December 31st, 2008 · No Comments

“Boulder has a much lighter floor, and it requires a lot of cleaning,” Callaway said, so designers tweaked the hue. Happily, “the darker the color you get, the more recycled content, so our floor is actually a higher recycled content. You have to be careful not to go with too dark a floor in a retail environment, because you want everything nice and bright, but we were able to darken it up enough that the cleaning isn’t as much of an issue.”

About that search for a bright, cheerful retail space: The Round Rock store was drenched with natural light even on the overcast day I visited. “There are 108 of those in the building,” Callaway said as he pointed to the bright glow of a Solatube, a fixture in which light enters through a hole in the roof and is bounced via mirrors to the building’s interior. “We’ve got 93 upstairs and 15 downstairs. It took a feat of engineering and design,” he boasts, to connect the downstairs lights with the roof, considering each needs its own mirrored tube: “They’re hidden in the walls and cabinetry and stuff like that.”

Solatubes are particularly welcome in the dressing rooms, where natural light is a novelty that makes clothes look much better than they do under conventional lamps.

Electric lights that are used are mostly ceramic metal halide, which Grillo notes “put out about four or five times the lumens at the same wattage as incandescent bulbs.” And throughout non-sales floor areas (stock rooms, offices, stairwells), lights are controlled by motion sensors so they go off when nobody’s around.

As for overall electricity usage, Callaway reports that “the building itself is designed to use about 48% less energy than a typical store of its size. The savings comes from everything from the natural light, the efficiency of the HVAC units, as well as the on-site power production.

“We’ve got a huge array of photovoltaic cells on the south side of the building that produces about 7% of our power. We’ve got a solar thermal hot water heater, which heats about 70% of our water and accounts for about 5% of our energy savings; eventually we’re going to get a photovoltaic skylight — we’re still working on the UL certification — that will give us about 1% of our power. All told, about 13% of our power will come from the sun.”

Callaway’s grasp of so many figures makes sense when he explains, “I’ve been studying it for about a year, because I wanted [to run] this store.” Now, he not only serves as the green prototype’s ambassador but is part of its evolution. “We’ve been giving a lot of feedback about how everything’s working,” he says. “That’s really our job.” When the next such store is built, in 2010, it is intended to be the last experiment; after that, the company expects to have resolved all the value-engineering and practical questions so they can build dozens more just like it.

As for the store’s reason for being — selling clothes and outdoor gear — Callaway and Grillo sound almost sneaky as they show off some of the growing line of REI-designed ecoSensitive goods. “The standard of our customers is so high, in terms of gear being able to perform,” Callaway begins, explaining the reluctance to push an item’s green credentials too hard. The emphasis has to be that a product performs as it’s intended to.

Grillo continues: “A lot of these things that are eco-friendly are more about transforming products that are typically, with the outdoors industry, using a lot of synthetics and petroleum-based products. Things from socks with stretch fabrics, that really have to be performance-fit, all the way to shell fabrics where it’s obviously much easier to make a durable shell out of synthetic fabric.”

As far as that goes, the ecoSensitive-branded Antifreeze jacket Grillo shows me (with a shell that is 88% recycled polyester) felt better in my hand — the surface material more pliant, the down filling cozier — than a name-brand jacket on a hanger nearby. And while I would understand a salesperson’s reluctance to describe garments worn closer to the skin as being made of old soda bottles, I found the line’s Northport sweatshirt (55% organic cotton/45% recycled polyester) to be entirely comfortable, in addition to handling dirt and spills better than an all-cotton version probably would have. The same goes for a style of shorts made with 35% PET polyester. (See the full line here.)

The most comfortable shorts in the world won’t convince most Central Texans to cycle from the suburbs to the office in July, even if they had a fully outfitted commuter bike to make the ride more smooth. But for those few who dare, there’s now a beautifully lighted, energy-efficient showroom in Round Rock stocked with gleaming new wheels and all the accessories you could want.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

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