Coach’s Gen Z Offshoot Coachtopia to Launch at The Grove, Other Markets

Meet Coachtopia: Coach’s aggressive path to courting the Gen Z consumer with a brand offshoot focused on circularity and sustainability. 

The new brand pushes sustainable concepts to the forefront—circularity, recycled, repurposed and renewable—and will serve as a test on whether this new “start-up,” as the company put it, within Coach can go from idea incubator to an overhaul of the luxury brand’s sourcing, design and development processes. 

“Circularity is about reimagining not just the product lifecycle, but the relationship between brand, planet and consumer,” said Joon Silverstein, the head of Coachtopia and Coach’s senior vice president of global marketing, creative and sustainability, in a statement. “That’s why we’ve created Coachtopia as both a discovery lab to pioneer circularity in fashion and a collaborative platform for change.” 

So why not just do that under the Coach brand, which has already been dabbling with repurposing used products the past couple years? 

“We know that to transform our impacts, we need to fundamentally shift mindsets—from seeing opportunity in waste to designing backwards to taking a more open-source approach to creativity,” Silverstein went on to say. “We’ve built Coachtopia as an entirely new world within Coach—an agile start-up with a mission to reimagine the end-to-end system.” 

To make good on its ambitious goals, Coach is tapping Gen Z to get there. 

Silverstein said the company’s working alongside a “community of hundreds of Gen Z individuals” to collaborate on Coachtopia and also be featured in the brand’s creative for marketing and advertising. 

Further, Coach made it clear Coachtopia is “designed for and with a new generation of consumers passionate about addressing the climate crisis and determined to drive change.”

Details and Distribution

In some ways Coachtopia breathes new life into the Coach (Re)Loved program, which was started in 2021 to repurpose Coach products. The company said the new brand “builds upon” the learnings of (Re)Loved. 

Coachtopia products are made with leather from Coach scraps, along with recycled leather from tanneries, plastic waste used for resin handles, thread made from recycled polyester and denim deadstock. The idea is no new, or virgin, materials are used in the process. 

Materials information will be made accessible to consumers through an embedded NFC chip on a “digital passport” that comes with every Coachtopia piece. The chip provides information on materials and impact, but will also follow the piece throughout its repair and reuse. 

The launch collection includes genderless bags, accessories, ready-to-wear and footwear that’s available through Coach’s online shop. 

It rolls out to brick-and-mortar Coach stores, beginning with Spitafields in London on Saturday. That will be followed next month with Coach stores at The Grove in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Miami and Selfridges in the U.K. The Asia market will see Coachtopia later this year. 

Test and Learn

Coach and parent Tapestry Inc., which also owns Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman, are seeing growth. That’s notable as it would indicate Coachtopia isn’t an effort to improve lackluster performance or fading brand relevance among a younger consumer. 

In fact, Tapestry CEO Joanne Crevoiserat told analysts in February, the most recent quarterly update for the business, that about half of the 2.6 million new customers the company saw from North America came from the Millennial and Gen Z consumer segments.

Tapestry revenue in its fiscal year 2022 ended July 2 rose 15 percent to $6.7 billion. Net income increased to $856 million from $834 million recorded in the prior year. 

Coach, Tapestry’s largest brand by revenue, ended the fiscal year with net sales of $4.9 billion, a jump of 16 percent from the prior year. 

Although, the second quarter of fiscal 2023 showed a decline in Tapestry net sales, the fall was due to the falling value of the dollar and not necessarily indicative of pressure on demand for Coach or other Tapestry brands.

Instead, Coachtopia is a test by a company with the financial means to do so, and will prove interesting to see as the physical rollout moves forward this year. 

“It’s a bigger, bolder step forward in realizing our vision for sustainability at Coach,” Coach Creative Director Stuart Vevers said of Coachtopia, “where we prioritize experimenting and learning, and ethical design intentions over cookie cutter perfection.”