Well, not just yet, but soon. If you look at the Nau website you’ll see that Nau is about to take on it’s 2.0 shell come August 1, 2008. From the looks of it they sort of tried what Black Diamond did of Chouinard Equipment, that is an employee buy out of assets and brand, but fell short a bit to where Horny Toad stepped in to cover the difference. My guess is that it was a big difference.
Enough has been hashed out about why Nau went down in a blaze of flashy web code and stores to match, but the concept of building and selling clothing in a responsible way that keeps the earth as priority number one which they helped push along was something that I knew was powerful enough to last. It looks like they may be around for good this time.
Nau will unveil a Fall/Holiday 2008 line and will be working with select retailers who share their vision and philosophy.
True to the statement on the Nau homepage, their first order of business is to fire up the Nau blog called the Thought Kitchen. On there they state what some would call the obvious direction they should have taken the first go around rather than the Dot Com style of brand building that burned through funding at impressive rates.
We’re going to start small. With a tight crew, we’ll focus on product development and what we like to call ‘story development.’ We’ll also focus on our ecommerce business once we re-launch the site for our new Fall/Holiday 2008 line. We will not be operating our own brick-and-mortar stores, but instead we’ll be developing relationships with select retailers who would like to partner with us.
From Horny Toad’s site they say of this move:
6 weeks ago Nau closed up shop due to some financing issues. But they have many, many fans and good friends who didn’t want them to go away. Horny Toad stepped in and bought most of Nau’s remaining assets and hired a small talented team from the original Nau who will now (no pun intended) continue to create incredible product and keep alive the core philosophies. We’re calling the new Nau Version 2.0 and it will launch August 1, 2008.
June 27, 2008 - 3:50 pm - posted by Brig Graff
So many people have idealistic views of what would be a cool business, and then they get funding on their fervent visions and end up getting out there & making some missteps. I am really glad to see Nau surviving!!! I will definitely be picking up some of their stuff shortly.
I also think there are little ways that lots of people can be green, instead of just being consumerist. Buying a jacket made from recycled materials, like Nau jackets are, is one thing. But what about Reduce and Re-use, not just Recycle? Check this out: http://www.overstock.com/Sports-Toys/Golf-Balls/2233/cat.html
Check out a place like Overstock.com, which has tons of bags of golf balls that are re-usable. They also sell tons of cheap-but-solid re-furbished electronics. And they also have last year’s models of other items that would otherwise go to the junk heap. Of course, the vast majority of their stuff is brand-new. But it’s always good to pick up re-usable stuff like that & put it to use, rather than put out demand for brand-new stuff. That’s my 2 cents…
June 27, 2008 - 5:29 pm - posted by Brig Graff
In fact, I don’t know if I could substantiate it but I heard that Prada is so conscious of not letting its brand get diluted by being sold at discount shops that it actually piles all of its un-sold merchandise at the end of the year and burns it. It doesn’t want anyone to get it cheap, or to have last year’s unsold merchandise on clearance competing with this year’s.
WHAT A WASTE — if it’s true (it might be a different luxury clothing company, but it was the chief clothing buyer for a large retailer that told me). Talk about arrogance, and total disregard for the environment to spend all sorts of resources (not to mention child labor or something like it) to build something and then just burn it at the end of the year.