The Road To Circularity

The short answer: yes!

All Coachtopia products made with leather (including styles made with Coachtopia Leather and Upcrafted Leather) are crafted with materials that reimagine and reuse leather waste. These materials are different from “pleather” or “vegan leathers” because they recycle and repurpose leather scraps that would otherwise go to landfill, resulting in products that have the look, feel and durability you would expect from a Coach leather product, but with a lower carbon footprint than comparable products made with new leather.

The longer answer: we’re finding new uses for leather waste

In Coachtopia, as part of our mission to build a circular economy for fashion, we’re working to avoid the creation of new materials (which accounts for 38% of fashion’s greenhouse gas emissions*) by making our products with pre-existing waste materials—and so advance towards a zero-waste future. Because we’re a sub-brand of Coach, a brand with 80+ years of leather expertise, one of our most significant waste sources is leather scraps, both those that are left over from the production of Coach leather goods and those that are created by the tanning and trimming of hides before they come to us. These leather scraps are of the same high-quality leather used in Coach bags.

Reimagining leather scrap

In their raw state, waste leather scraps are not ready to be made into products, especially at scale—they’re irregular, oddly shaped, often too small and stringy to cut and sew, and if finished, can be an unpredictable mixture of colors. In Coachtopia, we harness Coach’s deep leather expertise along with the technological innovation of our partners to transform these scraps into usable and beautiful materials such as our Coachtopia Leather and Upcrafted Leather—both of which have an at least 60% lower carbon footprint compared to virgin leather and find new uses for waste that would otherwise go to landfill.

What is Coachtopia Leather?

Coachtopia Leather is a material made with at least 50% recycled leather scraps leftover at tanneries. In Coachtopia, we only use scraps from tanneries that have been rated gold or silver by the Leather Working Group, which means they have achieved the highest environmental standards in the group’s industry certifications.

To create Coachtopia Leather, these scraps are shredded into fibers and bound into a supporting mesh. As part of our mission, we’re always developing new innovations to maximize both the luxury feel and sustainability of this leather. For example, our partner Gen Phoenix creates Coachtopia leather through an innovative hydroentanglement process (using 95% recycled water and 100% renewable energy) in which high pressure jets of water bind the leather fibers together. (You can learn more about this process here). The end result of such processes is a tactile, flexible and durable material that can be dyed, finished and made into products, just like new, virgin leather—but with an at least 60% lower carbon footprint.

Why not 100% recycled?

We’re continually looking for ways to increase the recycled content of our materials and products. There’s currently no technology that can create 100% recycled leather of the quality needed to make durable products like bags, but we are actively working and investing with partners such as Gen Phoenix to develop new innovations and bring them into the world of Coachtopia. While a perfect solution doesn’t exist, we believe that Coachtopia Leather is one of the best. Our mantra is to prioritize progress over perfection—so we can keep advancing on the road to circularity.

Using our own leather waste

Our other source of leather scraps is our own production processes—the scraps leftover after we cut Coach bag patterns from full grain leather hides. At Coach, we have optimized our cutting to use as much of the hide as possible, but there is inevitably some wastage that ends up on the cutting room floor. These leftover scraps are the same, high-quality leathers that we use in Coach bags, but they can be small, stringy, oddly shaped and unpredictable—making them very challenging to use. Across the industry, these scraps generally go to landfill; but at Coach, we are now saving, sorting and classifying these scraps and innovating new techniques to turn them into beautiful Coachtopia products. Learn more about how we do this in our docuseries, The Road to Circularity: Making with Waste.

Upcrafted Leather

To put this unpredictable and ever-changing supply of scraps to use, we’ve worked with our designers and manufacturing partners to develop craft techniques that allow us to combine smaller scraps into artisanal composite materials—and to do so at scale. We call these artisanal, hand-worked materials Upcrafted Leathers, as they’ve been cleverly crafted with repurposed leather scraps—resulting in beautiful products like our Ergos in Basketweave and Woven Checkerboard Upcrafted leathers that have an at minimum 80% lower carbon footprint than comparable bags made with new leather. Upcrafted Leathers come in a range of patterns, from Checkerboard to Wavy Stripe to our innovative Upcrushed designs.