How The North Face created its latest circular-design product

Recreational outdoor clothing is getting a dose of sustainability with The North Face’s latest circular-design initiative.

The clothing, made with single-fiber construction and trim, comes in 20 styles and includes updated versions of the brand’s major collections, Osito and Auburn. These new products will be part of The North Face’s product portfolio instead of “a one-off collection” the brand said and will feature styles for adults, plus sizes, youth, and accessories.

The clothing marks The North Face’s first circularly designed products that minimize waste and comes two years after the brand launched its Renewed Design Residency in 2020, which trained its designers in circular design, a practice that keeps materials in use and circulation.

It also plans on relaunching its take-back program under the Renewed name, which will allow customers to return North Face clothes to the “new Renewed Take-Back bins.” They will then be washed, tuned-up, and resold through Renewed.

• The circular-design garments in particular, which are easier to disassemble, will then be recycled back into raw materials.
• “We didn’t want it to be like a one-off capsule of products. We wanted to really create standards that designers could lean into, and scale as we continue to grow our partnerships and grow capabilities around recycling,” Kellen Hennessy, The North Face’s circular design manager, told Retail Brew. Earlier in the interview, she said, “Minimizing the number of trims that would need to be taken off of the garment before it’s recycled, to streamline that process and recover as much material as possible…that’s been the biggest approach.”

Trimming down: The company has been working with suppliers across the Western hemisphere, as well as Asia and Central America, to redevelop fabrics, which hasn’t necessarily been more expensive than using new fabrics. But one of the biggest challenges has been around trims and keeping the functionality of the garments intact, Hennessy said.

“In outdoor gear…there’s all these functional elements that you can’t really walk away from because you want to make a really functional garment that the customer can rely on,” Hennessy said, adding that the functional considerations included making decisions about whether trims needed to be elasticized or if the woven labeling could be converted into recyclable polyester.

• Although the brand hasn’t found recyclable options for all of its trims, it is working on finding more options down the line with its suppliers. Until then, it plans to only focus on products that are recyclable.
• “We want to make sure that what is going to be brought back into a recycling stream, [that] it is a current and scaled and viable recycling option, rather than something that we’re like, ‘Well, in the future, it might be recyclable,’” Carol Shu, global sustainability manager at The North Face, told Retail Brew.

Getting test-y: Hennessy explained testing the recyclability of the fabrics was critical to the process in terms of keeping the materials part of the textile supply chain, and took about one to two months. That’s also why it worked with partners such as Unifi, a global textile solutions provider that makes recycled performance fiber.

“We wanted to be sure if we sent them a trim that our supplier said was 100% polyester, that there wasn’t anything within that trim that might cause it to behave differently as a recycled PT at the end, as an output, because ideally, these raw materials are staying within textiles and can be used in future products,” she said.

The retailer also plans to expand its circular design products from the US to across the globe. But regardless of its scale, the brand plans on sticking to its core philosophy: keeping products in use for as long as possible.

“We want [the product] to be completely worn out by the time we’re going to recycle it. So ideally, if something’s wrong with it, there’s a manufacturing defect, it gets repaired through our warranty program,” Hennessy explained. “If the customer just doesn’t want it anymore, it goes through our renewal program. And then when it’s unusable, we’ll recycle it.”—JS