I found this one again by accident, which is how I have found most of them. A post from the last week of 2008, written in the reflective lull between Christmas and New Year's, back when I had a blog and a struggling bank account and a lot of certainty about which designers would matter.
I was certain about Nau. It was an outdoor company out of Portland, and to me it was the most beautiful version of a thing I wanted to believe in: clothes that performed, that were made responsibly, that gave a fixed share of every sale to causes the customer chose at checkout. They called it Partners for Change. I wrote about it the way I wrote about everything that moved me, as if admiring it hard enough could keep it alive.
It couldn't. Not the first time. Nau had launched in 2005 on a lot of money and a missionary's plan, burned through it fast, and died when the credit markets froze. Then it came back, bought and slimmed down, the giving kept intact because someone decided it was worth buying. It runs today under the Korean outdoor company Black Yak.
I covered it as a love story. Reading it back, I can see it was something I did not have the language for at twenty-five. Almost everything Nau did out of conscience in 2008 is becoming law. The supply-chain transparency it practiced by hand is turning into mandatory due diligence under the EU's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. The environmental claims it could actually back up are now the safe side of the line the FTC draws in its Green Guides. Even a record that travels with a product is becoming real in the EU's digital product passport.
Nau was not ahead of the market. It was ahead of the statute, and it paid full price for being early. I didn't know that was the story when I wrote it. I know it now, and it is the work I want to keep doing.
