Plus, we’re a Utah brand. It’s right in the dead of winter, [and] we have a lot of winter outerwear for cold winter environments. It perfectly lined up.
It seems like a big change for the Sundance Institute to have gone from Canada Goose, which is a very different luxury outerwear company, to a more sustainability-oriented partner.
The company was founded on this idea that we can do capitalism better. Our tagline is “Gear for Good,” and [Cotopaxi] was founded upon that idea. 1% of sales, at minimum, go toward the Cotopaxi Foundation. That foundation was set up with a broader mission of trying to alleviate global poverty, which is the No. 1 United Nations sustainability goal.
Our foundation works with a lot of nonprofits, mostly in Latin America, where we’re really focused. They’re all solving poverty in different ways. Some of those [ways] are environmental and some are social. We bracket the work into livelihood, education and healthcare. We try to figure out ways we can help [those nonprofits] do their work, which ultimately ladders up to poverty alleviation. That’s a big part of why the business was started.
Clearly, the environment is massively important, especially as we’re encouraging people to adventure. So we have a lot of environmental pieces to it, as well, and we have a big circularity strategy. One of the parts of that is one of our main product lines, called Del Día.
It’s our pack and bags business, and each one of those bags is made with completely different colors, zippers and buckles. We take dead stock material, which is material that was likely going to go into a landfill, and we purchase it. Then we make [the packs and bags] in all those color combinations.
When you see other people with it, [you assume they know] the story of why the brand started, and they’re usually pretty [interested in] mission-driven companies. Cotopaxi is a B Corp, so [customers] feel like they’re part of a community, which is really important for us as a small company—building that community and that word-of-mouth.
That mentality … that sustainability ideal … is baked into everything that the people who created this company did. They built it into the finance model [and] they built it into the product model.
I can see the alignment there with Cotopaxi and the festival. Beyond the director’s jacket, what were you offering Sundance visitors?
The main objective that we had was to go, as a small brand, into Sundance, and leave a really visual brand mark on Park City.
The director’s jacket … that’s the “big iconic moment.” We had a lounge where the directors could come in, they could learn about the brand and they got fitted for their jacket. We had a big photography and video moment for them so they could capture it for their family and friends.
Sundance is very protective of that [jacket] because it is so special. It’s such a career highlight for those filmmakers, and it felt like it was part of our job to make it special for them.
