Tapestry's Circularity: Sustainable Product Design, Life Cycle Assessment, Reuse and Repair
Originally published in Tapestry's 2021 Corporate Responsibility Report
We imagine a future where all products can be reused, repurposed or recycled, and cause minimal negative environmental impact. To achieve this ambition, we are rethinking product life cycle, reuse and repair, and through innovative design, we are working towards a sustainable, circular economy.
In April 2021, Coach launched (Re)Loved, a program that gives bags a second life by allowing customers the opportunity to trade pre-owned Coach bags for store credit. These bags are then reimagined as part of the Coach (Re)Loved collection. Coach (Re) Loved consists of Coach’s Upcrafted collection, oneof-a-kind products reimagined by Coach designers and craftspeople, and Coach Restored bags, which are carefully brought back to their original condition. When a bag is beyond repair, the Coach Remade collection deconstructs those pre-owned bags to repurpose them as small, playful objects. Coach (Re)Loved is paving the way for new circular models and is reimagining the idea of a bag’s end of life.
In FY2021, we continued to offer free leather care to our customers, and our Repair Workshops helped customers maintain and repair their own bags. Our Coach (Re)Loved & Repair Workshop in New Jersey repaired more than 9,058 bags. Though significantly down due to COVID-19, this makes up 76% of products returned to Coach in the U.S. Additionally, our Global Customer Experience Team tracked and managed over 61,000 repairs by local Coach or outsourced repair specialists across Europe, Asia, and Australia and New Zealand. Over the last three years, our teams have managed approximately 266,000 repairs for our customers.
Tapestry’s ESG & Sustainability Team partnered with graduate students as part of a course at Columbia University’s M.S. Sustainability Management program to evaluate the life cycle impacts of a single Coach product, the Swinger bag, across different lifetime uses. It was found that reimagining the Coach Swinger bag under Coach Upcrafted can reduce annualized emissions by 76% compared to a typical Coach bag life cycle. We also gained insight into our product’s environmental impact along the supply chain stages and are using these findings to target areas for improvement. We worked with a third-party organization to externally verify this life cycle assessment and confirm its accuracy. Moving forward, we hope to scale this work with future product life cycle assessments.
