MOLI VIEW™

f/d interviews Mark Galbraith, VP of design for Nau, an outerwear company that's got its heart and its business model in the right places. Galbraith was at Patagonia for eight years (and Polartec's Malden Mills and Lowe Alpine Systems before that) before his friend Eric Reynolds roped him into the brave new world of Nau. This is the fourth entry in a five-part series. Think of this as only the beginning, say, the sleeves of the conversation, with collar and torso to follow.

"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.

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