Word on the street is that Nau, the sustainable clothing company, is coming back. Yes! Fantastic news. The brand has been purchased by Horny Toad Activewear of Santa Barbara, CA. Most of the original Nau team is on board and ramping up fast. The buoyancy of the support Nau got from its customers kept it afloat until Horny Toad hopped to the rescue.A great narrative will always find a way to continue.
And Nau is always the time.
Congratulations to my friends at Nau! Way to improvise, you guys!
In March of this year, I wrote a post extolling the virtues of the sustainable clothing company, Nau. Last week, unable to secure another round of financing, Nau filed for bankruptcy and on Saturday, May 3, 2008, closed its doors. It was a sad day, the death of a beautiful brand.I have no idea what factors went into the shut-down, whether there were supply chain issues, management conflicts, pricing issues, location issues, or whether Nau’s investors were capitalized by bad real estate loans and the company’s financing collapsed because of it — whatever the reasons, as a loyal customer, the fact that Nau was forced to close its doors pisses me off. (more…)
When I was involved with the Live Earth project, I sampled some of the sustainable clothing — the hemp, bamboo and hybrid shoes and garments from prospective promotional partners that periodically floated through the production office. Live Earth’s chief of staff, Tom Feegel, called this stuff “smokable clothing.” It was mostly a big what-ev. I wasn’t feeling it.
Flash forward to last week. Our friend Shannon Porter shows me around Nau, the sustainable clothing store (men’s and women’s) in Chicago where she is one of the managers. (Nau is based in Portland.) The store where Shannon works is at 2118 North Halsted Avenue, smack in the heart of a great part of a great city. Shannon has a Wharton School degree and impeccable taste in music and friends and just about everything else, and so I want to think Nau is going to be cool before I ever set foot in it. But there is a shadow of a doubt in my mind. I mean, I’d had the unsatisfactory experience with the smokable clothes, and she did say a lot of their stuff is made from recycled polyester and, well, you know, the original polyester ain’t so great to begin with, so how could recycled — ??? (more…)