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Ep 25. Turning Agri Waste to Cellulose Fibre, High-Tech Naturalism and the Making of a Fashion Scientist with Amanda Parkes
106 Plays13 hours ago
In this episode, host Mili Tharakan, dives deep into the extraordinary mind and career of Amanda Parkes—a true pioneer at the intersection of science, fashion, and engineering. Amanda has consistently challenged boundaries and redefined what’s possible in textiles and sustainability.
Amanda Parkes is a renowned fashion scientist with more than 20 years of experience pioneering innovation, sustainability, and smart materials across the fashion and technology sectors. As founding scientist and Chief Innovation Officer at Pangaia, she led the creation of market-first, sustainable materials, helping to earn the brand a top spot on Fast Company’s Most Innovative Brands list. She holds a PhD and MS from the MIT Media Lab and degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Art History from Stanford. As an Advisor at Regeneration VC Amanda also advises leading climate tech and biomaterials startups and is an internationally recognised speaker, honoured by the Business of Fashion and Vanity Fair for her influential work shaping the industry.
In this episode they explore Amanda's latest venture - Mothership Materials, where she is translating cutting-edge molecular separation technology to turn waste into valuable ingredients for the next generation of textiles and glucose for microbes. Amanda's insights offer a hopeful and innovative vision for the future of the textile industry.
Key takeaways from this episode include the potential of waste valorisation in creating sustainable textiles, the importance of interdisciplinary approaches, and the need for robust business models in sustainable fashion.
00:00 Introduction to the No Ordinary Cloth Podcast
00:43 Meet Amanda Parkes: A Pioneer in Sustainable Textiles
05:52 Defining the Role of a Fashion Scientist
13:53 Amanda's New Venture: Mothership Materials
36:03 Navigating Interdisciplinary Skills and Innovation Diplomacy
43:44 Challenges and Strategies in Scaling Sustainable Technologies
51:53 Insights from Leading Innovation at Pangaia
01:09:40 Future of Emerging Textile Technologies
01:10:33 AI in Textile Innovation
01:11:18 Regeneration VC Fund's Mission
01:12:50 Challenges in Impact Measurement
01:15:12 Investment Nervousness in Fashion Startups
01:18:43 Career Path and Advice for Young Professionals
01:42:22 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
🎧 Recommended Listening:
Ep 15. Brewing Beer for Bio Leather
Ep 2. From Garden Waste to Leather
Ep 16. Catalyst Shaping the Future of Sustainable and Ethical Fashion
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Cover art: Photo by Siora, Photography on Unsplash
Music: Inspired Ambient, Orchestraman
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction: Textiles, Tech, and Sustainability
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to the No Ordinary Cloth podcast, where we explore innovations bubbling away at the intersection of textiles, emerging technology, sustainability, and craft. I'm your host, Millie Tharakin, a textile researcher and innovator.
Meet Amanda Parks: A Pioneer in Sustainable Textiles
00:00:21
Speaker
You're in for a wonderful treat today because I have a very, very special guest for us. She is someone who truly embodies innovation at the intersection of science, engineering and fashion.
00:00:33
Speaker
A pioneer who's shaping a sustainable textile future and inspiring others to follow. She is the absolutely amazing Amanda Parks. Amanda Parks. Amanda is not just a material scientist, she's a fashion scientist whose career has spanned groundbreaking research, startup building and global industry leadership.
00:00:53
Speaker
Amanda's journey began with a dual degree in art history and mechanical engineering at Stanford before a transformative chapter at MIT Media Lab with the Tangible Media Group, where she explored interactive design and wearable technology for her PhD.
00:01:09
Speaker
She's held key roles, including being the chief innovation officer at Pangaea, where she made lab breakthroughs commercial reality and helped set new industry standards for biofabricated textiles and sustainability.
00:01:23
Speaker
Prior to this, she was with Future Tech Lab and Manufacturing and NY, and she's founded a couple of her own startups.
Mothership Materials: Innovating with Molecular Separation
00:01:31
Speaker
But her most recent and exciting gig is with Mothership Materials as their CTO, developing cutting edge molecular separation technology to turn waste into valuable ingredients for next generation of textiles.
00:01:44
Speaker
Amanda's impact doesn't stop there. She's also a global advisor at Regeneration VC, working with top innovators and investors to fund the next wave of climate positive startups.
00:01:57
Speaker
She has taught biomaterials at Columbia and Harvard. She's an international speaker, having presented at TEDx, COP, CES, World Economic Forum, and many, many more.
00:02:09
Speaker
Amanda's work has earned her recognition from Fast Company, The Business of Fashion, Vanity Fair, The Glossy 50, and many, many more. I could go on about her and it is no exaggeration when I say Amanda Parks is an absolute rock star and legend in the world of emerging textile technology.
00:02:27
Speaker
Her curiosity, relentless drive and deep multidisciplinary expertise continue to inspire and radically transform fashion and textiles as she redraws the boundaries between science and fashion.
00:02:42
Speaker
This is a slightly longer episode than usual, but it's worth every minute because Amanda lives and breeds textile innovation and there is so much to learn from her.
00:02:54
Speaker
So join me now for an incredible journey with Amanda.
Reunion in Mumbai: Millie and Amanda
00:03:03
Speaker
Hi, Amanda. I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome you to the No Ordinary Cloud Podcast. When I first started putting together my dream guest list, even before I launched the podcast, you were right at the top. So I'm really glad we can finally make this happen.
00:03:17
Speaker
And I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while because the last proper long catch up we had was way back in 2015, sitting together for hours at Mumbai airport.
00:03:29
Speaker
Waiting in vain, I guess, to board our flight to visit one of India's largest home textile manufacturing facilities. And we were both really excited about it. But unfortunately, the flight never took off.
00:03:41
Speaker
But we had such a lovely time. You know, I just remember that conversation. We had lots of ideas that we were exchanging. and it was such a lovely memory. So... Sadly, we don't have five hours this time to to chat, but hopefully we can cover just as much ground.
00:03:55
Speaker
And Amanda, I genuinely mean this when I say I've never really met any anyone whose career has been as rich and vibrant and fun and consistently at the cutting edge as yours. It's it's incredibly remarkable. And I feel you've already lived the careers of 10 people in one.
00:04:16
Speaker
and you make it look so effortless. You know, you're just such an inspiration for me um over the last decade and more. And what I deeply admire is the way you so gracefully dance between the worlds of science and fashion, two fields that rarely come together so seamlessly and beautifully as you have made it. And you blur the boundaries between these worlds.
00:04:37
Speaker
Again, make it look so easy, though um' I know it hasn't been, and I hope we'll get into that today.
Interdisciplinary Innovation: Living Boldly
00:04:43
Speaker
um So I'm excited to learn how you you've danced that dance for over two decades and also to share with our audience what it really may means to live boldly at the intersection of disciplines, industries and possibilities.
00:04:56
Speaker
Because it's precisely at these intersections that I think that innovation thrives. And it is here that we will find answers to the biggest problems that we face today. So I hope our conversation today will inspire listeners to step into those intersections and to really own them just as you have done.
00:05:14
Speaker
Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. It's so lovely to reconnect with you. And I can't believe that day in Mumbai was 10 years ago now Yeah. but Time it is flying. but But what a lovely intro. And you're right. We we really connect on a lot of different angles. And I so appreciate your perspective as well. And i was I'm so happy to be here and to be chatting to you. this is a proper catch-up. I hope the listeners can feel the kind of longevity of of our connection and and also just the kind of the different threads through the industry. I think that'll be, you'll you'll be the perfect person to talk to. Oh, thanks, Amanda. I appreciate that.
00:05:52
Speaker
Now, you describe yourself as a fashion scientist. What does being a fashion scientist mean to you? What is the essence or the role of a fashion scientist?
Fashion Science: Bridging Fashion and Engineering
00:06:02
Speaker
Well, first of all, i i think invented that term. I needed a title for a lot of conferences or whatever. um And because I'm very interdisciplinary, you know I think, first of all, like the job that I have now or the kind of roles that I play didn't even exist when I was in college. So...
00:06:18
Speaker
This term really, to me, just encapsulates this idea that I'm looking at all the things about fashion, so that whether it be the creation of materials, the structuring of textiles, innovation and process, and at various points, I'm moving all into digital innovation as well, that are kind of surrounding fashion and the fashion industry. And I think that historically, fashion has been very removed from engineering school, and we can get further into that if it's about sort of a gendered issue. and But you know I see fashion and and explicitly textiles and garment creation as a very technical discipline, like ah everything from molecules all the way up to sort of you know patterning and production. and um
00:06:59
Speaker
And so I just wanted to figure out a way to encapsulate that. And it also is intriguing to people. I love that teenage girls are like, what's that? I want to be that. So that's, that's also like a lovely way. It's a lovely way to to, kind of enter into a conversation where it's, it's not as, you know, all the traditional forms of engineering. I like to, it is, it is more encapsulating and a little bit more fun.
00:07:18
Speaker
Yep. I'm glad you brought up the teenage girls because I've actually pointed girls to you as a fashion scientist because I've come across many who say, I want to do fashion. I don't like signs. It's boring, but I want to do fashion. I'm like, look at this person who is a fashion scientist, right? And she she holds both worlds and and hopefully, you know, that's inspired them to look at it as well.
00:07:41
Speaker
To say that really that's really started happening, i'm recognizing that this was like a way in for STEM for for girls um was when with wearable tech, right? Because the way
Wearable Tech: Making STEM Relatable for Girls
00:07:51
Speaker
that traditional kind of electronics is taught is is can be quite boring. But when you start to think about, oh, you can make your clothes light up,
00:07:58
Speaker
You trigger something in them. It's something they can relate to. i mean, not every not all of them, but in in a stereotypical way, which which is which is fine. and um And then it's a path in to be like, you know, circuits are boring. Circuits are incredible, right? So so i I love that that kind of deflection. I usually don't start right at the beginning, for but for the listeners to really understand your journey, I feel I need to go back to the start all the way back to college.
00:08:24
Speaker
So you got your BA in art history and as well as in mechanical engineering at Stanford University. What inspired you to pursue degrees in both art history
Amanda's Educational Journey: Art Meets Engineering
00:08:34
Speaker
and engineering? engineering I mean, the the just there's there's more and more recognition of interdisciplinary study now. This was, ooh, 30 years ago now. And so basically I started doing mechanical engineering, but Stanford has a program called the D School, which is product design.
00:08:48
Speaker
So it's a little bit more holistic. You're studying anthropology and needs finding and then also industrial design mixed in with the mechanical engineering. It's very hard because there's a lot of different requirements. um But while I was doing this, I was, we're learning, you know, taking, advanced physics and all of the engineering and thermodynamics. And you're not really learning about the history of engineering. Now, this is me telling the story backwards. I'm not sure I was this cognizant of it at 17, right when I started.
00:09:15
Speaker
but But there was this idea of um not really understanding the history of design. And so I kind of started taking art history classes more looking at design history. I was taking a lot anything that was offered in architecture and products and industrial design. And of course, modernism, you know, this was kind of the focus.
00:09:30
Speaker
I just wanted more context. for what we were learning about and and building. And it seems like now they there is a little bit more of that, like understanding the history of what was built and why is very crucial for to inform the next generation of what is built.
00:09:42
Speaker
um So honestly, i started taking art history classes and then I was like about three quarters of the way through the degree um just because from my own interest. And I was like, let me just finish this. And then ended up writing an honors thesis about contrasting Italian futurist design, like these kind of obscure parts of, you know, there's the art movement, but this was, there was a whole separate design movement and how that influenced the later like 1980s Memphis movement in Milan. And so just, it was very, very directed at what I wanted to learn, but i was like, I'm
00:10:13
Speaker
you know I have to say that I've been so grateful for the art history degree because it's also taught me to write really well. And especially visual writing and visual narrative or descriptive narrative has become, when I moved into grad school, writing publications about engineering and design things, um it's been incredibly useful. So, yeah. Yeah.
00:10:33
Speaker
But it was it was definitely, um you know, interdisciplinary. they It didn't really make much sense. And then at the time, but um I went on and I got a Guggenheim Fellowship in Italy. So I kind of did go down the art history track, but, know, work and then worked in in galleries and, you know, moved to London and worked at the Science Museum. Really?
00:10:53
Speaker
I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. Maybe there's, I mean, i won we won't go into too much of it, but I i still felt the pull of the engineering science piece. And so exhibition design was kind of where I landed, where I could have a lot of, understand a lot of context.
00:11:06
Speaker
And even at the time of the Guggenheim, I was spending a lot of time with their head conservator, who was also working on the Sistine Chapel. Like it was an incredible array of people. And I was considering conservation, right? So chemistry and art. And so understanding a lot about process and then the exhibition work, which moved over into science exhibition work and trying to, how do you do the informal science education and learning through exhibits, right? How do you get people and intrigued by things? And then i ended up at the Exploratorium in San Francisco as an exhibit developer there.
Interactive Exhibits: Art and Science at the Exploratorium
00:11:37
Speaker
So really working on literally on like the biological, biology collection and the seeing and visual perception collection, um very much. I mean, that museum is called art, science and human perception. Like that's the title of the museum. So it really encapsulated that, you know, kind of what I wanted to to get at that science is way beyond, it's much more, if we take a kind of human centric focus of of understanding science and think about it through the lens of ourselves, um it's incredibly engaging. and um And we're only just beginning to understand anything about ourselves.
00:12:08
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. And then at some point along the way, you started to do a PhD with the tangible media group at MIT Media Lab.
MIT Media Lab: Shaping a Career in Material Development
00:12:17
Speaker
How did your time at MIT shape your approach to your career and to developing new materials?
00:12:23
Speaker
I mean, MIT changed everything. I mean, like yeah there's pivotal steps, you know, going to Stanford and changes things, getting to Italy and living in Europe and all that changed everything. And then MIT, you just there's not there's no place like it. It's just just a fact.
00:12:36
Speaker
But i had the reason I had actually started the ph d What started it as a master's was at the Exploratorium, I was starting to develop more interactive exhibits. So this was, you know, early 2000s, where we were just starting to have like sensing and actuation and, you know, God, I sound like an ancient person now. But, you know, this was like pre-Arduino even, right? Right, yeah. After prototyping. And um so I wanted a better understanding of how to build these things, quite frankly. My mechanical pleasure engineering degree was taking me to a certain place. I knew how to code, web stuff, but the interaction, it really was like, I got to connect the digital and physical world. And my advisor, Rosh Ishi, that was his specialty, tangible media, the intersection of the two. And he was also very focused on
00:13:18
Speaker
doing incredibly high-end you know computer science um research and interaction design research, while also knowing that art and design plays a huge part in this and it has to be addressed.
00:13:30
Speaker
So we just really came together. I didn't even necessarily mean to apply to grad school. like I got introduced to him. just fell in love with the program and all that. So yeah, it was very um it was just it just felt right. And a lot of my the biggest career decisions have always just been like,
00:13:46
Speaker
I know it's like I'll know it when I see it or I feel and then I'm like that, that, that, that. So when we spoke about doing this episode, ah you said you were starting something new and exciting. Of course, it didn't surprise me because you're always doing something new and exciting and way ahead of everybody else.
00:14:03
Speaker
So I can't wait to get into that now. um This new venture, Mothership Materials. Love the name, by the way. ah So tell us more. What is Mothership Materials and what problem is it solving?
00:14:15
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I should probably just go back and I'll just do the five second explanation of how I got here because it's going to be a real non sequitur. Like after MIT, I founded an algae company and ah micro we were developing microalgae photobioreactors, which sounds like it has nothing to do with textiles and it doesn't, but it was...
Startup Journeys: Algae and Wearable Tech
00:14:34
Speaker
It was electronic infrastructure um on sort of how we use digital technology to influence the natural world. So we were optimizing photosynthesis. And so I worked on that startup for a while. um And then I had a studio where I was doing wearable tech kind of consulting. And this was in...
00:14:50
Speaker
but around the time I met you, when we you know and so I was doing consulting work with Intel and Google and and also some of my own side projects. like I built the costumes. I was working with this Parisian um choreographer, and we together developed a ah show where um all of the ah energy for the performance, for the lights and sound, was generated through movements of the dancers. So I developed costumes to do that, this electromechanical translation.
00:15:15
Speaker
And um so stuff like that, that was that was high concept, but then I was doing more much more practical wearable work too. So there was this kind of cross section. And so I kind of amlet so kind of came into fashion through the back door, through this very technical lens. And at one point I was doing like structural engineering for couture. Like in New York, there's all these weird fashion jobs.
00:15:33
Speaker
that you don't think about you know they're just they don't exist in other markets well paris they do but that that was kind of interesting to me so was getting more involved i'd be like the technical consultant brands would bring in for to solve various problems and so you know that just opened my whole world to the actual fashion industry not just me loving clothes as a kid but now going oh okay this is how it works and you know fast forward to bunch of different startups and materials i was running a fashion tech studio and um i was involved with ah an incubator for new material startups And then got involved with a fund because as you get more and more of the startup world, you realize that the most important thing is who has the money and who controls it and what are they funding and are they understanding the real, the kind of problems. And, you know, we all are very aware of the problems, the problems around um sustainability and environment and environmental problems that the um fashion industry has created.
00:16:24
Speaker
And there's a lot of backend reasons for that, but, um but you know, knowing that, we as the engineers and the sort of scientific people can have a say in how to how to help sculpt the future narrative of a better you know better impact for for the fashion industry, that was really engaging to me. And there was a real disconnect, and this goes back to Silicon Valley and how it works around kind of engaging in you know, new new forms of engineering and science that are actually work aligned with nature and in balance with nature versus ones that are sort of in in opposition. And I went to engineering school kind of bigger, better, faster, stronger um is the way forward and not taking into these other considerations. And then I've been reworking all of that, like just kind of re reformulating in my head how we think about progress.
00:17:15
Speaker
And a lot of it is we're not trying to overpower nature. That was kind of the the industrial revolution, right? It's like we can win. It's like no need to work in balance with nature. And that is then then you actually have even much higher growth, right? So that long-term sustained growth is about balance.
00:17:32
Speaker
so So that's a whole different philosophy, but but I was working with a fund and then there was an offshoot brand, which maybe some of the some of your audience has heard of, Pangaea, where I became the the founding scientist there and the chief innovation
Pangaea's Viral Biofabricated Textiles
00:17:44
Speaker
officer. And we did whole lot of work um developing new material textiles. We're known as a fashion brand and you might know our...
00:17:51
Speaker
brightly colored track suits that went viral during the pandemic. But there was a whole research lab behind that developing materials from highest level of biofabrication. ah You know, like we did the first ever biofabricated hoodie with fiber, which is crude protein like made from um the DNA of spiders.
00:18:08
Speaker
Like so it's mimicked around spider silk. We're looking at all different kinds of natural paradigms, looking at waste valorization. So how do we, how do we start to utilize different kinds of, biomass or or you know just like recycling, but at the highest levels of what's the what's the future progress on on those things to to really to kind of actually upgrade materials or put them in an infinite loop, not as kind of downgraded.
00:18:31
Speaker
So setting like protocols around the highest levels of ah impact criteria. So, you know, no, like absolutely no virgin polyester, like kind of creating, creating this whole infrastructure around materials first um for the, for the brand. So, so that ah the has, I've been working on that for the last but six years and I just recently left, but um the point was that it really created this whole framework of how do we integrate not just R and D, but like kind of innovation, this, this evolution of innovation direct going directly into products where, you know, I was,
00:19:04
Speaker
watching you know academia, right? I've been, and I also, well, this whole time in the back end, I taught at and NYU for a couple years. I was at Columbia for eight years teaching biomaterials. And then, and then more recently I was at Harvard. So I've stayed very close to academic circles and you see amazing things in the lab. They're not necessarily making it out into companies or into, you know, and it's not,
00:19:25
Speaker
There's lots of reasons for that it about the kind of people who are doing it and, heat you know, whatever. But was just sort of wanting to focus on how do we really get through the hurdles of getting something into into real product. And I can't say we solved it, but we did a lot of work to get forward into this is a real model.
00:19:42
Speaker
And it's it's a lot more complex about understanding what how the fashion industry works, what are the levers to pull, what are the business structures? You know, it's like all this thing, it's like, go back to the spreadsheet. So that was, um there was a massive um education in inside the fashion industry, but also bringing my kind of innovation and my perspective on all these, like the cutting edge, um the cutting edge science and and engineering work, bringing that, trying to bring that really in inside fashion as well.
00:20:11
Speaker
So what I'm doing now is working on a molecular separation technology, which really can pull different nutrient streams from any kind of of agricultural waste.
00:20:25
Speaker
So it's a waste valorization platform. Now, the reason this is still in fashion. okay so So a lot of the problems that we were having with getting new materials into product is the cost. right So all of these innovations um and cost cost more, is most especially because they're at the beginning and there's there's always a sort of a hurdle where it's something like we we understand this from every form of science, you know, with the first to make a drug, the first pill costs $5 billion, dollars a second one costs two cents, right? Once you have the formula and you've done the work and so there's an amortization period.
00:20:58
Speaker
So there's that to go in and fashion is traditionally not invested textile innovation. Like there's a whole weird splintering of where the money goes and, you know, innovation in textiles is coming from mostly the military and then a little bit around safety, but there's not a lot of actual directed money going in there. So that that's kind of ah a strange, um strange thing to try to work around. But Also, there is it's just about supply chains and setting up
Fruit Fiber Textiles: Cost-Competitive Challenges
00:21:24
Speaker
the right stream. So you know we have textile supply chains that are hundreds of years old, at which which which are have been um developed and it can be fantastic, but we need to start working on alternative supply chains. right and this is So for example, we were making like my favorite textile that we made at Pangaea. It's called Fruit Fiber.
00:21:45
Speaker
And so we made plant fiber and fruit fiber. So this we wanted to show that you could make of a soft, lovely drapey jersey with no cotton, right? So we were gonna use 100% reclaimed. um So that the waste of pineapple plants, banana plants, and seaweed. Now, not the food, right? But you all the stuff that's cut off and and you know just basically is burned. It's like a it's ah it's a hazard for for kind of the problem. So we're trying to turn the something as like, this is a burden, we're turning it into an opportunity. and um But it was very hard to get any. So you have to separate out the cellulose and process it and turn it into a viscose or whatever.
00:22:20
Speaker
it be can't we We started joking around that we were it was like couture waste because it was so it was these very small streams and small producers. Process wasn't really optimized and the ingredients were expensive. So so we could just never, there was no what no way to ever get the cost of these garments down to even to compete with.
00:22:39
Speaker
organic cotton. like We're not trying to go to fast fashion. like That needs to be over. But just to get it into a general, responsible high street price, it just the the supply chain is right there. So everything I'm doing is to move up the supply chain to sort out the ingredient streams.
00:22:53
Speaker
So that's really where I feel the innovation is. So So what we're doing is this new technology, which comes from medical technology. It actually was developed as a blood separation technology. It's incredibly intricate. There's a biological capture particle. The IP is two-sided, working with like a centrifuge, a specific geometry of a disk,
00:23:12
Speaker
where, and it works like a magnet, where basically this capture particle can go through a solution, like this one is intended to pull out cellulose, this one is glucose, you can pull out abs absorbic acid, proteins, lipids.
00:23:23
Speaker
So you're doing, you're really separating out, you sort of sonicate the the biomass, and then you do this kind of um this separation um centrifuging process, and you get clean, like really high level clean ingredient nutrients, nutrients streams.
00:23:40
Speaker
And it's cost effective. There's a lot of reasons why it makes sense from a business point of view, is what I can say. So we're just kind of getting up and started. The technology, the you know the the lead scientist who's one of the partners in the company, you know she's been working on this for 12 years. There's nine patents. like It's gone through medical testing. So we're like downgrading Because we already know works super well for this one.
00:24:03
Speaker
we We just need to kind of, we're just sort of industrializing it and making it lower resolution. It doesn't even have to work as well. So this is ideal engineering problem.
Mothership's Nutrient Separation Tech
00:24:12
Speaker
So yeah, so that's what I'm getting involved in. And so we're we're going around and and, you know, I've been obsessed with this like waste valorization we're leaving, like, for for example, like, you know, all the sargassum blooms that have been happening across the Caribbean. So there's seaweed there. And this is because of climate change. So the what this the water temperature is rising and we have all different weird pollution, which is nutrients for seaweed.
00:24:35
Speaker
So they bloom, they're taking over beaches, they're killing ecosystems. Now, this is, it algae and seaweed is an incredible organism. It has like lipids, um it has everything, lipids, proteins, cellulose, right? It's like a model organism of ingredients. So i'm they're thinking, oh, they're like taking this away, carting it, burning it off the beaches in Mexico.
00:24:55
Speaker
This is like, we're we're burning gold, right? This is money, right? So if we can separate it into useful things, right? then then so so this is how I'm seeing it. like look at this is My philosophy that I developed at Pangaea was called high-tech naturalism, where you look at the world from a place of abundance. So what do we have a lot of that we can use? We have a lot of carbon, and we have a lot of waste, right?
00:25:16
Speaker
So these are the things that we can turn into useful streams if we have if we put the innovation to work in the right way. So that's why I'm now in the CTO of Mothership. And um you know we're starting, it has to be also cross-industry. So there's a lot of, say, for example, like food and beverage companies who have excess from their production, we'll take that and we'll turn it into you know cellulose. So for all the textile industry to make any kind of what they call man-made cellulose fibers, MMCFs, viscose, Lysol, which are I think the fastest growing component of the textile industry, I'm glad to say, and they're they're bio-based, so they can have a lot of properties of cotton, but they because of the way they're kind of extruded or produced, you can also embed some synthetic characteristics into them.
00:26:00
Speaker
So I think it's an incredibly cool, malleable mechanism. i'm a attract It's like that that intersection of where you're looking for something that has performance characteristics, you usually go to a synthetic, fossil fuel synthetic.
00:26:10
Speaker
you know If you want fluffy cotton, ah we still love that. It's great. We need some things that are in between. And if we can have this family of textiles, these MMCFs take over all the synthetic categories, that's the that's kind of the ideal. and But the other thing that we're also going to be producing is glucose.
Affordable Glucose for Biofabrication: Industry Solutions
00:26:28
Speaker
And this is important for fashion. It's important for a lot of industries. But the rise of biofabrication, right? So the the nature of how we're actually taking DNA... ah from one organism, say ah the flower a flower that is red, you take the part of the DNA that grows the red, put it into a different microbe, grow that, and they produce red dye. This is this is across all industries, food, materials, et cetera.
00:26:51
Speaker
they need The microbes need to eat something. and what they need is a cheap source of glucose. And so in order, it's been like kind of this looming crisis that as biofabrication um industrialization rises, we do we've not had an affordable glucose source. And so it's a bottleneck.
00:27:07
Speaker
So we are going to be releasing the first ever glucose specifically for microbes. So as a product to go into the biofabrication chain. So this, could feed, and this is also something that will get the cost down of biofabrication. So for example, like the biofabricated hoodie that we made at Pangaea was incredibly expensive.
00:27:26
Speaker
And there's all different parts of that process that are expensive, but the we shouldn't be using, like growing sugar to feed microbes is not the way for it. We need to be using a waste source just from an impact and balance cycle.
00:27:39
Speaker
So yeah, so and then there's ah thousands of other ingredients which we we can pull out to absorb a gasp. you know, oil, like, like smaller, smaller by volume things, but um we're just getting started. um Even lignin potentially for biofuels. Like we, we're getting inbound requests and go, Oh, we didn't even think of that. Okay. Like, you know, it's that, that beautiful early time in a startup where have to be very careful to stay focused on what you're doing. And we've got our first industrialization, you know, happening early, early 2026, but the opportunities are endless. And that's, I love that feeling where we are,
00:28:13
Speaker
you know, there's too many things that we can be doing. And so we're well careful to focus, but of I'm collecting all of these things as as future um future parts of the company.
00:28:24
Speaker
Yeah, I love it. I mean, I got goosebumps when you were explaining this. just... love Just incredible technology, Amanda. i mean, honestly, it's just fascinating. and So many startups are trying to do little bits of this and, you know, try and get one ways to produce one kind of material, leather, fiber, whatever it is. And you've just kind of really disrupted that space as well. Exactly.
00:28:46
Speaker
I see us as an enabler. i mean, it is. Okay. Yeah. But since that, like, well, i worked on a lot of like waste valorization projects where the problem was that because of a lot of it was chemical or you would, you would be trying to get one material out and you destroy the other ones in the process. there Not in a bad way. It's that this is just how it was working is complexity of trying, trying to get nutrient different streams out of one thing. um So i i want to ah I really want this to be a kind of enabler where people don't have to be like, oh, well, is that cellulose going to be too expensive? Or can we do, know?
00:29:19
Speaker
So it's this sort of, it's a kind of a backbone. um And it's it's it's honestly, like I just said, it's solving the problems that I was having inside the industry. I was at the cutting, the bleeding edge things. And I'm like, we're never going to get there unless go upstream five steps and look at the actual cellulose that's coming out.
00:29:37
Speaker
so And so there's no there's no amount of, you know, the the head of sustainability in a fashion brand going, oh, but we want to better this. It's like, it's not going to happen from from that space. It has to go way upstream. So that's why i I tell people, like, I'm still very much in the fashion industry.
00:29:53
Speaker
It's just there's a couple of steps I got to explain to you why is. yeah but This will get you there eventually. Brilliant. So you said it's not limited to any particular kind of waste. Any agricultural waste can be used with this technology. Wow. Yeah. And so and so things like, you know, the offcuts of a farm are like a very obvious place to
Revenue from Waste: Mothership's Farm Innovations
00:30:13
Speaker
start.
00:30:13
Speaker
um And so, for example, like we're potentially working with a like a cocoa farm in Granada, who you know, and there's a obviously there's a lot of pressure on farms to be to make money or to break even or, you know, just the pressure is crazy and with the climate change and everything. So anytime you can have a secondary revenue stream from, you know, cause the, you know, seeing the prices of chocolate rising like crazy and that's partly because the farming. So if we can get the farmers more money back on what they're growing, there's a lot, ah lot of the pot that has a lot of other interesting things in there that we can process. So things like that.
00:30:47
Speaker
But then there's also like industrial processes, like say like brewer's plant grain, Like there's incredible ingredients in what's left over from making beer or so. So almost everything has some kind of residue. And as long and we're also, we are looking at like things like polluted sargassum. Right. But we're starting with some, with streams that we know what's in them.
00:31:06
Speaker
So if it's an industrial stream, like we know, so that's cause then we can understand what we're going to get out and set up some standards for the process. Right. we yeah Like starting in the wild west of like, we're not sure what's in this seaweed, you know, like, We will be setting up a ah sugar kelp processing plant in new York City. Wow.
00:31:26
Speaker
TBD, but we're working with the the city here, Anna, in various ways. But they grow sugar kelp for remediation of the harbor waters. And being able to do something useful with that is. it's it's ah The tricky thing with with these kinds of waste streams is that and we can We can remove toxins or we don't remove them. We separate out what we want and then there is still toxins there and you have to dispose them properly, but you're taking all the volume down.
00:31:50
Speaker
um But you have to be very careful. like We cannot have food grade ingredients coming from New York Harbor at this point. right so You have to be working on doing other things with that. so If something starts food grade, then you can potentially put it back into the food grade chain more easily. It's still not direct. There's a lot of testing and I don't want to scare people. This is by no means like, yeah.
00:32:10
Speaker
This is very regulated, everything they'll be producing. Although the microbes don't care, of the microbes. They need anything. Yeah, yeah um but yeah but so that's, you know, starting, there's so many different streams that we're literally analyzing, but but starting with ones that are just more known.
00:32:30
Speaker
It's readily available, right? And is the infrastructure heavy? Is there something that you can build nearer to where the waste is produced? when i When I met the founders and ah you know they were looking for an engineering partner, there was things I was looking for. Having done enough startups, worked with a lot more. And also now I also am an advisor to impact fund called Regeneration VC. So we see a lot of deal flow coming through. It's like, what works, what doesn't? Like I've i've been through it for the last 20 years. And um one of the things that's beautiful about the tech is that it's modular. So we don't have to build like million dollar facilities.
On-Site Waste Processing: Reducing Carbon Footprint
00:33:04
Speaker
It's basically a stack of disks
00:33:07
Speaker
that spin and there's a kind of just a sort of motor infrastructure there. And those disks can be literally 3D printed. i mean, there's IP in the design and there's IP in the capture particles that make it match and everything.
00:33:19
Speaker
But it's the kind of thing where we can literally ship those off or ship off a drawing. And so the infrastructure can easily be moved around. We're talking about paradigms of where it lives on a flatbed truck. So you drive it around, process it out.
00:33:32
Speaker
or on in a shipping container. it's ah you know So the device itself is has got like a you know four four foot by four foot footprint. yeah um There's some other you know other things that have pre-processing, whatever, but this is not it's not infrastructure heavy.
00:33:47
Speaker
And that's a point that we could drive this onto a farm and process and get some ingredients there. Yeah, so that was one of the things that I was really sold on because I know people trying to set up... I mean, we this needs to happen, but it's very, very hard in terms of getting the right fundraising of like building entirely new manufacturing plants. And also from a impact perspective, from a carbon perspective, it doesn't make sense to be like driving waste around. I mean, you you can justify a lot of things.
00:34:15
Speaker
But the more you can decentralize these kinds of things, the better it is. So then what you do is we will still be moving the product, but you're taking the mass and volume down by 10x, 100x, right? So then the carbon numbers start to make more sense.
00:34:29
Speaker
Even just removing the water. like Sometimes like I get like freaked out about how much water we ship around the world inside of products. It's so crazy. like using fuel to ship water is like one of those kind of like when you start to think about balancing moments of carbon cover him and i and i love that it is innovation that was developed in a completely different sector and industry and and you know you were able to kind of bring that to the needs of our world and um i mean this stuff is blowing my mind away um i mean Interestingly, I worked on a lot of technology. I i think I talking about Gravitate to them because one of the my first algae biofuel startup was actually an innovation from the flat panel display industry. My friend was an optical engineer and we pulled it in to work on distributing light for photosynthesis.
00:35:20
Speaker
So that kind of crossover, I think that's where a lot of the big ideas that can be sort of teased out, right? So Yeah. um i I love those trends. and And it takes somebody to be able to see it. And this wasn't me, the other partner, she'd worked in ag tech, but it had it it is the an argument for um kind of interdisciplinary education, like being able to understand what's going on in one industry and how it can apply to another one is super, super important.
00:35:47
Speaker
Absolutely. and and yeah And that's the thing, you do that so seamlessly. Like I said, you sort of move between these sectors and disciplines and spaces. So like, it's just very normal for you, isn't it? And that's a real skill. That's a skill that is so hard, isn't it? It's interesting because I think, i mean, part of me is like, oh, do I just get bored easily? That's partly, i mean, but although I don't get bored when I really love something. but But one of the things I think it's about, are you someone who's comfortable with uncertainty?
00:36:16
Speaker
right and there's there's there are some personality traits like i don't recommend this for everyone it's like i love the challenge of solving the problem but it has actually more to do with well i consider a lot of my job it to be innovation diplomacy where you're you're coming into one environment say like a very traditional textile manufacturing environment and in italy or portugal right they they have processes have been set in stone for like you know 100 years and for good reason they're incredible right they're incredible craftsmanship and stuff and you're trying to kind of disrupt and interrupt there you have to do it delicately and you have to yeah to like explain and you know be like this is going to be better the long run we're we we're coming to you because of your craftsmanship and because of your understanding and we're going to maybe have you work like incredibly good leather craftsmen working with like a new leather that has been you know that's made of mycelium has different characteristics you tell us what's wrong with it it's not going
00:37:07
Speaker
It's behave like leather. It's going to behave like something else, but you'll be able to do something amazing with this. So tell us its benefits, its limitations, right? So this balancing act of, it there's a lot of culture in it. And i I think you can probably appreciate this. I know when we were, I was, when we, when we missed out on going to the ah facility, but just understanding like the traditional craft and manufacturing process of India and how you start to integrate new innovation, right?
00:37:32
Speaker
there You just, you have to respect culture. And that's, I think that's something that I, ah like I have this kind of anthropological thing that I, is a good trigger.
00:37:43
Speaker
So I, you know, I always say like, I'm at, I'm the nerdiest person at a fashion event. Like I'll be at the its a fashion 500 gal and I'm like the dorky scientist. Right. And then I'm at like a computer science conference or material science conference and I am the most stylish person there. Right. So absolutely. Like very comfortable with kind who you are. And, you know, and I always like also like I like to to put myself in rooms where I'm like the dumbest or least informed person in the room.
00:38:09
Speaker
That's the pleasure to seek out the other the other information and the things I've learned, like from getting like, for example, like the crafts people. And I've worked on a ah high heel project. We were re-architecting the stiletto and it was people from SpaceX. I swear we had an astronaut on the design team, ah design reviews with an astronaut or around the inside of the stiletto. That's actually a crazy story where like all of these engineers, like the, the woman who started it, um, Dolly Singh, she, you know, she was wearing, she worked, She was like Elon's head of talent at SpaceX. And she's like, what you know we're building these rockets. Why do my feet hurt so much when i walk around the factory in heels?
00:38:51
Speaker
And all the engineers who, quite frankly, were men, they were like, we don't know how a shoe is made. And then they cut it open and they're like, this is outrageous. And I was like, yeah, that hasn't been changed since it was invented in 1920. It's like a rod. It's like a metal rod.
00:39:05
Speaker
yeah know we're like We're torturing women. So re-architecting that with new polymers, new structural innovation, like looking at how you displace forces. and We did this an amazing amazing project called Thesis Couture.
00:39:16
Speaker
But we went to the most traditional Italian shoe factory to have it produced. And we're like, can you build it around this new center? And we had to get... them on board say, how can we work with us We want it to look and feel, you know, like my baton um and, or not, not feel, we want to yeah know he want it you know, to have a a totally different inside and, but but have this. And so those are fun conversations, but the amount I learned from being in those shoe factories that reapplies to other things are like, like shoe manufacturing machines are some of the most intricate systems I've ever seen in my life.
00:39:51
Speaker
like the moving components of robotics that are like, oh my God. So yeah. But how do we do that, man? I mean, a lot of the the majority of the listeners here do come from the textile and fashion world and they're curious about science. and But how do we sort of encourage them to move further in? And you don't have to be experts at everything, but still be able to to enable these kinds of exchanges of insights and and be able to see something there that you can bring back into your world because it's a solution there.
00:40:20
Speaker
How do we encourage people to do that? I mean, i think it's important, first of all, to always be curious about how things are made. And that's something that I but just continue like don't and don't ever assume that it's done that way because it's the best way. You know, like there's reasons behind it. But I mean, now, you know, I remember some of the most amazing things that I did, like as an undergrad at Stanford. And I know I was lucky, but they would take us to a factory where they were manufacturing cables. This sounds boring. It is not.
00:40:46
Speaker
Like, right. And if you like mechanical system, figure out what you are interested in, first of all, but, but anytime you can see how something is made, your brain starts to work slightly differently in that you see the product. different And, um, now we have YouTube and every factory is on, has stuff online. You know, you can say, how is this made? And like a thousand videos will pop up. So it also, how it's made and what it's made of those two, the curiosity of like, where do things come from for anybody in fashion? I think just starting there.
00:41:14
Speaker
And then that will just, so and anytime you have a an opportunity to go see facility or understand a process or, you know, or so even, and I i don't, isn't you it could be like, yes, the technical factory.
00:41:27
Speaker
i love to like watch videos of like the French couture houses, those that hand stitching. Oh my God, I can watch that for hours, right? and So understanding like the, there's a lot of good reasons why those systems have developed.
00:41:40
Speaker
There's also ways that we can break them open. and And like, you have to be like, I think it's also about sensitivity and like a very high level of emotional intelligence. I think for someone in the science and tech realm, I do have that. I have like one of those rare Meyer Briggs things where I have the high emotional intelligence. And so...
00:41:58
Speaker
There's a lot of, you have to fight the nerve to, to be like, I'm right. Like, this is the Silicon Valley problem that you people come in and go, oh, we're doing it. We're breaking everything. It's like, no, I, you know, instead of like, you know, move fast and break things. I'm like, move fast and fix things.
00:42:12
Speaker
Is that like, please? like Yeah. so Actually, you just talked about Silicon Valley because they, um you were named by Vanity Fair as the eight wildest women of Silicon Valley, right? Yeah, I did it i did an interview and then that that's what my title came back is. So I'm i'm happy for it. Yeah, absolutely. trained there, I live there, I work there.
00:42:36
Speaker
And I always felt I was on the edge. Like, and I don't know if this was, they there's a lot of gender stuff from the last decade. 30 years, right, across technology. It's not a Me Too podcast. But even when i it's hard to know like, I felt kind of out like an outsider inside of mechanical engineering. And i and i always felt like you blame yourself and go, oh, must just not be good at this.
00:43:00
Speaker
Because it wasn't appealing to me to go in and get that engineering job or whatever. I was like very happy to like move to Italy and work in a gallery. and um And I think now I'm like kind of reprocessing. Like that environment wasn't comfortable to me for a lot
Innovation and Craftsmanship: A Diplomatic Blend
00:43:14
Speaker
of other reasons. not that Not just that I wasn't good at it. Like I figured out that I am am good at certain things that are part of that. And there's a lot of, so I think looking at like workplace culture, which which are which we're much better at now. I mean, it's by no means perfect, but at least it could it can be recognized that those things are are happening. So yeah, I think that's also important. Like you want to seek out, you want to be comfortable where you are, but you also want to identify like how much of it is you and how much of it is the environment. Yeah, right.
00:43:43
Speaker
And then go from there, yeah. Now, this technology that you talked about with Mothership, it seems almost the perfect solution, but I'm sure there's been some big challenges along the way. Could you share some of that and how you've navigated it?
00:43:54
Speaker
To be fair, I just joined full time last month. So so we're very early. I mean, we the technology has been in existence. Primary nature of the engineering work is done. And that's where there's all the patents and everything. So it's all the small things along the way to get this industrialized. And that's really the whole point of a lot of what people don't see. And like the breakthrough innovation feels like it's like 90% of the work, but it's cut it's not.
00:44:18
Speaker
Like the implementation and like, for example, when we were working with like Colorifics, to get the first ever bioreactor put into a dye house, right? They were growing the live dye. The engineering work on the bioreactor was done, but getting it implemented in the process and all that, there's a ah thousand tiny things.
00:44:36
Speaker
So this is one of those like death by a thousand paper cuts where each process, um even if somebody worked on Italy, like it took us six months to get the power turned on the building. Like just crazy things that you're like, there's no way to have known. So it's just this const constancy and determination of each phase that, yeah, that you just have to go through. So it's all the just considering all the small things, as we get things up and running. And then, again, there's that, you know, making sure that the business model is so tight, that nobody can ever say, Oh, this isn't going to make money. And I hate to say that I sometimes I'm like,
00:45:10
Speaker
i i Who am I? Like other say because you know like I've never been that's motivated by that. But it's just true that nothing is ever going to work to change anything towards more sustainable systems if there isn't a business model. But they're Now, you need to look at the broken nature of the fact that we're still supplementing fossil fuels, right? So they you know they get extra money and and then you know the the actual like sustainable energy systems are tasked. you know it's It's broken in that way, but really kind of just to understand that the business model has to be there for it to become parallel.
00:45:42
Speaker
It's not like you these systems are cannot be charities. Yeah. yeah yeah And so so just being like locked tight on how that's going to happen or have a realistic projection. Like the first one is not going to be cheaper, but at what point will it become break even or the same price of doing other things or what when they start to make money? And I think that's really how we've gotten corporates on board to say, you know, this is the right thing to do, but also...
00:46:06
Speaker
within X amount of time, which is pretty short, we will be able to be bringing you extra revenue in. And and so you just got to get your your people on board. So, yeah, but but I think that the biggest challenge is to just stay focused on each tiny step of the way.
00:46:20
Speaker
and then also staying focused on not trying to do 20 things at once. Because as I just said, you know we could be producing 20 different products and all different streams and like choosing carefully. And that mostly comes from experience of having done enough startups where I'm like, no, in that one, we did we went too broad and, you know, these kinds of things. So just these careful, these little navigating things. So your focus, you're saying, is going to be um cellulose fibers to start with for the tech technology. Cellulose and glucose are what we're starting. And what and There's a lot of reasons for that, but one of the main things is that they are by mass and volume pretty much the largest amount. So you're removing the bulk the material. It doesn't mean they're the most high value, but establishing those supply chains there and you know um in terms of there's definitely need and ah markets for them.
00:47:05
Speaker
But then we'll go into more specialized nutrient streams and things that can be, know, like it's great if you have a tiny amount of something that costs $2,000 a kilo or something, right? Yeah. The opportunity is smaller for those very high.
00:47:18
Speaker
so So, so doing that enough. well How soon do you think you can get it to market? Well, I think, well, I think the thing is like, what does market mean? So we're we're getting our first industrial installation up and running next year. And then honestly, there's parts of this, this system where even if we don't do anything with what we process, it still pays for itself in terms of waste remediation.
00:47:40
Speaker
there's an, There's that interesting first step of just getting it running does like does a certain thing you're separating out water and toxins and whatever. um And then there's the the next point, which is this the point of the company, but the market is to sell off the other things. There's two there's like two phases. So we have a proposal.
00:47:56
Speaker
But then there's even a smaller company that we are working with that wants to use the cellulose right away. So we will start with some startups that are specifically interested in this and want to work with us on developing the right viscose or the right lifestyle with it. i mean We also, we're not trying to become ah textile producer or even really yarn producer. So we want, I mean, we could, but that's again, let's, let's just, I just want to fix first, the first, the first thing.
00:48:24
Speaker
um And there's lots of people who know how to do that. So, so that, that could be out pretty soon if it's small volume, right? So, so that's, we're working through those timelines, but there could be, there could be, you know, small, small amounts of product out by the end of next year with the cellulose.
00:48:37
Speaker
I'm also curious to find out what waste you generate at the end of it and how are you processing that or how, what do you have to deal with at the end? Again, it it's every stream is different, right? So it's, if we take out, say that the highest percent, like the cellulose and glucose, which might be 80%, oh, and the water, by the way, which, which people pull out clean water. So that's ah also an important thing.
00:48:58
Speaker
Okay. Yeah.
00:49:02
Speaker
ah secondary process or you know it depends on what is if it starts with a lot of toxins it's obviously more complicated and stuff but but just being able to at least pull out clean if you if the ingredient stream starts clean quote in we will be able to pull out clean water and that's in itself is great and then And then there'll be like a pile of everything else, which could be lipids or, you know, different things that will still will be all bio-based.
00:49:28
Speaker
So that can go in a compost or go into regular landfill, like responsibly. You know, it's it's just biomass. great but We've just, it's really about, yeah say, if you take the volume down by 10x, that's a big deal in terms of that kind of stuff. So we don't know yet, um you know, if we do start working on toxic streams,
00:49:48
Speaker
um there has to be an agreement in place of like, we're not trying to take over, we're not becoming like a toxic remediator. Like we have to like whatever they're doing now, whoever whoever is in charge of this waste or whatever, we have to, you know there's there's a lot of like regulatory stuff, which we'll start getting into. And this is why it's going to be the second second phase of the business.
00:50:07
Speaker
And that, or for example, if we were trying to look at like, all the waste sargassum that pulls up on beaches. Like who owns that, right? This is like, these are like, we're government infrastructure problems. So you have to come in and have a lock tight agreement on, we will process and make clean this, this and this. um You know, we can't be thoroughly in charge of and if there's arsenic in it or something, you know, like like what happens, there's gotta be um that whatever, whatever the government compliance and all that. yeah Yeah, probably a really dumb question, but if it is agricultural waste, what makes it toxic?
00:50:40
Speaker
No, most things wouldn't be toxic. When I'm talking about the sargassum blooms, this is literally stuff that will, okay, it'll it's coming from the ocean, right? So there could be a pollutant stream like running from a river, whatever. All of all the ways that water gets polluted, sargassum like takes that inside as the organism.
00:50:59
Speaker
Like it remediates it by putting it into its planets organism, right? Yeah. And so you're subject to whatever is potentially in the water being in the organism.
00:51:10
Speaker
So that's like where the unknown comes. So it's a good thing because you're working to at least pull it out of these environments. But I imagine, and there's so much research going on in this, it's not my area, but of like understanding where the toxic flows are coming from. We're trying to stop all that, but what what is even left in different places, like where things end up in the world, that's the whole science itself, right?
00:51:34
Speaker
so but we're not So we're not we're not expecting high levels of toxins. There's going to be waste that can just be you know literally just biomass that we don't want, like lignin, which is there's nothing dangerous about that, right?
00:51:49
Speaker
Versus something that should not be there and will contaminate groundwater or something. Now, moving on a little bit ah to your previous role in Pangaea, you talked about recently, we'll just do a little little chat about it because knows Pangaea.
00:52:03
Speaker
And you were the chief innovation officer there. And of course, you were also named the most innovative brand by um fast company on the fast companies list. So, you know, that must have been an incredibly proud moment for you as well, being the CIO of the company. That was where you started to bridge that world of fashion and science, but in a very commercial way, right? You were kind of taking the science from the lab and bringing it out into the world, turning it into a business.
00:52:29
Speaker
What was unexpected and tough about that process?
Pangaea: Sustainable Materials in Fashion
00:52:33
Speaker
Well, first of all, everything, but but no, but the the thing that's interesting about Pengai was we started as an investment fund, right? So I came and joined as like a scientific partner where there was a small fund that was working on investing in new materials, new sustainable materials, um mostly for textiles, but more broadly around kind of fashion and product.
00:52:51
Speaker
And so we had, you know, and and when we started this fund, I spent like a year basically with with um some of the other partners, like going around the world and visiting labs, kind of getting them educated on the space and then seeing the absolute cutting edge startups, labs, et cetera. First of all, the whole mapping of the space. And and I got to have spend time getting a really deep understanding of what's important, where things are moving, where the limitations are, like just a real kind of mapping out of of what's coming next for innovation and what's going to make sense.
00:53:20
Speaker
And we were investing in companies that word we thought were doing the right material innovation moves, but we were also watching the fashion industry backlash. And this is 10 years ago, right? Or maybe eight, where they were not incorporating quickly because, you know, There's ah there's a big mismatch between like a tech startup and like an old school giant fashion brand. like they just They don't even speak each other's language. We'll start there. But the assumption that the startup is going to have passed every regulatory test and can deliver them 2,000 meters in six months, like the way that they put in a purchase order. like you cannot just
00:53:53
Speaker
A startup is not a supplier. and when it So you have to work with them. So kind of setting. We we really started Pangaea as a way to be like, you know we should have a brand that demonstrates that you can make beautiful, responsible garments from these new materials.
00:54:07
Speaker
And let's like, let's create something that sets the standard. Now we started by making just like best in class organic cotton and, you know, but just showing like it was made as a demonstration brand to the industry because we were getting so much pushback on like, oh, that's impossible. Startups aren't ready. it edit And it's like, well, you have to work with them.
00:54:22
Speaker
so So that was the model to show that we could do that. And then as we grew, we were getting into more and more complicated um innovations, like like getting the first ever you know biofabricated hoodie made. And when we did get the brand up and running, like we had like 12 innovations in like 16 months or something ridiculous, which seemed impossible.
00:54:42
Speaker
But what was that? There was like a, first of all, there was like four year back end of me mapping out and developing those relationships. And then like 20 years of industry relationship. Like one of the things, you know, ah like I, in my first job, I had like a 20 year friendship relationship with one of the founders of one of the stars we were working with. Right. So that stuff doesn't come from nowhere.
00:55:03
Speaker
Right. And so the trust and then, you know, me, them trusting me to be like, I will do the best that we can with your material. We'll work with the best artisans and all that kind of stuff. So, So, I mean, the challenge was really in building trust everywhere, but right? And even internally, right? Because we had, as a brand crew, we had a lot of people coming from traditional fashion industry who thought I was nuts, which is great.
00:55:23
Speaker
And then you got to get them on board, right? To see the vision and all that. And then, of course, the challenge was... there's so much financial challenge. Like this stuff just costs a lot of money to make. And well, I got very interested in the business model of fashion brands and like why, but so the bill of materials is like 5% of the actual cost of what they sell for.
Reforming Business Models for Sustainability
00:55:43
Speaker
And trying to break that down, like what, like the sort of the whole, so first of all, the wholesale markup or, the you know, that, that whole thing is crazy. The stuff that goes into marketing, yes, we need marketing campaigns, but do we need 10 million dollars celebrity campaigns, can we science? So really trying to shift that, you know if someone so comes to you and says, I, you know, the problem was more like there was CEOs of fashion brands being, yeah, yeah, we want to do sustainability, to but then the people who are actually purchasing the textiles,
00:56:09
Speaker
or like the middle managers, they don't have the ability to spend one more cent per meter on something, right? So you have to put the hands, the the decision-making into the right people to change.
00:56:21
Speaker
You need to change small things up and down that supply chain. And maybe you whack your marketing budget off and da, da, da, and you you accept the fact that it's not written in stone that materials can only cost 5% the product cost.
00:56:33
Speaker
or that you do spend more on manufacturing or, you know, these things that you develop like longer term, you know, we did a lot of stuff that was like, put, we'll say we're going to buy this much over three years. So we get reduced price at the beginning, even though we know costs, you know, so these, you have to be really innovative and, and get everybody on board. and um,
00:56:51
Speaker
that's not how traditional fashion brands, you know, they're also the whole idea of trying to make four collections a year. you cannot do that with this model. And so the pressure, I don't blame the fashion brands. It's like they put, they've been put into a structure where the pressure to just produce is overwhelming and there's no time for people to think or innovate.
00:57:08
Speaker
So you have to get out of that, like wrench or yourself out of that cycle. We didn't produce, we would sometimes have new colors for new seasons, but we were we would do what we call material upgrades. We'd have, we you had our basic, like really successful design and then we changed the material. We'd change, you know, we do these small upgrades to things tweak. So we were operating more like the way that you think of like ah an upgraded version of an iPhone.
00:57:30
Speaker
It's like, there's slightly new features and you it's like, it's better. It doesn't mean that the other one was bad. It's just, you're, you're moving up that chain as opposed to saying, Oh, everything has to be new every three months. Yeah.
00:57:40
Speaker
that was what something that actually helped us. But I think it was just the, honestly, ah the the diplomacy part, the just diplomacy and money, where like, you know, the design was there, the innovation was there, it was moving it through and getting everybody on board. And like, it is going to take longer than you think, it's going to cost more than you think.
00:57:59
Speaker
And everybody get on board. Because there was there were these funny times, or i remember early on with the brand, where you know we had an innovation team that were kind of scientists and and technologists, and then the product design team or and the production team who were coming more from traditional fashion. And we would make prototypes and stuff.
00:58:17
Speaker
And if 50% of the stuff made it into a product, we would be like, that's wildly successful. Like if you have a research lab, 20% of the stuff makes it or something that's success. The product team, their perspective on the 50% was like, we were failing.
00:58:31
Speaker
So we had to have this like corporate conversation or this kind of company conversation around what it means to be successful with new innovation that you are like, even if you spend a whole bunch of time on this and it doesn't become a successful product, you didn't fail.
00:58:44
Speaker
You were learning things from that. And there's only a certain amount of stuff. It's like, if you're not failing at stuff, you're not trying, enough things that are hard. And so that was an interesting kind of cultural thing that we had to kind of get over and all so all small things, but all small things that make giant problems, I guess, is where just hardship.
00:59:03
Speaker
Was there anything that you wish you had done differently during your time with Punga? um I think there's always like, oh, we should have gone harder on this. Like, I sometimes think we should have done less. I know that sounds a little crazy, but um just, I mean, I'm very proud of what we produced, but there there was the the nature of short-term versus long-term, right? How much we're producing, et cetera, and how do we establish different supply chains.
00:59:28
Speaker
um I might've gone in like a little bit earlier on process tech. I don't know. Yeah, it's it I'm still kind of thinking it over, but I think in general, just being mindful of the market.
00:59:41
Speaker
And, um you know, there's, you cannot create a product that will sell itself on its sustainability. And we weren't trying to do that, but we did have like a very loyal base of customers who were, we knew they were buying the brand because of the credentials. It was also very cool, but you can't expect that to keep scaling, right? You have, your brand has to be Just as good and just as cool as other things in their price point. I don't think we did that wrong, but it's just a recognition of how fashion and trend works. And so the the selling of the material coolness is not is was not what we could rely on really for the long term. Also, the other thing that this is just something that we just never got to, but I'm still very passionate about is...
Universal Textile Language: Tactile Online Experience
01:00:24
Speaker
developing something online to give people a sense of what the textiles feel like and act like. So I think we're missing a lot of language. So this concept coming from Lululemon, the science of feel.
01:00:36
Speaker
And I really think about this. We we we think about a lot like ah when you're online shopping, there's always like size and fit and there's like numbers and this and that. And you know that when you get the garment,
01:00:49
Speaker
like you or you're like oh it's just wrong like it's not it's not that it doesn't fit you it's like it's wrong and a lot of this i've recognized a long time ago but i try to bring it up in conversation with people it's like you don't like how that feels how it feels on your body how it feels new how it feels like it could be part of the fit the way that kind the you know garment drapes or something but you can't identify that as it being the wrong size And so how do we start to communicate? Like, I would love us to have a universal system in a fashion that's like, and yeah, yeah his students listening, like start working on this and call me, you know? yeah But like, so this, you know, this is like, so even if it's just like featherweight to heavy, like we but we barely even talk about that. It just says like 100% cotton.
01:01:28
Speaker
I mean, do you know how many things that could mean? Yeah. Yeah. um what you like So in like house what's like what's the level of stretch? like How much does it stretch? Is it smaller? and So like that would be about knit structure. But how do we create a language that somebody can understand, um this feels like your favorite old bed t-shirt, this feels structured, no these different these different things. And um I would love to identify the language, the descriptive language or pictures or, you know, just work more on that premise. And I think that would really change. We do so much shopping online now and it's important. Like we don't want to, we we need a hybrid world where there's still stores to go to. I mean, I just walk around stores and feel stuff. Like that's why I go in, right? And then i might end up ordering it online or whatever.
01:02:12
Speaker
and But the the the point is to be like, you you know, you trust a brand. You're like, oh, no, I know they have good textiles. Like, I'm very particular about this. And so anything that you can help people identify those those intangible things that like people people in our industry might know them, but other people that are just random consumers, they got they say something like, oh, that feels cheap. And I'm like, yeah, has to be like the shiny polyester. so How do we start to help people identify that so that, you know, we're...
01:02:41
Speaker
what not to buy or the, you know, all the things about returns and this, there's so much, there's so many startups that are working on fit. And I'm like, no, that's not really, like you're not getting to the essence of the problem with online returns.
01:02:51
Speaker
so So that's something that I would love to work on still. That needs needs to be part of a brand, but you need to have a coalition. is what I wanted to do, like a coalition of brands. We're going to develop universal language together. going all agree on it and put it on our websites and create an industry standard around feel.
01:03:07
Speaker
I love it. And don' if i my brother is going to prove me saying this, but he can only buy things, not just by feeling it with his hands. He has to, he rubs it on his cheek. Like even just touching it is not enough. He has to do that with them with a jumper, ah a shirt, T-shirt, whatever it is.
01:03:24
Speaker
um And now zooming out a bit into the future of emerging textiles and technologies, are there any conversations within textiles and fashion that you're tired of hearing talking about?
01:03:36
Speaker
What are the new conversations that the industry should be having instead? I mean, i am tired of having the same conversation. It's nice to like take a little bit of a break. like I'm now working on like centrifuge tech. I love depression and whatever, but it's yeah it's good to... When you're when you're sitting there at the bleeding edge, you you the conversations that I was having eight years ago are now becoming mainstream, so...
01:03:59
Speaker
They get little boring, but i' they're still very important to have. but um So I think that, first of all, there's a whole narrative that like innovation startups in the space are failing just because they haven't come to market yet.
01:04:11
Speaker
And that's really frustrating because fashion timelines and like science research timelines are totally do not merge. And so you know a startup that started eight years ago and they you know they they're not fully industrialized yet, like that's totally normal if you were in any other form of tech.
01:04:29
Speaker
So we need to kind of normalize the fact that like fashion people like sort of catastrophize and go, oh,
Industrializing Proven Innovations
01:04:36
Speaker
everything's failing. It's like, everything has failed. Like, just calm down. yeah Like yeah not you know it's not seasonal, right? so So there's that kind of conversation, which I am really sick of having that everything's failing.
01:04:47
Speaker
Some things are failing, like things fall off, but we do. And part of it is also we need, this pulls into the industrialization scale up. we That is really where all the conversation, we don't need,
01:04:59
Speaker
and not a lot more new. I mean, we have like, of course there's space for new startups, but really drilling down on the the stuff that we have that's out there. That's, that's working and helping get the factory innovation, is the the factory scale up systems in place. There needs to be capital. There needs to be government buying, brand buying, you know, um,
01:05:20
Speaker
factory, like produce or buy and like, just, ah that's obviously the more complicated infrastructure question, which takes longer and stuff. But that's, that's where really what we need to be doing. It's not just the Oh, this is amazing.
01:05:31
Speaker
And then poof, the net, you know, um just let's, let's concentrate and let's commit. And then I think the other conversation that this is happening, but it's really confusing is everything around regulatory.
01:05:45
Speaker
I mean, forget the US because we don't have any regulation regulations anymore, but where everything's where everyone's looking to Europe for um you know the regulations around carbon and impact and measurement.
01:05:55
Speaker
And, you know, what materials should be subsidized versus what should be banned. And in those things, I think the brands are getting scared and kind of pulling back, which makes sense because it's it's being forced on them. But you need to just kind of people to get on board and really have somebody in an organization to understand it and push it forward. um And then.
01:06:17
Speaker
like invest the earlier you start doing the right thing, the less it's going to cost your brand later. so there's this kind of cost benefit analysis where it might seem a little bit expensive or terrifying now. And there has to be a little bit of a leap of faith for some of these things.
01:06:32
Speaker
Like if you're like, we hear brands kind of being like jaded, like, Oh, whatever. We'll just pay the fees when they come. They're not going come. like Like it's just not going to work. So I don't know. so So those are the kinds of things that I wish it's really confusing. And,
01:06:46
Speaker
but quite frankly, totally boring to me. But I understand what's coming down the regulatory landscape. And also, i wish I was doing this more and I should invest more time in it, but helping to shape the regulatory landscape with informed practices. So like there are some of the things are you like we would dig into LCAs really broken measurements there. And it's it's like they started from a space of like, this is, you know, they're making a lot of assumptions. Every every sort of and ah ah analysis makes assumptions about the data that's coming in and what, what what you know, what means what.
01:07:20
Speaker
And um they're just things that haven't been drilled down properly. Like, for example, the water measurements, there's no differential in water. Like this this one is to me the most broken.
01:07:30
Speaker
So if you say you have like a pineapple tree that is growing in a tropical environment that has unlimited water, rainfall, free water, whatever, right? The amount of water that that take plant takes to grow, that gets the same quote, carbon measurement of the water as like, if you're growing, you know, something in the cotton in the desert of California, that's being irrigated piped in. Right. So It's just about gallons, right? You have to have nuance on where the water is coming from, where it was available, ah all of these things. So then, so the problem is that like with our LCA of like pineapple and and um and banana plants, they were really, they had really high water measurements.
01:08:09
Speaker
And it's like, no, it's a waste from some, first of all, it's already been grown as a food source. So first of all, you should every measurement in half, right? And then that is readily available water. And so that so those differentials that we need more nuance in the tracking as well so that people because you can skew there's data, you can make anything kind of be anything, right? like Yeah, right. But the idea that this material that was made from 100% waste, ah plants that are already being used for food sources, having a higher carbon footprint in an LCA than, know, it like regular cotton.
01:08:42
Speaker
is That's crazy. And can't even use of water. so so So those kinds of things, we have to get a little bit of like, okay, that these numbers are not right. Where inside the data structure is it wrong? Or it just needs more nuance.
01:08:55
Speaker
So that's that's something that um we all need to be engaging with more. And that that comes from practical expertise. I also and not even sure where to start. like who because I have had this conversation that's frustrating, trying to drill down on who actually wrote the equations in that spreadsheet? Who created the assumptions for each thing? And it's like, there's a past the buck thing where there's some sort of secret black box.
01:09:18
Speaker
Yeah. That even the companies are doing the LCAs are like, these are the industry standards. I'm like, who made the standards? The government. And then the government is like, we went to a consultant and the consultants like, well, that comes from science. And I'm like, it's not.
01:09:29
Speaker
So, so there's this like weird cycle of um like, and they're I don't think they're trying to like push it around in any evil way. It's just, it's confusing. And yeah. Where do you see the field of emerging textile technologies heading in the next five to 10 years? What are you excited about?
01:09:46
Speaker
I mean, I'm still incredibly excited about biofabrication. I mean, for the last 10 years, that one I'm still totally on board with. Next week is the Biofabricate Conference in London. It's the best conference of the year.
01:09:57
Speaker
um ah the All the new innovations. It just has so much promise. It's it's rebalancing with nature. It's using innovation at the highest level. It's taking very technical things from you know from biotech, from another industry, applying them to this.
Biofabrication: Balancing Innovation with Nature
01:10:10
Speaker
It does have a lot of infrastructure problems and needs for capital, and it's complicated and all those things. um I'm also very excited about um you know all forms of waste valorization and what you know what we can we can do on that front to start to just... It's just really all about getting rid of synthetic. So everything that we can do to mimic the different behavior and performance characteristics...
01:10:30
Speaker
And then, you know, i am also, I have to bring this up because it's everywhere. I am excited about what AI can do, but not in probably the way that you're thinking. It's a little bit more about ah how do we actually like use AI to work on biological and chemical formulations?
Accelerating R&D with Regeneration VC Fund
01:10:46
Speaker
So speeding up the... the early phases of R&D that, or, you know, how do we use it to like, there's this problem and this problem, like, can we use it to help to have like a second order analysis on a lot of things that would take research assistance, you know, just a lot of measurements and and these kinds of things that we can start to, to kind of fast track.
01:11:03
Speaker
So yeah, I think, I mean, I, I'm not, I'm not saying we need 27,000 more breakthroughs. I mean, we need to concentrate and that's what I'm excited about. You briefly touched upon this. You are also a global advisor for the Regeneration vc Fund. Could you share um a bit about this fund's mission and what excites you about this fund?
01:11:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, they, ah i met them originally because they invested in Pangaea and their mission was all about new materials that have better impact characteristics. And also like things that are more consumer facing, like they could be product companies, they could be materials, but but ah first of all, incredible group of people, but with, first of all, a line, you know, coming from,
01:11:45
Speaker
finance, but totally aligned on and impact in for the in the most pure way. So you you just know it when you get you get to know people. um So was always a big fan of, every you know, they were making their decisions that were smart about both business side and and impact side and and and just have a real holistic way of thinking and some out of the box things like, you know, I get, you know, doing some deal analysis on things go oh, wow, this I wouldn't have thought this startup like fit, but it's sort of they they understand that something that is up or down the supply chain or a sort of side service can be a real game changer. And so that's, I love the kind of out-of-box thinking of, you're like, well, I know this is a material innovation fund, but that sensing technology matters because of X, Y, and Z. So they have a really deep um complexity of thought around the ideas that they're considering.
01:12:34
Speaker
that's That's why I'm very happy to be part of it. And yeah, incredible analysis and conversation going into to those decisions, which, you know, having been raised money and been in conversations with many, many of that's not how all ACs work, let me tell you. So...
Measuring Impact: Logic vs. Rigid Criteria
01:12:50
Speaker
um Actually, I've had a lot of sort of startups who who are engaging with impact focused VCs and they feel a bit confused about how impact is measured. And I guess maybe that's a big problem generally, but your thoughts on that?
01:13:02
Speaker
Yeah. and And also, you know, we're raising money with Mothership and there is there's a real kind of The impact funds definitely want to show that they have a rigorous process around impact analysis.
01:13:13
Speaker
Some of them, I'm like, you've taken this too far. Like there's still an element of risk and intuition around investment and knowing that this idea is just logically a good idea or the numbers make sense, right? That you can't overanalyze a problem to guarantee that it's going to work or be incorporated, right? so So that, and this also goes into some of the regulatory things I'm talking about where we're trying to figure out exactly what to measure. And they're like you if you lose your common sense in the middle of that, that's where the problems lie.
01:13:44
Speaker
So I do understand that. And I think you know at Regeneration, we are trying to establish very clear characteristics of like what we're checking for without being so rigid that, oh, if something has X, then we absolutely cannot and invest. right There has to be a kind of logic there.
01:13:59
Speaker
um So I think that what's happening is the the funds... and And also it's a strange environment for for um investment. So we're being quite cautious and little bit of not hiding behind like the analysis and stuff, but yeah that we saw kind of too far and there was like, oh open season on
Navigating Impact and Financial Regulations
01:14:17
Speaker
all these things. and they're like, oh, we do need to be tracking more. and I think looking at going after Europe's regulatory environment, understanding how that impacts and then tying in the things in your fund to the like the like financial regulatory and impact regulatory, carbon regulatory to to make it very but it complicated from that side as well. So I think if my hope would be that there's more open communication between the startups and the funds themselves about
01:14:43
Speaker
like the startups could push back and be like, okay, I see this analysis, but I also want to point out that that number doesn't matter for us for X, Y, and Z. So if there, if there could be more transparency in those conversations, um I think that would be really helpful, but I do sympathize with companies. I mean, ah me being one of them being on the startup side, you do get confused by, well, are they, is that actually the analysis or what else is going on in the fund? And yeah, so, so that's, it's not a perfect system.
01:15:12
Speaker
You know I've been hearing startups say VCs are getting quite nervous about funding fashion related, textile related startups. How do you feel about that? And why might that be? Or how do we ease their nerves?
01:15:22
Speaker
I think i mean i think the the main thing, there was a lot of money that went in about like starting like five years ago. and Things have done well, but they they're they're not hockey stick kind of growth structures for anything. That makes people nervous where the payoff is a payoff. come you know Normal financial ah measurement stuff.
01:15:42
Speaker
but um I think also the fashion brands have become a little sad. cynical, I don't know, I'm trying to kind of read it, right? That if if they don't if we don't see the big players actively making infrastructure change, then yeah we need that support into the system. So it's kind of a, it's a little bit chicken and egg. like The biggest problem is more the growth phase of raising capital.
01:16:04
Speaker
Like if you're doing a manufacturing and new manufacturing technology or something or process tech, you do need that 30 million at a certain point. And raising that Strictly inside of fashion, I think that's where you need to go to like infrastructure money and maybe in different places. like Fashion doesn't have that history of putting in the million for the payoff and stuff.
01:16:22
Speaker
So that's where there's some stalling out that people are finding it really hard that are focused on a text innovation and they need to build this whole new biotech facility.
01:16:33
Speaker
right so yeah, I mean, I think people are nervous about anything and there's been, i do think that first of all, all the money been going AI, that's going to crash out. Six more months, there's there's no way that's going to stay up. there were there was That was a gold rush, and then people were pulling back on other things.
01:16:47
Speaker
it's It's going to rebalance. Everything with investment is always a pendulum. And I think the most important thing is that when things get lean, the really good ideas, if things are being analyzed more closely, generally the really good ideas will rise the top and get the money. I've actually always done a little bit better in lean business.
01:17:05
Speaker
in lean environments because there's like signal and noise problems. and like the loud Sometimes it's like the loudest founder shouting gets the money for not the right reasons. And so if there is they could ten more attention to detail, sometimes that can actually help the good ideas.
01:17:21
Speaker
But I would say that if people are nervous about investment going into fashion, it's because the fashion industry is giving off. It's not a great retail environment. they're not They're not at growth. There's also...
01:17:32
Speaker
the things, the changing, and you know, changing things in China and Asia and how it's affecting European American um luxury. And so there's a lot of stuff that is just the fashion industry itself is cautious and not at the best. not It was, I mean, we had luxury growth growth that was extraordinary for so long that people got used to it that we shouldn't, that we shouldn't normalize that level of growth on luxury goods.
01:17:56
Speaker
So it's not that luxury goods aren't selling, it's just stabilized and like small growth. And so that's not a crash, that's just a stabilization. So when I was doing a bit of research about you and where you're working and Regeneration VC, I looked looked up the team and I came across Leonardo DiCaprio as...
01:18:14
Speaker
as a team member. I'm sorry, I have to ask. Is that who you work with? Every day. vi No, no. He put in a front capital for the original fund LP. And yes, he is technically a partner. i can't say I have analysis calls with him, but he's he is part of the fund. He's, you know, put his money where his mouth is and is it put in the money and is a big supporter. So yeah, it can't hurt.
01:18:41
Speaker
Yeah. ah Brilliant. Well, I wanted to ask you about Manufacturing NY, but I can see that we're way over time. So I'm going to do quick run through little bit about your career, because I think it's really interesting for the sort of younger audience who's starting off and, you know, how they navigate
Non-Linear Career Path: Balancing Intuition and Stability
01:18:56
Speaker
that. Maybe your story is really inspiring for that. Like i said, you know, you've kind of ah done 10 people's career in one.
01:19:03
Speaker
wasn't intentional that you sort of, you know, did so many different things, but how did you carve out such a pathway and and how did you stay so agile in your journey? So I think the first thing which I had mentioned before is just the, intu like following your intuition in a way that, you know, you know, this is the right thing. You maybe can't matt is justify every, like you got to trust your intuition and be true to yourself. I mean, of course there's times you're going to take jobs that you need money or whatever. um And, and quite frankly, like some of the,
01:19:33
Speaker
most random jobs I had that were very much like I have this temp job to make money have informed other things um in different ways. So every experience is valuable. And if you keep keep your eyes and ears open and learn things from being environments, that's really important. um ah Yeah, and then follow your intuition.
01:19:51
Speaker
You know, I think that this is one of those tricky ones where I i feel like I've never... really taking a job just for like money and security, which I'm not saying that's for everyone. Right. It's like, if you, you know, there's, I've, I've lived like a high risk kind of, which I'm, you know, I'm doing fine, but I, if I would had gone down a more traditional Silicon Valley track, I'd be a lot wealthier now, right. Quite frankly.
01:20:11
Speaker
Um, so and you got to assess what you want from your life while you're doing it. And there's, I, You know, support and I think any sorts of decision making that if you're true to yourself and you're like this is what I want, then, you know, do that.
01:20:24
Speaker
um So you have to like if you're not interested in high risk or you're not, you know, I just i I it's torture to be bored in your job. This is what I think it's for me to be bored my job. It's not worth the whatever excess of money, like what you're balancing out your value system, right? and And I think it's more about life and like how you want to live. Like it's always the phrase, like, you know, if you if you love your job, you never work a day in your life.
01:20:49
Speaker
So that kind of thing where I'm like, I'm flying off to, you know, Indonesia and going, checking out this stuff and just live, I'm like living. It's like, where does work end and life start? um And I'm not, I don't consider myself a workaholic. I have a very active social life and everything, but it's just this this idea of,
01:21:06
Speaker
Like I'm always taking in interesting information and observing in nature and I'm an active scuba diver and just having these, this kind of depth of your life and hopefully parts of that inform your career in a, in a logical way. And this takes a long time to figure it out. i mean, your whole twenties are like, Oh, what's going on? Yeah. Like, oh can I survive? like and and hopefully you get something out of it that you find meaningful. But I think the pressure for every single thing to be like calculated is also weird and arbitrary. And I also think that people go out after after college or even after high school or whatever, like be in the world a little bit. like
01:21:43
Speaker
I like definitely tell students now, like when they graduate undergrad, like take time off before grad school, because grad school is a time when you really need to know who you are and like or you get more out of it if you do.
01:21:54
Speaker
So be in the work world and don't like that's not you're not wasting time before you go back. You're like figuring stuff out and you're like and maybe you fall in love with something totally different. or whatever, right? so So those sorts of things. you've only ever been in school your whole life. Yeah, and then also I think traveling and just opening, ever anything that opens your eyes to things is really important and let that let that stuff in.
01:22:14
Speaker
um So absolutely, I have never made a five-year plan. I'm not sure that's right for everyone, but I'm like, oh, that would be so limiting because what are all the new things that are going to happen in five years? Like I'll be behind.
01:22:26
Speaker
So it's fine to be like, oh, I should have like some goals about where I want to be in terms of like structure life. And then I i just, I stay excited with new ideas.
01:22:36
Speaker
And so every opportunity to kind of like, I'm constantly like reading up on other things, which I don't know how this fits yet, but I really, I can't get it out of my mind. Like right now I'm obsessing about DNA data storage.
01:22:47
Speaker
talk to me in a year and I'll tell you why that matter. I mean, it does in terms of storing data and data, but, um but like if something sticks in your head, just let yourself have that as a background thread, all puns intended.
01:23:01
Speaker
um And, you know, and they'll see when it, when it pops back up. So don't know. What were some setbacks you had in your career and how did you adapt or work around them? um I think that, you know, at certain points, I probably should have taken a more stable focused corporate job.
01:23:18
Speaker
Like, you know what I mean? Like when I came out of grad school, I spent a lot of time kind of spinning my wheels, working for myself on projects and not really knowing. It's sometimes it's okay to just be like, you know, you're not, um you're not compromising yourself. If you're like, I'm just going to go into this work environment for a little while and concentrate.
01:23:36
Speaker
I think I should have done, i don't know it's called a setback, but at certain points where I should have done that and I didn't give myself that. It's kind of like a little bit of like downtime or something, or, you know, like, let me just, it's a reframing and regrouping kind of thing.
01:23:49
Speaker
For this last transition, I did let my, I gave myself the time and that, but that comes from experience. So I think the setbacks would just be like time that I spent kind of spinning my wheels on various things that didn't go anywhere,
01:24:04
Speaker
ah or or Or staying a little bit too long in some situations where I think I sort of intuitively knew, yeah, yeah you have to be kind of brave and figure out when is the right like when it's right place to go. Like I usually do know with intuition, but sometimes...
01:24:19
Speaker
Like following up on the you're like, I know this is cool, but you're like, but is it like is it is it really embodying what I want it to be for myself and this and that? And sometimes going into something more traditional for a while can build up other things in you.
01:24:33
Speaker
So that's maybe that's what I would say is like something I would have changed. it's like I don't know if it's a setback exactly, but I think I could have been... Well, I don't, yeah, for further along, I don't
Textiles: Public Perception and Technological Innovation
01:24:42
Speaker
know. it's It's a weird thing when you're trying to really work at a cutting edge.
01:24:46
Speaker
As long as you stay there, then you are kind of making leeway. I don't know. Well, this is a question from a previous guest of mine. What has been the best bit of advice you have been given and how has that been used in your career going forward? This is Victoria Nickerson.
01:25:03
Speaker
I know i I'm like notorious for like, I've had obvious mentors and like, you know, my advisor for MIT and john me and and like people and the people I think of and admire deeply, but I'm not one of those people who's like, oh, and like advice centric. But I think that like the, the kind of like the,
01:25:22
Speaker
staying true to who you are and being weird. Like, I think there were people trying to tell me this early on. Like when I was sort sort of like, oh I need to fit into some engineering box or this or that. Like there were older people in in various environments that were like, no, no, stay, stay weird.
01:25:40
Speaker
Yeah. Like, who you are, it's going to turn into something. um So I think that that is kind of the the best advice that I got.
01:25:50
Speaker
I mean, sort sometimes directly, but sometimes indirectly. like Like, even when I was at MIT and I was chasing stuff down, there'd be certain people who, they'd be like, no, to keep going on that thing. You don't know what it is. And I don't either. But that makes you you. And that's why it's important for you to be here. Like those kinds of things to to stay to be like stay stay yourself in any kind of environment that's trying to kind of um push you to conform to something.
01:26:14
Speaker
Yeah. And what question would you like to leave for the next guest? So if it's kind of related to fashion and textiles, I think I really like to understand sort of where are people's perceptions about like why textiles matter?
01:26:29
Speaker
and like, how do we how do we figure out to bring them into the narrative of very important um technological innovation and like a key part of how we live, how we work, how we experience the world?
01:26:43
Speaker
They touch on every single supply chain, you know, agricultural, you know, manufacturing, everything, materials. How do we think about bringing that to the to the forefront of consciousness and not not stereotypical, oh, fashion is just like, you know, throat like vogue and it's trend. this that No, no, this is like deep life source of a lot of, ah kids you know, the same way that you think about construction and food and all that kind stuff.
01:27:11
Speaker
So i would I think that's kind of the question I would put out there is like, how do they first you know think about it inside of their own working career? But but how do we how do we like kind of shift the public perception? Actually, this is a project I've been wanting to do is to like rebrand textiles. I feel like the whole industry needs a bit of a rebrand and educating you know the general public about what it is.
01:27:32
Speaker
Like this idea that it's superficial to care about that. And that, and, and I would love to, not because I think that it's because it's my, my work. So it's important, but it just literally, like, I i think the, the misunderstanding that it's not a fully part of your life, right. That it's not integrated or that it's not this, it's not a cutting edge field or not something that needs, that is like actively determining a lot of like very important industrial decisions and climate change and all these other things.
Mental Well-Being: Balancing Work and Life
01:28:01
Speaker
Absolutely. You travel around a lot, you juggle many things at the same time. How do you maintain your mental health and well-being while doing something that you love so much?
01:28:11
Speaker
Yeah, no, no. And I think, you know, that's also one of those things of like setbacks or whatever. Like I've given myself pneumonia a couple of times over last few years. I have started pulling back and just recognizing like it's when you're on the road, like it's okay to just, you know, you you say you you, I would have these really hectic schedules of a month or whatever. And like, oh, I'm in a new city. Like I have the day off. I should go run around and see. but It's okay to just be in bed and like do bedrock. You know, you need that downtime and the like not everywhere.
01:28:39
Speaker
you can't do everything at all times while you're and of out ah out in the world. So just the literally, like, I just need to like shut down sometimes. Like I'm an introverted person. It doesn't seem like it, but I need the systems to turn off. And I sometimes would like really beat myself up about it.
01:28:58
Speaker
I didn't take advantage of this, that. And it's like, i it's okay. Like I've, I've like, you know, been forgiving myself for that. So, so that's one way to, to try to take care of yourself. And then also like, I have friends all around the world and, you know, love catching up and spending time with them. They, they bring so much joy.
01:29:14
Speaker
um But also I do not always, overly index on talking to everyone at all times. You know, like I think that there's, you know, people understand that if you live in different places, you you know, i have tons of friends that I can not talk to them for six months and pick up and see them in a city and go back to exactly where you were. And that's I think the quality of people that you keep around you makes a huge difference difference. I mean, that's, that's the main thing, right?
01:29:38
Speaker
Family, friends, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of founders, um young startups, early startups really struggle with that. And there's the founder burnout that we're all familiar with. Yeah, it's so important to keep that ah side of your life. It feels like every minute has to be focused on building that startup. I think that's like the direct route to failure.
01:29:58
Speaker
Like if you don't take time off, like you have to to work hard, but you have to be efficient. Like people think they're like oh, you must work nonstop. And I'm like, not at all. You got to know what you're focused on. And I don't do everything perfectly. I'm like, no, I absolutely like, I haven't answered my LinkedIn messages for two months or, you know, there's things that fall off the plate. And I'm like, I'm okay with, I've just, you just got to make peace with like, I'm okay with that. And really do not believe in that Silicon Valley, like work a hundred hours a week and you'll suddenly you'll get,
01:30:26
Speaker
Yeah. And also that that's not what you want your investors to be pushing you towards either because yeah, the burnout thing is real and yeah, you have to, you have to, the all startups are a marathon, not they're not a sprint and yeah, so...
01:30:39
Speaker
Where did you grow up, Amanda? In Redondo Beach, California. So a little surf town southwest of l a Yeah. So love although my parents are Northern Irish, so you know, I'm British.
01:30:49
Speaker
Really? Wow. Yeah. they came over from Belfast and Eskillen. So i have families across the U.K. and in California. So real hybrid British California upbringing makes no sense.
01:31:01
Speaker
ah You said you were quite shy growing up. It's hard to believe that, knowing you. But what's something that you enjoyed doing as a teenager? You know, what did you used to hang out and do? I mean, I played volleyball, like with love, like all the time. Everything about the beach.
01:31:16
Speaker
Like I was a total beach rat. So like skateboarding, biking, like, you know, just that just brought me joy it still brings me so much joy ever everything involving the water and the ocean and then yeah i also like just kind of design just for aesthetics sake like i wouldn't call myself an artist but just you know just creating things like colors sewing and interiors just you know that that whole kind of just area of of design and just brings me a lot of joy so and and when were you at young did you dream of becoming i want to grow up to be something i don't I remember having like, oh, i'm going to
Textiles in Tech History: From Weaving to Computing
01:31:48
Speaker
be this. But I do remember the first job that I remember thinking, oh, that's a job I want to have was ah Disneyland.
01:31:55
Speaker
They have this this position called the Imagineer who work they work on all of the engineering of like the rides and everything. And it was I didn't know how to articulate it but that is the combination of like aesthetics and engineering. But I just never heard of it before.
01:32:14
Speaker
So I was like, oh, I want to be an Imagineer. Like somebody gets to work on this as their job. I think Imagineer is still a great term. Yes, I love it. When did you start working with textiles and fashion? Was this an interest you always had on the side?
01:32:27
Speaker
Yeah, and I think this is an interesting thing. Like I was one of those kids who would be like obsessed for like one whole year, fifth grade, I only wore yellow, like different tones of yellow. and then there was another year that was all pink. And I was incredibly like, I would drive my mother crazy because I yeah i was just really persnickety about this. And I just loved it. You know, it's always, again, this is, I can only say this backwards, but this means a personal expression where I was kind of a shy kid, but I loved loud clothes.
01:32:55
Speaker
And also just a very attuned aesthetic sense, like just the sensibility of, um I love texture. I have kind of like hyperactive um sensing, like in my skin. And there's, yeah, there's just, I was very sensitive to all different kinds of texture and textiles and and color. And yes. So it was it was very much a love. But interestingly, at engineering school, you know, I was good at math and science as a kid.
01:33:21
Speaker
So I was like, okay, I'll go into engineering. I didn't know that you could also do fashion. That fashion was like seen as, oh, that like, why would you do that if you can be an engineer? yeah You know, it was was a pejorative thing about it, which I don't know. I'm like, absolutely not. Although I'm very grateful that I did get the engineering basis first.
01:33:39
Speaker
and then um And then I just, you know, as as we were doing this digital physical interactivity, i was the only woman in the group for a long time. I was the first one first woman to get all the way through the program.
01:33:50
Speaker
um was ah There's a whole other kind of story there about MIT and changing gender roles. But they were talking about, you know, this the tactile nature of digital physical physicality and everything in the group was wood, metal or plastic, right? So I wanted to bring in softness.
01:34:06
Speaker
And I just really started kind of studying material characteristics and then how kind of materials and different soft materials um change when you're putting different sensing and actuation modalities inside of them. And this is where kind of where we start talking about wearable tech. But it did kind of start as a material exploration. And also from the psychological point of view, like i looked I was doing a lot of work on robotics at the time, like module robotics.
01:34:29
Speaker
And perception, there's there's you know interesting perceptual studies where if something is like like hard and rigid and moving towards you, you have a different feeling than if something is soft.
01:34:40
Speaker
There's very specific sensory perceptual capabilities. And this is what is missing and from a lot of modern technology, I think. Like we and we can have it be, um you can have a lot of different modalities that haven't been fully tapped. And the reason is that it's really hard. Like when something is soft, it's less defined. You know we're talking about the want the perfection of the ones and zeros of code moving into this really amorphous nature of nature um where we're talking about molecular structures and things that are, you know, just harder to define.
01:35:10
Speaker
And textiles are kind of the ultimate in that because, ah well, you know, they're and incredibly hard to create the behavior. Like it's one of the areas where in computer simulation, it's like the hardest thing to to create the visual simulation of cloth moving or hair, you know? So these things that are soft are, are really the the pinnacle of this technology. So I started studying that and at the same time,
01:35:33
Speaker
you know, when I was looking at different materials, I was also starting to look at different organisms and thinking about nature and ended up getting kind of obsessed with algae. That's another story, but thinking about how digital technology can kind of manifest in nature in different ways. So like how yeah the change in chlorophyll can be like in a plant, like in photosynthesis can be ah a measurement of time. And these different sets of things like the state change of water when it goes from say liquid to steam and you can use this as information and and using so using the element of heat as a pixel so things like this that were very um kind of ephemeral and i used to call it like slow media i think all these words don't make any sense anymore but just but just thinking about different temporalities like that's not just like what is in your phone or an electronic device but we can have the digital nature of things be explicit in a material environment in different ways so give
01:36:27
Speaker
basically getting away from screens really. Yeah, yeah. And you're absolutely right. Textiles is so powerful. I believe it can fulfill our senses and our soul. And we engage with textiles far more intimately than with any other material in around us. Yeah. Well, I mean, I like to say to people when people say oh, fashion is not important. I guess I got a lot of like backlash. I mean, I remember one point the Media Lab did a, the MIT alumni magazine did a little piece on me. This was a few years after I graduated.
01:36:57
Speaker
And I knew I'd made it because I started getting Twitter hate um where there was some guys that were coming after me like, She like she she's wasted her degree. which She's working in fashion.
01:37:08
Speaker
oh what She took up someone's spot, you know, that kind of stuff. Right. it's a girl But but that whole idea of it not, you know, it just not being important. And, you know, it's like if you think about this, there's not a single person in the world who doesn't own a textile.
01:37:22
Speaker
but like the Basic need food, clothing, shelter. Right. And you interact with textiles every day, no matter what. And you don't, there's not every single person in the world has a phone or, you know, so these kinds of things of how, how very, um, it's a necessity and it's, it's primitive and yet so incredibly complicated. Like we have the history of textiles and what we have from thousands of years ago, what people were able to create. I, I still get blown away by that. Yeah.
01:37:48
Speaker
Yeah. No, the Jacquard Loom was the precursor of the first computational device. Exactly. We can talk more about that, but I encourage people to look that up if they don't know that fact. But when people say fashion or textiles aren't technical, I go, well, that's how we got computation. Yeah. I know.
Emotional Connections: Personal Stories about Textiles
01:38:09
Speaker
Mic drop.
01:38:11
Speaker
So could you share about maybe a piece of textiles or garment that you have that holds very deep personal meaning and value for you? Something that you hold on to, ah you know, and it's maybe sitting in the back of the cupboard. You'll never let go of it.
01:38:25
Speaker
Okay, that I mean, this is interesting. I mean, yeah i mean i still, this is a stereotype one. I still my baby blanket, which, and I just brought it back home with me recently from you know from my parents.
01:38:36
Speaker
And so, yeah, that whole idea of it's like like everyone's, it's like kind of shredding and decaying, but it's still soft. It's like that, the so there's there so much there with that. um And I have like visceral memories of it. I also think that textiles hold for me, and I don't know if this is everyone, but I definitely have,
01:38:53
Speaker
memories that involve a particular garment like i can look at a dress and go and remember the time i had at a particular event or so there's a real nostalgia and a real storytelling for me there because they're close to your body and they're also like they're they represent an an image and and and also um potentially like so can be something ceremonial or symbolic right you're dress up ah not not for everything but um ah recently I recently brought back my prom dress and so that this is all this is like as but um it was it was atypical so you know ah it was like it's fusion sequins and short it doesn't look like other like ah this was me being like I'm doing this you know short little um but um I had just I just remember like it was like the most sophisticated thing I'd ever worn
01:39:48
Speaker
Like really lovely, lovely memories of just feeling and analysi just feeling fantastic in something, right? Like that idea that, i yeah that ah what's it called? Enclothed cognition, that the things that you put on your body can actually change your performance or it changes your your perception of yourself. Like they did studies where if dog if people are wearing lab coats, they perform differently than if they're not, or, you know, these things. and could be forms But there's all sorts of um symbolic things. like It's real. Like you put on something, it makes you feel confident and better. And then you your behavior changes. so So I know I'm trying to think of like some more. i it i have so many.
01:40:22
Speaker
like like I potentially am a clothing and shoe herder.
01:40:28
Speaker
but i I, I mean, I like to say that I'm collecting amazing vintage things or whatever, you know, but there's, yeah, it's hard. It's, it's hard to throw away things that you have.
01:40:40
Speaker
I mean, I can tell you, like, I just encountered this pair of pants and i was like, Oh, that's, I gave my first talk at Kai in those pants. Like I have real, like lot of like, it's, it's an active trigger for me. And I don't think a lot maybe that's not for everyone, but,
01:40:54
Speaker
it's very I feel like I'm throwing away photographs or something if I get heard of it. Right. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I love that. Amanda, that has been such a wonderful conversation. I feel like I've already gone way over our time, but i feel like we could... Now I can switch over and talk about your career, but...
01:41:13
Speaker
know what i see We'll do that off offline another time, but it would be really, really lovely to catch up properly again. And thank you. Thank you for your time, just your wisdom, your joy, ah the curiosity. i mean, that's the word for me. If, you know, if I had to pick a word for you, that is curiosity. And you really, you're like a sponge that just absorbs everything and and every everyone as well, I think. Oh, yeah, that's lovely. yeah I do love people and I love ideas. So, yeah.
01:41:40
Speaker
Absolutely. and um And your passion for what you do, it really comes through. It's true. You could have been making millions working in a tech company, but I think the diverse experience you've had has been incredible. And em and really, the fashion textile community is so lucky to have you ah sort of come into the space and and really move things and change things and question things and and develop innovation as well. So thank you for being an inspiration. thank you for being my inspiration and really looking forward to Mothership Materials and all that is going to grow up to be.
01:42:13
Speaker
Good luck with that, Amanda. Thank you for having me. This has been lovely, lovely conversation.
01:42:22
Speaker
Wow, what a whirlwind of a journey through the mind of an innovator. I'm absolutely blown away by Amanda's latest venture into waste valorization, where she's adapting cutting edge technology from the medical field to deliver a scalable, affordable solution for the textile industry.
01:42:41
Speaker
This kind of cross-sector dest disruptive innovation is exactly what's needed to bring about the rapid transformation our industry so urgently requires. Hearing about such technologies fills me with genuine hope and fresh energy. I love it. I absolutely love it.
01:42:58
Speaker
Now, if you'd like to learn about waste valorization for creating textiles, you can check out a few of my older
Waste Valorization: Innovative Textile Approaches
01:43:04
Speaker
episodes. For example, ah way back in episode two, we look at how garden waste was being converted to leather. So that's episode two.
01:43:13
Speaker
Then episode 14, we look at spinning yarn from potato plant waste. Episode 15, we're talking about brewing beer for bio leather. And if you want more of an overview of biotextile materials and innovations in the space, check out episode 16, where the creators of Future Fabrics Expo, Nina Marenzi and Amanda Johnston, share a wider industry perspective on sustainable textile innovation.
01:43:39
Speaker
You can find the links to these episodes in the show notes. Please share this episode with anyone who might find it inspiring or valuable. Your support to spread the word about this podcast is deeply appreciated. If you enjoyed the episode, consider buying me a coffee using the link in the show notes.
01:43:56
Speaker
It helps me fuel those late night editing sessions as I bring you these stories. A review from you would also mean the world to me. Thank you again for joining me today. Stay tuned for more episodes and don't forget to subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of textiles, technology, craft and sustainability.
01:44:15
Speaker
Until next time, I'm your host, Millie Thurakin, reminding you that there's no such thing as ordinary cloth. Every thread tells a story.