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FeedThe Coconut Connection
A variety of top sportswear companies are incorporating Cocona’s “coconut technology” into their clothing, which results in apparel being significantly more comfortable, quick-drying, and UV-protected.
At first glance, it seems like some form of tropical magic, scientific voodoo. Hold a coconut in one hand and a Cocona-fiber shirt in another, and it’s hard to see the connection. Cocona products bear no resemblance to a coconut; there’s no “Hawaiian grass skirt” look to these high-tech clothes, no lingering scent of sunscreen.
So just how did a coconut become a quick-dry golf shirt?
How it happens may be difficult to understand, but for anyone playing a round of golf in the hot sun, who can now walk into the clubhouse feeling miraculously dry and smelling clean, it’s an invention quite easy to appreciate.
Take the example of NCAA basketball coach Rolland Todd, who was playing a round of golf in Atlanta during a break during the Final Four action in 2007. Soaking wet from the Georgia heat, Todd decided to try a new shirt during his round of golf.
“I changed into my Cocona shirt for afternoon golf and I felt the difference immediately, and even more so when I reached the course,” he says. “I didn't feel damp at all and I seemed to be cooling as I walked that muggy afternoon. It was pretty amazing.”
The “amazing” factor behind this new textile comes from the Boulder-based Cocona company, which found a way to turn a coconut shell into one of the world’s most comfortable, quick-drying, and UV-protecting shirts.
Or pants if you like. Or hats, or base-layer long underwear, or as Sierra Designs has done with Cocona’s fabric, a state-of-the-art sleeping bag. 
It’s possible, even likely, that if you have a quick-dry golf shirt in your closet you’re already benefiting from Cocona’s remarkable stroke of inspiration, which involves taking the portion of a coconut (which is currently of no use to anybody and is probably on its way to a landfill), and turning it into something useful, stylish and only four years after its invention, almost ubiquitous.
About four years ago, Cocona was a company essentially comprised of Dr. Gregory Haggquist (who invented the Coconut-based fiber called Cocona), Brad Poorman and company founder Tom Kallish. The company was soon joined by Jon Erb in marketing and a who’s-who group for its board of directors. In the short time since those three principals merged to form the company, they’ve already managed to bring their products to over 40 textile, clothing, and equipment companies. Everyone from Patagonia to Tehama, Woolrich to Ping, Cannondale to Cutter & Buck, are using Cocona to make better apparel Eddie Bauer, for example, is using Cocona in about 30 percent of its products. Buy a pair of base-layer, expedition weight long underwear from Marmot, or a golf shirt from Izod-G, and you’ll be benefiting from the coconut along with millions of others.
The coconut explosion began with a small, core group. Erb remembers getting a call from Brad Poorman, who had left Outlast Technologies to become president of the upstart Cocona, Inc.
“I remember thinking, ‘here we go again,’” laughs Erb, who now serves as a principal and chief marketing officer of Cocona. “But Brad sent me out a couple of sample products. I took these products and tried them out against similar products, and after three days I was amazed.”
“That’s when I said, ‘I’m in,’” he recalls.
It’s no surprise a marketing guy is a big fan of his own product, but it is a surprise Cocona so quickly assembled a team of executives with a gazillion years of combined experience in textiles and textile technology. Their experience gave them an open door to meet and talk with big names in apparel. After that, it was simply a matter of putting decision-makers through the same test Erb himself had been through himself.
The team has had little trouble licensing their product to big-name clothing manufacturers, but they’re doing a bit more than helping runners, outdoorsmen, and golfers stay dry and smell clean – they’re also doing something uncannily green.
And that’s where the magic becomes science.
Coconuts are in ample supply throughout the world, yet very few people have a use for the outer shell. Once these shells are discarded by the food industry, most of them head for the landfill, or, perhaps surprisingly, to water filtration companies. Coconuts, it turns out, are an ideal raw material to use in the creation of activated carbon – the very same activated carbon that populates water filters throughout the world.
Activated carbon has some pretty special properties. Like carbon’s version of Swiss cheese, activated carbon is filled with pores. It’s these pores that have the ability to allow moisture to evaporate quickly, lock-in scent, and protect skin from harmful ultra-violet rays.
Cocona’s Dr. Haggquist found a way to interweave activated carbon into a fibrous material, now dubbed “Cocona,” and the results were impressive enough for Fairhaven Capital, a leading capital investment firm in Boston, to call it, “the most exciting new fabric and film technology to come along since Gore-Tex®.”
The high praise came with a high-dollar investment in September 2007, and Cocona is now on a national campaign to inform the nation – and the world – of their product’s benefits. They’ve opened an office in Europe and have launched a worldwide marketing and media campaign.
Competition will be fierce. Cocona is not the only new textile that dries quickly and is being used throughout the sporting world. Nike, Adidas, and others have products that look and feel, at first, pretty similar to Cocona. Coolmax, Nike’s version of flexible, quick-dry clothing, is being marketed with all the force that comes with a Nike brand; shirts being worn by Tiger Woods, for example, often are Nike Coolmax products.
There’s plenty of room for Cocona to take a healthy market share, however, and beyond that, Cocona is confident their product will outlast others – in more ways than one.
Most other quick-dry products are chemical spray-on technology, meaning that a solution is mixed up, then sprayed onto polyester shirts. Cocona products, on the other hand, are actually woven into the fibers of the shirt, or pants, or sleeping bag, so they last the lifetime of the product itself.
These advantages have landed Cocona in products as well known as Levi’s Dockers. “These are mainstream brands,” Cocona founder Kallish points out. “Even
though Cocona is a technology, it’s really something that’s crossed over into the everyday lives of consumers.”
There’s also the long-lasting environmental benefit. Since Cocona’s activated carbon comes from an almost infinitely renewable resource (coconuts), its key ingredient is made mainly of carbon, not chemicals, and therefore biodegrades as naturally and easily as, well, a coconut. That’s part of the reason Cocona has won Outside Buyers Guide’s “Green gear of the year,” award, as well as mention in Rocky Mountain Sports Online’s “Colorado Green.”
A quick-dry product has other environmental advantages, too. “Our product dries more quickly everywhere, and that includes your dryer,” Kallish says. “And that, in turn, results in lower energy use as well as tremendous savings.”
So, not all quick-dry clothing is cut from the same cloth. Cocona says their patented technology has been shown to dry faster, outlast, and stay more environmentally-friendly than its competitors’ similar products. As a small, Boulder-based company, Cocona may be fighting against some of the biggest boys on the block – but at least they’ll stay dry and smell clean as they sweat their way to the top.
Tom Boyd is a freelance writer who splits his time between Vail and Denver. In 2006 he circumnavigated the globe with his wife, covering the 2006 Turin Olympics and writing travel and outdoors stories along the way.
