In December, just under 2,000 limited-edition oatmeal-colored cotton hoodies cropped up at The North Face’s online and brick-and-mortar stores, commanding a premium price of $125 each. By January, the hoodies were sold out.
These shirts spun an interesting tale. They were an experiment by the sports clothing company to see if everything it needed to produce the hoodie — from the cotton to the finished garment — could be found within 150 miles of its headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“We wanted to inspire consumers to support local artisans, and our goal was to eliminate wastes [during production]. We wanted to learn what was possible. Could we achieve the 150-mile goal?” said Adam Mott, director of sustainability at The North Face, during the Sustainable Brands corporate sustainability conference in San Diego earlier this month.
The answer, it turned out, was no.
But the project yielded some good lessons about creating a hyperlocal supply chain and casting narratives to connect consumers with the people who produce their clothes, Mott says.
The North Face hoodie was part of its Backyard Project, which is part of the company’s effort to work closely with the US textile industry, from farmers to factories, to use sustainably grown materials and reduce waste. While such an effort might be easier for a local artisan producing a small quantity of clothing, it presents special challenges for large retailers that need mass production to keep costs low and stay competitive.
Clothing manufacturing is a cross-continent business these days. The North Face’s suppliers and manufacturers span the US, Asia and Central America, and it focuses primarily on making performance wear out of synthetic materials.
Using local materials and craftsmen to create products has been shown to resonate with consumers, particularly when it comes to food. People also are willing to pay more for organic produce because of health and environmental concerns. But that’s not the case when it comes to clothing. Although consumers say they care about sustainability, however, it’s not a priority when they shop for clothes, Mott says. Instead, they often buy clothes based on performance, aesthetics and price.
Part of the goal of the Backyard Project is to figure out how to make sustainably made clothing, which can be pricier, that people will actually buy.
“We want the conversation to be not just about if they care, yes or no,” Mott tells The Guardian. “You start with what people care about and translate that into who we are as a brand.”
The idea to make the Backyard hoodie came out of a 2012 meeting with Rebecca Burgess, executive director of Fibershed in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. Burgess started the nonprofit to promote locally made textiles, from the fibers to the finished product, and she set out to wear clothes that were made within 150 miles of her organization’s headquarters.
“I’m advocating for a new supply chain that connects soil to skin,” Burgess says. “So much of what the brands are doing is telling amazing stories, but they don’t own the supply chain. Why not?”
The Backyard Project required The North Face team to work much more closely with its suppliers. While the company doesn’t have its own mills, cutting and sewing facilities, or other factories along the production process, it typically tells its suppliers what types of yarn and fabric performance characteristics it wants and where to buy them.
To make the Backyard Project hoodie, however, Mott and others on the project met with cotton farmers through Burgess and bought 15,500lb of cotton from two farms.
The heirloom, organic cotton from the farm of Sally Fox comes with a light brown color and shorter fiber than conventional white cotton. The short fiber also isn’t as soft and is harder to spin into yarn. But Fox, who started growing cotton in the late 1980s, is clearly passionate about her work and, Mott noted, is “hard to resist”.
“The project is very much about connections with people,” Mott says. “Her cotton was so beautiful. We were all a bit mesmerized when she brought a sample. We thought, ‘we will have to make something from it.’”
The North Face decided it wanted a hoodie with a heather look. That required mixing the brown cotton with standard white cotton, which came from the farm of Gary and Mari Martin, who are part of the Sustainable Cotton Project, a nonprofit that promotes environmentally friendly farming practices and connects farmers to buyers.
But finding the right spinners to produce the yarn and people to knit it proved much tougher – and, ultimately, impossible to do locally. The North Face was looking for experts who could figure out the right cotton blend to create fabric with its desired color and strength, and the company had to cross the country to find them in North Carolina and South Carolina. That part of the US remains the heart of the American textile industry, which has shrunk significantly since the 1990s, when many of the jobs went overseas.
The fabric then came back to the Bay Area for dying, cutting and sewing. Because the project is also about exploring ways to reduce waste, the in-house designer set out to create a pattern for the hoodie that would maximize the use of the fabric. It took about nine months to go from cotton delivery to kicking off the hoodie sale in December. But the whole product development cycle took longer, starting with that meeting with Burgess in late 2012.
Because it was produced in small batches, the hoodies cost more to make than usual, and that’s reflected in the price of $125. Comparable hoodies go for $55-$80 at The North Face stores.
Selling the Backyard Project hoodies at The North Face’s own retail and online stores was one way to make sure the project wouldn’t lose money, Mott says. Selling them at other retailers would’ve marked up the price even more.
The company created a website and a video to help tell the hoodie’s story, which Mott says was shared significantly more times on social media than is typical for its other product videos. But the puzzle that remains to be solved is how to get consumers to care about the efforts that go into producing a sustainably made piece of clothing, Mott says. Telling a good story that tugs at people’s emotions is hard to do, but it’s more effective at making consumers care than ticking off environmental attributes such as using recycled material or eco-friendly dye, he adds.
Collecting enough data to quantify what worked and what didn’t in selling the hoodies is also difficult. The hoodies did well in California, likely because of the hoodie’s backstory. And Fox turned out to be a good customer, as well as a supplier.
The Backyard hoodie project “made me happy”, Fox says. “For the last 20 years, there hasn’t been commercially produced products from my cotton. I bought it as Christmas presents for everyone in my family!”
Mott says he is already working on the next version of the Backyard Project, but wouldn’t divulge details. The big goal for the project is to figure out how to scale up and attract more buyers.
“There needs to be demand from consumers to want this and pay a little more for it,” Mott says. “We hope this is not just a brown hoodie on a rack but a story behind it that drives interest and demand.”
