Relaunching Nau, version 2.0

Well, not just yet, but soon. If you look at the Nau website you'll see that Nau is about to take on it's 2.0 shell come August 1, 2008. From the looks of it they sort of tried what Black Diamond did of Chouinard Equipment, that is an employee buy out of assets and brand, but fell short a bit to where Horny Toad stepped in to cover the difference. My guess is that it was a big difference. Enough has been hashed out about why Nau went down in a blaze of flashy web code and stores to match, but the concept of building and selling clothing in a responsible way that keeps the earth as priority number one which they helped push along was something that I knew was powerful enough to last. It looks like they may be around for good this time. Nau will unveil a Fall/Holiday 2008 line and will be working with select retailers who share their vision and philosophy. True to the statement on the Nau homepage, their first order of business is to fire up the Nau blog called the Thought Kitchen. On there they state what some would call the obvious direction they should have taken the first go around rather than the Dot Com style of brand building that burned through funding at impressive rates. Were going to start small. With a tight crew, well focus on product development and what we like to call ‘story development. Well also focus on our ecommerce business once we re-launch the site for our new Fall/Holiday 2008 line. We will not be operating our own brick-and-mortar stores, but instead well be developing relationships with select retailers who would like to partner with us. From Horny Toad's site they say of this move: 6 weeks ago Nau closed up shop due to some financing issues. But they have many, many fans and good friends who didn't want them to go away. Horny Toad stepped in and bought most of Nau's remaining assets and hired a small talented team from the original Nau who will now (no pun intended) continue to create incredible product and keep alive the core philosophies. We're calling the new Nau Version 2.0 and it will launch August 1, 2008. Get the full scoop at HornyToad.com