How Do You Scale Material Innovations?
Someone once asked Simardev Gulati, CEO of Bloom Labs, what makes a good sustainable fiber. His response: Well, what makes a good product?
“I think it’s the same thing, which is how does it feel, does it breathe well?” he said at Sourcing Journal’s Sustainability Summit in New York. “Fibers, clothes are so intrinsic to humans: how we express ourselves, how we want to feel. At the end of the day, it comes down to all these ingredients that the customers want, hopefully at any price. Storytelling will only get you so far.”
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Certainly, a good story, no matter how cracking, isn’t enough for brands and suppliers to decide if they want to take a chance on an upstart innovation. A seamless integration is also important, said Gulati, whose company transforms biomass waste into high-performance textiles. Much of the textile supply chain, for instance, is built on melt spinning and extrusion, which is how polyester is made. Solutions need to be not only scalable but also compatible with existing infrastructure so they can be a drop-in replacement for incumbent materials with little fuss and even less muss.
“We need to make it really easy for mills and brands to adopt it and lower the friction,” he said.
The biomaterials space is chock-a-block with marketing-speak that dubs X the new Y, said Ross McBee, co-founder and chief strategy officer at T?mTex, whose shellfish-waste-derived material—t?m means shrimp in Vietnamese—is often presented as an alternative to bovine leather. While doing so can help give someone a frame of reference, he considers T?mTex its own class of material, since it can be made to resemble rubber or plastic by tweaking the formula.
“I think it’s important to build a vision of sustainability of what is possible, not about being restricted,” McBee said.
??Gulati agreed. Polyester was created as a cheaper version of silk, but it has evolved to fulfill a raft of needs and specifications, from lightweight clothing to heavy drapery. Innovative fibers, too, he said, will start out mimicking certain materials before inspiring designers to take them in different, even unexpected, directions. That, for him, is pretty exciting.
But before the next-generation stuff can get there, they have to escape what innovators describe as the “valley of death,” the treacherous transition from R&D to commercial viability. This means being picky about who to partner with, said Aleks Gosiewski, co-founder and chief operating officer at Keel Labs, whose flagship fiber, known as Kelsun, comprises a biopolymer found in seaweed.
“We want to make sure we have the commitments, for the long-term, with the brands that we select,” she said.
These include Stella McCartney, who incorporated Kelsun into several crochet-like open-knit dresses in her spring 2024 collection. In January, Keel Labs worked with activist-influencer Aditi Mayer to develop a pocket tee knit from 70 percent Kelsun and 30 percent cotton and marked with a logo printed with algae-based Living Ink.
There’s a downside to comparisons with legacy materials that have been around for “hundreds of years,” Gosiewski said, adding that while these have had plenty of time to hone their life cycle assessments, “we’re not focused on that right now; we’re just trying to get the products into your hands.”
Even so, considering the high carbon costs of textile production, there’s a “balance to be struck,” McBee said. It’s important, he noted, not to come up with half-baked solutions considering the existential nature of the climate crisis.
“For us, we’ve always been very good about highlighting and reflecting on what do you want the future to look like in 2040,” he said. “And that’s kind of your goal.” Even, as McBee added, there might be a “degree of talk and not action” from brands.
Uptake, whether from suppliers, brands or consumers, is a perpetual problem for innovators, Gulati admitted. He said that incentives are critical to encouraging adoption, whether they’re market-based or regulatory-related. Perhaps R&D and innovation need to be a separate line item in the ledgers of bean counters everywhere.
“You have a company like Shein, which is going for an IPO with a valuation of $65 billion—that’s the market speaking,” he said. “And so, how do you sort of combat that?”
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