After reading the Holden Outerwear article, answer all the questions and include your sources:

1-Describe the type of change that Holden's leaders are managing on a daily basis.

2-What resistance has Holden encountered while introducing innovative garment designs?

3- How did the brand overcome that resistance?

Holden Outerwear: Managing Change and Innovation

While many apparel manufacturers dream of setting trends in the world of fashion, Holden Outerwear is the ultimate fashion innovator. Founded in 2002 by professional snowboarder Mikey LeBlanc, the Portland, Oregon, sports-apparel maker has given traditional baggy outerwear a complete style makeover. Unlike ski-apparel brands that focus on utility at the expense of looking good, Holden believes technical garments can look cool. "What I love most about Holden is that they take cues from fashion and they're not looking at what everyone else in the outerwear market is doing," says Nikki Brush, design and development manager at Holden. For Mikey LeBlanc, Holden is the perfect vehicle for expressing his two favorite interests, snowboarding and urban wear. When the pro boarder is not out taming the mountain, he's somewhere talking about his company's approach to design. "We brought an element of old world tailoring to our stuff , so we deal with paper patterns and fi t, and we work with the shape of a garmentthat was new to the industry," LeBlanc says. Most outerwear brands focus on keeping skiers warm and dry, not on fashion. Not so with Holden. "We were the first to bring a couple different fits," LeBlanc adds. "We had a standard fi t and a skinny fi t on our pants, for example." Soon after Holden launched, the company was heralded as the new and improved outerwear maker because of its attention detail. "We use a lot of genuine leather, a lot of wool, and things that weren't found in outerwear," LeBlanc says. Holden pants and jackets possess unique features like leather covered snaps, leather shoulders, and urban-style snaps and stitching. LeBlanc and his design teams keep a close eye on runway brands like Marc Jacobs and G-Star, as Holden is always looking to bring new elements of style to the slopes. "It's all about bringing that element of fashion design instead of technical design to outerwear," says Holden's founder. "We've been labeled as the brand that pushes the style portion of technical outerwear." As a trained designer, Nikki Brush relishes the innovative aspects of working at Holden. "I have a pretty solid background in development and designs, so I get excited about technology, whether it's working with the fabric mill or a garment manufacturer," Brush says. In particular, the designer enjoys taking a standard industry garment and doing it differently, as with Holden's use of denim. "I think our denim is very exciting. Most companies are working in cheap nylons that are printed to look like denim, but we are not." Unlike brands that substitute faux materials, Brush works with true cotton twill, which is first cut for style and then laminated with water proofing. "It performs on the mountain as high performance outerwear, but looks like jeans," Brush says. By far Holden's greatest innovation has been the creation of a new eco-friendly fabric. In 2005, LeBlanc and a business partner had an idea to make a natural-fiber waterproof breathable fabric, which didn't yet exist. So the partners pioneered it. In addition to being technically durable, the new garment material was hailed as an environmental breakthrough. Today Holden has the attention of everyone in its industry. Retailers wait anxiously to see LeBlanc's newest collections, and competitors from Burton and Salomon to Bonfire and Walmart borrow heavily from Holden's collections. LeBlanc doesn't worry too much about the rampant plagiarism that goes on in his industry. As the pro-boarder sees it, imitation is the highest form of flattery. Plus, Holden's business is based on finding the next big thing. When it comes to style, Holden is the leader, never the follower.