to come forward and
play logo to my logo-less gear. And forced to state my position in the
world.

I think of that old saying: You are what you eat. In this case, I am what I wear. Design has consequences.