The President's a body surfer

Seriously. Who thought that would happen?

Well, Hawaii-raised Obama likes a bit of body surfing - and who can blame him.

Nau...the end is near

Yup, looks like the final curtain for pioneering outdoors retailer Nau. There's an open letter on the Nau website telling us that they just couldn't keep going. The capital markets were too tight for them to raise more capital. It's a massive shame as they've really tried to push what consumers expect from sustainable/green clothing - and they're a company that we're been looking up to. However, they had quite a difficult business model - where they were not only launching a new brand, but also controlling all the distribution channels (in other words - not selling an outdoor brand through the outdoor stores) and trying to get people to choose items in the stores but get the clothes posted to them (with a discount). All these things made a lot a sense for Nau - but only if they could get enough people to actually purchase this way.

Seems like this didn't happen. Nau had a target of $11m for 2007, but it looks like sales to date were more likely to have been around $4.5m (based on the fact that they said that they donated $225,000 to charity under a scheme that was supposed to be 5% of sales). Nau was always ambitious, but it's still sad to see a company making good clothes shut it's doors.

Finding the right fabrics

Well, those sneak previews have taken a little longer than we hoped. Frankly we'd like nothing better than to get our clothes out to you as soon as possible. However, we've got a vision of putting out the right sort of product, so taking a little bit more time right now is no bad thing. One thing we've discovered - there's no such thing as the perfect eco-friendly fabric. If you want decent clothes, then you have to make some sort of compromise.  We had been trying to stay away from cotton (organic or otherwise) but we decided that there's still a place for it.  Don't worry though, it's not going to be regular pesticide-packed water-glugging cotton. We're not talking about THAT sort of compromise.

But if you have thoughts about what fabrics you think would be good, let us know...we want to hear from you!

Yew are working hard

Over here at Yew we've been toiling away trying to get our company up and running.
We've spent months and months looking for the best fabrics to use for our new sustainable sports clothing line. We can't wait to show you some of what we've found, so we'll be giving you sneak previews right here on this blog.