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🌱 Ep 15. Brewing Beer for Bio-Leather with Brett Cotten
206 Plays1 month ago
In this episode of the 'No Ordinary Cloth Podcast', we have Brett Cotten, co-founder of Arda Biomaterials, in discussion about their innovative leather alternative, New Grain made from the spent grain waste from breweries. Brett shares the establishment journey of Arda, from its founding in 2022, its recognition among Forbes 30 Under 30 and H&M's Global Change Award, to entering the competitive market with a sustainable solution.
He elaborates on his motivations for starting Arda, his educational background, and the concept of turning pain points into purposes, as described in his book 'Gene Trepeneur'.
The conversation extends to the complex challenges faced in the traditional leather industry, the innovative process behind New Grain, collaborative efforts with breweries, and insights from various accelerator programs.
Key highlights include:
- Turning a pain point into purpose and highlights from his book Gene-trepreneur
- The animal and plastic leather industry’s impact on the environment
- New grain technology and process to turn spent grain into bio-leather
- Challenges of material durability, scaling production of biomaterials, and the promising future of biomaterials in replacing conventional leather and beyond
- Investor relations and challenges
- Arda’s future material roadmap
Grab a cold beer, or your favourite drink, and get comfortable to learn all about taking waste from the craft beer industry and making it into gorgeous leather.
This is the third in a series of 6 episodes in collaboration with Fashion District, who are creating a hub for fashion innovation in east London. They connect fashion, technology, business and education to provide an ecosystem of support for fashion and textile startups that includes innovation networks, affordable space, business support and investment.
Accelerator resources: Entrepreneur First I Tech Nation I Carbon13 I Creative Destruction Lab
Connect with Arda Biomaterials: Website I Linkedin I Instagram
Book: Gene-treprenuer: Cultivating an Entrepreneurial Mindset in STEM to Impact Sutainaibility
Connect with Fashion District: Website I Instagram
Connect with Mili Tharakan: Website I Linkedin I Instagram I Buy me a coffee
Email: [email protected]
Cover art: Photo by Siora, Photography on Unsplash
Music: Inspired Ambient, Orchestraman
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Transcript
Introduction & Episode Context
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome everyone to another episode of the No Ordinary Club podcast. And this is the third episode in partnership with Fashion District London, where we highlight UK-based leading textile and fashion startups.
History and Types of Leather
00:00:17
Speaker
Did you know that kangaroo leather was used to make rugby shoes? I had no idea. And in this episode, you're going to learn a lot about leather, both traditional animal and plastic leather, as well as new bio leather or leather alternatives, as they refer to sometimes.
Introduction to Brett Cotton & Arda Biomaterials
00:00:33
Speaker
I'm thrilled to have with me Brett Cotton, the co-founder of Arda Biomaterials, a young and groundbreaking startup based here in London. Arda has developed Newgrain, an innovative animal and plastic-free leather alternative from using the spent grain waste produced by local breweries.
Challenges and Opportunities in Bio-leather Industry
00:00:54
Speaker
Brett shares the journey of founding ARDA with TJ, the challenges they face in building a scalable bio-leather solution and the incredible opportunities that waste streams from breweries and agriculture open up for new material innovations.
00:01:10
Speaker
Leather is used in so many different industries. So this is an episode for textile designers, as well as product designers, interior accessory designers, and anyone interested in biotech startups as well.
Environmental Impacts & Arda's Innovations
00:01:23
Speaker
Listening to learn about the environmental impact of traditional and plastic leather and the science behind ARDA's technology that turns beer grain waste into gorgeous leather that can have customized patterns, colors, and finishes. He also gives us a peek into other materials Arda's working on beyond the leather that they've created. Having closed a pre-round seed and prepping for their seed round, Brett talks about the challenges that next-gen material startup face when looking for investors, and also the investors' sentiments about funding early stage material startups in general.
Personal Journey of Brett Cotton
00:01:59
Speaker
The alternative material market is forecast to be $100 billion dollars by 2030 and Arda has definitely got their eyes set on a slice of that pie. So grab a beer or your favorite drink and get comfortable and join me in conversation with Brett Cotton.
00:02:18
Speaker
Hi, Brett. It is just wonderful to have you with us today on the No Ordinary Club Podcast. You, along with TJ founded Arda Biomaterials. And the first material that you've developed is new grain, an animal and plastic free leather alternative. which we're going to hear a lot more in detail today. But firstly, I wanted to congratulate you all on being ah recognized by Forbes in their 30 Under 30 Europe list in 2024, which is exciting. Great job. And you were also shortlisted for the H and&M Global Change Award in 2023. You were featured at BBC click. So there's clearly a lot of stuff going on, especially since you're a very, very young startup that was founded only in 2022. So that's some incredible achievements there. And I look forward to hearing more about this whirlwind of a time you've had setting up this startup. Before we dive into Arda, I wanted to step back a bit and talk about the book that you've written called Jean Trepeneur. Did I say that right?
00:03:19
Speaker
yes yeah Yeah, amazing. So you're the author of this book. It sounds fascinating. The gist I got from the book is that you want to be turning pain points into a purpose. You've interviewed a whole lot of startups and others who are in the biotech space. So could you tell us a bit about that concept of turning your pain point into purpose and then how that kind of fed into ARDA biomaterials as well?
00:03:44
Speaker
Yeah, sure thing. So I guess for a bit of context on that, I went to Penn State University smack in the middle of Pennsylvania. And I did a biochemistry and molecular biology degree. But I really wanted to pair that with another sort of focus. And in the US, you have the major and minor system, which is great. So I saw the College of Engineering at Penn State had an entrepreneurship program. And I then paired the science major with an entrepreneurship minor. And I was really excited. You get together with really smart people, you come up with ideas, business plans, you pitch.
Inspiration and Education in Biotech
00:04:21
Speaker
But the thing is, nothing ever materializes at the end of the semester. And I was the come across a professor from Georgetown who was also fed up with this. And he wanted to use his students as guinea pigs so that they could actually have some sort of project that they could take forward with them outside of the semester. And he experimented by having his students do three different things. They wrote books, they did podcasts, or they ran conference series. And the professor's name is Eric Custer. And he actually found that his students were able to outcompete for MBAs, graduate programs, jobs,
00:04:58
Speaker
All the while, they were building credibility in a network and you could write about anything. Baseball, beer, fashion, anything you want. um So I chose to write about something that was very important to me, which was using biotech to impact climate through food and materials.
00:05:13
Speaker
And I really wanted to find a way that students could use their STEM backgrounds, whether it's biotech or chemistry and material science engineering, in order to solve problems that were close to them. And for me, that was removing animals from agriculture. I grew up in the the forest of New Jersey surrounded by wildlife, grew up with animals, and I never really wanted to eat them.
00:05:35
Speaker
And so I discovered when writing the book that there were all these different founders now creating companies with plant sciences or fermentation or growing cells in a lab, trying to remove animals from dairy, from meat, from all sorts of different industries. And I want to sort of lay a groundwork for other students about how they could shoot some other paths that weren't becoming a lab technician. Yeah, so they could really go after things they care about.
00:06:01
Speaker
Can you now bring Arda into this concept and what was the pain point and what was the purpose?
Founding of Arda Biomaterials
00:06:07
Speaker
Yeah, the pain point for me has always been animals don't belong in the supply chain of food. And in trying to start a company, I looked a lot into the food space. I knew a lot about it. But my co-founder, he is really a brilliant chemist. And he realized that food is just a material that we eat. There's all these other materials that are derived from animals as well, be it fur, silk, wool, leather, feathers.
00:06:33
Speaker
And we can use some of the same technologies and approaches in chemistry or biotech to also solve these problems. Animals are used in the materials that we wear, that we sit on, that we have every single day.
00:06:46
Speaker
So I understand that you met TJ, your co-founder, at a pub near London Bridge over a glass of beer, I presume. ah Tell us what happened between the two of you in that first meeting and what that journey was from that first chat that you had and where you decided that you wanted to set up a company together. Yes. So we joined this cool program called Entrepreneur First.
00:07:09
Speaker
which has other offices around the world, most recently in San Francisco. And the whole purpose of it is, you know, it's really tough to find a co-founder. I mean, I looked for quite a while for a synthetic biologist, and it's a matter of the right timing, the right skill set, the right personality fits. And a couple of friends had been through this program, EF,
00:07:28
Speaker
The whole function is you bring all these really smart and brilliant people together, and you can form companies in between these gaps where no one might think they found a company. So TJ and I, we met at this program a couple of weeks before it officially started. It had kind of a fresher's week, and they brought everyone to the site. It was speed dating. it was It was great, and the pub after, and that's where I met TJ. And we happened to live pretty much in the same place of London.
Focus on Brewery Waste for Materials
00:07:57
Speaker
ah This small area called Bermondsey, which is just south of Tower Bridge, and hosts a load of different craft breweries. Funny enough, it used to be where a lot of industry was kept in London from fur, leather, glue, biscuits, pickles, but and unfortunately it was bombed during World War II and it was rebuilt into residential and commercial real estate.
00:08:18
Speaker
But we started going to the office pretty early, just to get head start on the program. We realized that we work really well together and had the same mission of working in the climate space. And TJ also cares deeply about animals, but also from a chemistry perspective, a lot about plastics, which have been way over industrialized over the past.
00:08:38
Speaker
50, 70 years. And we began coming up with all these new ideas about impacting the food space, not through synthetic biology, but through chemistry, because typically these issues are solved by people with more of a biotech background. And we came up with all these ideas, the whiteboards were full, and we went to different conferences, we're talking to loads of different founders, companies to figure out different problems that we could solve for them.
00:09:02
Speaker
And we met this other chemist at a plant-based food event. And he was like, guys, you live in the craft brewing hub of London. Go chat to the brewers and see what you can do with them. They have loads and loads of waste, one of which is the spent barley grains. We went over to the brewers and we saw literally mountains of spent grain outside because for them, it's a huge waste buildup problem in cities. ah They extract the sugar from barley and they leave behind the protein and the fiber.
00:09:31
Speaker
and they just pile it up in front of the brewer. Many have to pay to get rid of it. Others get it taken away for free. There's a whole bunch of different arrangements. But we realized that the brewers had just done us a huge favor. They've removed the soluble proteins and the sugars that we don't want, leaving behind this rich waste stream in protein and fiber. And coming from the food sector, we thought, oh, why don't we use this as a competing protein source to soy and pea coming from alternative protein? I know a lot of companies are trying to move away from these to various different reasons, like taste, for example.
Shift from Food to Materials
00:10:04
Speaker
Pea protein often has to be masked.
00:10:06
Speaker
and had a friend at the time working at Anheuser-Busch. She worked at the corporate venture arm of the biggest brewer in the world. So called her up to run this idea by her. And she's like, ah guys, we've just invested $100 million dollars into a company to isolate barley proteins. And they were making like protein muscle isolate. And she's like, don't don't do it for three different reasons. One was it's very difficult from a regulatory standpoint to take away stream and convert it into a human food ingredient.
00:10:36
Speaker
That's one, regulatory minefield. Two was just on the unit economics. Heat protein, soy protein, it's all super cheap, like five pounds, five euros, five dollars a kilogram. So unless you're the biggest brewery in the world or one of the biggest, the unit economics don't work out for converting this biomass into a cheap source of of protein.
00:10:58
Speaker
And the third, which is pretty important actually, is the standardization of the feedstock. So if you take a waste stream, one thing that comes across in food and materials is that feedstock standardized isn't the same stuff consistently. Even with the big batches from Anheuser-Busch or other brewers, it still wasn't consistent enough where the founders had to keep racking their heads about which batches to take.
00:11:22
Speaker
And materials are much more forgiving because we're not putting them through such a heavily engineered process that you'd get in the creation of plant-based burgers, for example. So we went back to the drawing board and as I mentioned, TJ realized food is just a material that we eat. There's all these other protein-based materials and leather is the lion's share of the market.
00:11:40
Speaker
However, we'd seen so many different innovators try to tackle the space over the past 10 years, from bacterial cellulose, mycelium, lab grown, plant-based with leaves or or with fish. There's so many different types of approaches. But we realized that fundamentally, the vast majority of them failed on two fronts. One was scalability and two was the reliance on plastic. So a few things that are just made of fibrous biomass. It's very, very Loving of water, so you have to add on plastic top coat and people don't realize as well that most animal leather is top coated with plastic too. But if you use proteins from plants, you can do two things.
00:12:20
Speaker
you can mimic the structure of animal-based proteins in things like leather. But there's also been a great deal of research over the past 10 years in using proteins to replace plastic. So we found a way to knock out two problems at once. Nobody loves plastic leather, and we can make ah a significant dent in animal leather with a very scalable process using chemistry.
00:12:42
Speaker
but Before we go deeper into the solution you've created, can you paint us a picture of what the leather industry is like? Why is that not a sustainable solution that we can continue using moving forward? Leather used to be this natural material before the invention of plastics and before more industrialized ways of tanning the leather came about. Leather used to be tanned with things like oak bark so that you could stop the rotting process and impart these natural tannins in to make it more durable.
00:13:12
Speaker
change the color make it more resistant to water it still would absorb it but the thing was that vegetable tanning process took about two months so as we industrialized things like fashion and automotive and demand soared this problem this bottleneck came about which is you know how do we produce enough quickly enough and so some clever chemists figured out that they could use something called chromium And it's a really toxic chemical that pollutes waterways, but this tanning process could be done in a day or two. So you went from two months to two days. It was just this really quick way of creating a really robust material.
00:13:52
Speaker
However, a lot of leather using chromium tanning, which is a vast, vast majority today, that wastewater is left untreated and it goes off into rivers that are used to irrigate crops that animals drink from the people that live or work in these areas with leather tanneries often suffer.
Market Size and Sustainability Trends in Leather
00:14:09
Speaker
And so it's really not this wondrous biomaterial that people think.
00:14:13
Speaker
On top of it, it's coated with plastic. So it's this misnomer that animal leather is this waste material that's natural. In fact, a lot of leather is coming from the dairy industry. So baby male calves are of no use to dairy farms. They don't produce any milk. So that really soft calf skin leather bag is actually made of a baby skin. So there's all these different issues here.
00:14:37
Speaker
And it's better to let the the hides rot and landfill than to put them through the the chemically intensive tanning process, both from wastewater as well as from a carbon perspective. So it's really a co-product of the animal agriculture industry, not this byproduct that should be used. And then plastic leather, it came about because it's super cheap can take polyurethane and put it into these these sheets or rolls ah now we're drowning in microplastic pollution. You have these two sides where animal leather, people love animal leather, plastic people love the plastic because it's better than using animal skins for them. But there's no really great solution at mass mass scales yet that can use no plastic, no animals. The closest so far has been natural fiber welding or NFW, which uses a rubber based approach and they're based out of the US.
00:15:29
Speaker
What is the the size of the leather industry globally? Do you have some numbers on that? By by the end of this decade, it's forecast to be $700 billion. dollars It's absolutely massive. You look around you, you sit on a ah seat in the movie theater or on an airplane or a train, the boots that people wear on the subway, it's just it's just everywhere. So $700 billion by 2030. However, $100 billion of that is forecast to be for alternative materials.
00:15:57
Speaker
It's essentially at 0% at the moment, because there's so so little scale in non-plastic based materials. But it's quickly growing in a similar way to the fall of the fur industry, where it really fell out of fashion. We're now seeing very similar amongst the leather industry with big brands like Apple banning leather, a lot of different fashion weeks like Copenhagen have banned leather.
00:16:21
Speaker
Most commonly rugby shoes are made of kangaroo hides. Sports brands are now moving away from these kangaroos and and sporting footwear. So now we're seeing this shift, which is really, really positive. Yeah, very exciting and great timing for companies who are involved in alternative leather, I think, because that's so important for a startup as well, isn't it, to make sure that the stars align in a way to be able to present a solution that the industry is looking for. There's a real pull from brands to find better leather alternative.
00:16:51
Speaker
Yeah, i'd I'd say, though, there was so much hype ah back a decade ago. These innovators, be it mycelium, bacterial silos, you name it, or ones that are essentially greenwashed with taking some pineapple or other biomass and putting plastic in it. There was so much hype there, are all these partnerships.
00:17:10
Speaker
And then now there hasn't been scale, a lot of people have been burned, there hasn't been the execution. And from the public, there's been a lot of ridicule over greenwashing or any efforts where brands are trying to improve their sustainability. So while there is a lot happening now, much of it is kept behind the scenes and it's not really public yet. The different initiatives behind the the companies, for example, LVMH, the biggest luxury fashion group in the world.
00:17:37
Speaker
are now building a 100-person material innovation arm that will empower their 70-plus brands. And this is this is now coming about. So I'd say a lot of it's not public yet, but there is a lot happening.
Technical Process of Creating Bio-leather
00:17:50
Speaker
So let's come back to Arda Biomaterials. You started with new grain. Could you tell us a little bit more about the process, you know how you get that waste and turn that into leather? As I mentioned before, the first step of brewing beer or even making whiskey is you get malted barley and you put it in a big metal tank and you increase the temperature, you swirl it around a bit, and you start to extract the sugar from the barley, which is what the breweries are after. They then will pipe that sugar solution into a separate vessel where they'll add things like hops and yeast and commence fermentation. But that barley grain, which is now devoid of its sugars, is an isolated step.
00:18:34
Speaker
And the brewers will pipe that spent grain into a separate holding container, most often to be trucked away to landfill, or as a really cheap and low-grade animal feed, or turned into biogas. Everything is is typically for a pretty low-value use case. But what we can do is use the same kinds of vessels that the brewers have just created sugar extractions out of. And we can do protein extractions. So by playing around with temperature, pH,
00:19:02
Speaker
other parameters we can start to pull these proteins out of the grain and they come out in these little tiny molecular fibers and they want to come together into a stable state but they're not quite strong enough when they do that alone so we can add in other naturally derived ingredients to help with the strength of the material as well as the flexibility color other parameters And we can create essentially a protein soup. And it's with this protein soup that we can then cast it. Currently that's into a tray. And we can then evaporate the solvent with very homemade setup here in our lab in London.
00:19:40
Speaker
But the way that we're going to produce at scale, which is currently what we're raising funding for and making the leap towards, is a roll-to-roll production process, which is continuous. So you would take this protein soup. It'd be cast into a conveyor belt. It would then go through a dedicated series of drying chambers. And it could be then rolled up into these big, big spools that go off for your fashion manufacturers, automotive, furniture, but where and more.
00:20:08
Speaker
Can you describe what you get as that raw bio-leather at the end of the machine? What does it look like? What does it feel like? Yeah, it it feels like a vegetable tanned leather. It's made of plant proteins, so it's quite similar to materials made of animal proteins. We can do some post-processing on it, so just for context, the way the plastic leather is made is you have a ah pattern that you pour the liquid on top of and as the material sets, it peels off and it carries that pattern and texture with it.
00:20:38
Speaker
So we do the same thing. We can also add on a textile backing, which is often a piece that different designers want, which could be switched out from cotton, biscoes, bamboo, hemp, flax. We choose not to use any recycled polyester, virgin polyester nylon, anything like that.
00:20:56
Speaker
So you can essentially get a ah very nice material that feels supple, it's flexible, has the right colors, texture, thickness, all within a day. So from a brewer to a biomaterial under 24 hours at scale, we don't have to grow anything. And it's it's just really, really efficient. Is it possible to dye this leather to get different color options?
00:21:16
Speaker
So the same reason that a Guinness is black is the same reason that we can create a naturally black material as well. The malters will roast the grains. So you get stout grains, IPAs, loggers, they all have funny names. And we can get the stout grain from a brewer IPAs, loggers. And we can create our own mixes of them. So we can get everything from black to a pale tan. And That pale tan is something we can then look to impart other colors into, but that's something we're we're currently working on, whereas most leather today is in the tan to black spectrum.
00:21:54
Speaker
Yeah, I've seen some images on the website and it looks gorgeous. It just looks so luxurious. Just the natural colors that you have managed to achieve already. The first question when I talk about alternative leather tip designers is but how alike is it to real leather or how different is it? I'm sure you get a lot of that question yeah as well, you know? and So how do we get people like that over the fence?
00:22:16
Speaker
it's It's a tough one. These materials are made of so many different things. You have the ones that take like a fruit or a cactus and grind up that plus plastic, so the hand-filled plastic leather, which had their time in the sun, but I think the public is now seeing through that. It's greenwashing.
00:22:33
Speaker
You have mycelium materials, which can feel very soft. You have bacterial cellulose materials, which are quite strong. You also have ones that are made of protein or ones that are made of rubber, which is a protein as well. So you get all sorts of hand fields across the spectrum. But if you're trying to create new materials that will make a dent, not just in the plastic leather space, but ultimately in animal leather, then it's really important to have the right hand feel, the right durability, the right performance, the right aesthetic.
00:23:02
Speaker
And by using an approach with plant proteins, you can get something that is made essentially of molecular fibers, just like collagen fibers would be in leather, except it's
Scalability and Applications of Bio-leather
00:23:13
Speaker
made from plants. So the the hand feel I think is quite an important piece for the designers that ultimately make the decisions at the fashion brands.
00:23:20
Speaker
The other pieces there are things like thickness or how customizable the material is in fashion. All the different brands want different things, but as soon as you get more into more standardized areas like automotive or furniture, then it becomes a bit more. One formulation can can do a lot of volume as opposed to fashion, which has a lot more options required in order to get across the different brands. I think scalability is also one of the main factors. So there were all these promises from the early innovators And though the material stories were cool, they they just couldn't hit the scales most of them. Even now, if you're producing in a batch process, it's this divide in the industry, whether that is truly enough or whether you need to hit a continuous roll-to-roll process. So that's the divide between things like mycelium bacterial cellulose and cultivated leather versus ones that use rubber plant proteins.
00:24:14
Speaker
But there will be a whole series of different materials that went out for different use cases, could be for stationery or footwear. So I'd encourage people to look at a whole host of different materials. One might have a lot of hype, but not be suitable for the end use case, but also to be patient and understanding and flexible, because these materials can change and upgrade so quickly. For example, we've only been running for two years, and we've gone from scratch, from something that looks like a biscuit yeah to a material that's suitable for fashion accessories.
00:24:43
Speaker
And we think we can hit automotive, furniture, footwear, and more. So the the speed of these these R and&D cycles can be incredibly quick with the right approaches. Two months, three months, six months a year, things can change enormously. Amazing. Could you tell me a bit more about the quantities that are needed just to understand how much waste you know you need to make, I don't know, one meter by one meter of leather, for example?
00:25:05
Speaker
We have really high conversions. So a brewer, they make, there's millions and millions and millions of tons of spent grain. And per ton of spent grain, we can make about a hundred meters of material, which is a really high yield. And each meter can sell for, yeah, it depends if it's commodity or luxury applications, but you can look at anywhere from 15 pounds to 60, 80 or more if you're trying to make a dent in the exotic skin space.
00:25:34
Speaker
One brewer for us, if it's a a big brewery, could do 5 million to 10 million meters. Wow. Yeah. In a year. Yeah. Once we get up to scale, they had the source of the spent grain. It's so abundant around the globe. And there's so much of it used to make beer and whiskey. and It's this wonderful feedstock. And beyond that, one of the secrets we found, circular economy startups are becoming quite popular. Most often, the supplier of the feedstock just supplies. But in the case of breweries,
00:26:03
Speaker
though they yeah might not seem it at times, they are full of engineers, scientists that run these factories 24-7 around the globe. We can use the same equipment. They end up selling and sponsoring packaging, sports, fashion, automotive. And so they they're actually this secret way of producing, scaling, selling with really low unit economics so that we can actually make a dent with tens of millions of meters of material produced.
Collaborations and Industry Support
00:26:32
Speaker
You mentioned about the partnership with breweries. It seems to be really critical in in you know developing the solution itself and then being able to scale it. What has their reaction been like and how how open were they to your idea in in developing this further?
00:26:48
Speaker
it It really depends on who you speak with. So just as in fashion or automotive, there are players that are further along than others in how they interact with startups or innovators. So on the more conservative end, I'd say some brewers are kind of frantic about meeting their scope one and two emission reductions, which means investing a lot into biogas, investing a lot into regenerative agriculture, into glass, or how they recycle water. That's been a big focus for a lot of brewers. However, promises have been made on scope three and four, which has to do with spent grain and other waste.
00:27:28
Speaker
that goes up. And we're seeing a lot of brewers receptive to engaging beyond the alcohol and beverage space. There are brewers that sponsor F1 and Peroni sponsored Ferrari. You have ones that are engaging a lot with packaging or fashion.
00:27:45
Speaker
using their brewing capacity as a pillar to support a more lifestyle brand as an umbrella. So that means going into things like fashion or music. So there's been a lot of reception on, can we use our material to empower their merchandise or their packaging? Could we materially connect the brewer and one of their Companies, they sponsor an F1 through upholstery, things like this, but also on the ability to co-locate and produce. So alcoholic beverages are on the decline, hence the push more towards spirits and non-alcoholic beverages. But brewers are looking for other revenue streams to diversify.
00:28:25
Speaker
And one of those could be producing materials or other products from there their waste or co-product streams. So we've seen other brewers like Bitburger, which is a big German brewer, partner with an alternative protein company called Infinite Roots to make these whole cut mycelium meat alternatives. And as materials become more and more important for the fashion automotive industry, especially in Europe where there's a lot of regulation coming in, We're not just able to help the brewers to make more money or to reduce their scope three and four emissions, but they actually hold the key to decarbonizing the fashion and automotive footwear, furniture, you name it, in terms of their material use, which can be upwards of 50% of their emissions.
Durability and Competitiveness of Bio-leather
00:29:10
Speaker
The struggle is trying to connect the different if in industries and figure out which players on upstream and downstream are furthest along in that process.
00:29:19
Speaker
In developing this leather, have you been able to partner with some brands to really understand, you know, the quality of the leather and and the finish of the leather and what you really need to be aiming for as, as that final product? And are you able to name a few that you've been able to work with? Maybe not naming the bigger ones, but in terms of ones that have publicly announced, we, we worked with a local London brand. It's been absolutely fantastic. They're called Bean London, ah B double E N.
00:29:48
Speaker
And they've worked with new materials before. They're a startup themselves. They're local. They move quick. So we were able to develop our first external collaboration, which is a snakeskin ah clutch bag ah with them. And it's great because we get these feedback loops from their designers, the workshops, and that feeds back into the R and&D. We also just released a showpiece with Beavertown, which is an iconic London brewery that operates as a part of Heineken. And we developed card holders with their branding on it made from their own spent grain in North London. So that's been really good. In terms of outside of that, we've had interest from large luxury groups. And with them, fashion is sort of run by whoever's the lead designer.
00:30:33
Speaker
So they want to see different finishings, different patterns, different colors. And so we're in these feedback loops with with them. We've also had a lot of interest from other sectors, be it airline, train, automotive, footwear. We're really seeing a big demand for new materials.
00:30:50
Speaker
It's most often been led by fashion, but these other industries are now starting to catch up. For example, three different automotive groups have publicly announced working with innovators, so Jaguar Land Rover, General Motors, and BMW. But there's many more behind the scenes, and the volumes are so massive that there's room for many innovators to supply to them. Yeah, absolutely. You've explained beautifully what how you make the product. What is the end-of-life process for this leather?
00:31:17
Speaker
So what I found in speaking with different different brands is there's a big focus on durability because they have a promise to their customers that things are going to last. And that translates to recyclability and an aversion to biodegradation. I look at the packaging industry though, and in the packaging industry,
00:31:40
Speaker
like A lot of things aren't recycled, so I think it's important to play both sides. What we've found is our material can naturally degrade. You can check it in the back garden and it should be good to go. It's essentially made of nutrients. At the same time, it's really important to us that we make materials that have the right performance and durability, and we've also proven they can be recycled, so it can be kept in the chain. So we are developing for both ends.
00:32:05
Speaker
And do you believe that when you start scaling up that you might be able to match the same price point as leather that's available currently, either plastic or animal? Definitely. That's one of our big USPs. So due to working with brewers and distillers to hit really great scales at low unit economics, the really customizable material that can meet the right aesthetic performance.
00:32:28
Speaker
We're able to get to price points that should be competitive with commodity materials. We could make for your high street brands. Yeah, they're more fast fashion. We could customize the materials so that they would.
00:32:42
Speaker
have a certain lifespan, if people are consuming them and in that way. We could also make for the more luxury end, where they're more durable, they have nicer finishings. We're also looking at how we can create for automotive and and footwear and beyond. So we can create price points across the spectrum of leather, which leather is ah is a whole spectrum.
00:33:04
Speaker
You would look at kangaroo leather for rugby shoes, as I mentioned earlier, and that's because the proteins are interlocked in a very strong way with kangaroo hide. So different leathers are used for different things, and we can customize the performance from the stretch or the stiffness for different use cases at different price points, which is great with chemistry.
00:33:25
Speaker
I understand that it was only a couple of years ago that you were at the Future Fabric Expo, but you were on the innovation table where the new ideas kind of come up. And then in a very short time, in a couple of years, you've actually been managed to sort of develop the product enough to be ah to have your own booth and showcase samples at the event this year. You're iterating very quickly and coming up with better and better solutions.
00:33:51
Speaker
But what has been some of the biggest challenges that you've faced in the last couple of years in developing this product? I'd say there's there's two. One is on the size of the material and two is on the performance in terms of how it interacts with water. So on on scale, what we found is brands didn't want to have a 10cm by 10cm sample.
00:34:14
Speaker
If you're actually going to try prototyping with it, you need something a bit bigger, which industry-wide is typically something like one and a half meters by a meter. So earlier this year, December of last year, the team really set out to create a really large sheet. We made our own trays and figured out how we could create these one and a half meter by one meter sheets of material. And we cracked it in two months, and we thought it would take six months.
00:34:41
Speaker
And now when we go off to different expos or events, some other peers, due to the approach they've taken, are still carrying around smaller samples. Meanwhile, we're carrying around some hefty ones, which which always feels nice. And so yeah scalability is one thing that we cracked, although the next leap is for a continuous process at scale, not a batch process.
00:35:06
Speaker
The second one is most materials um absorb absorb water, leather absorbs water, and if you leave leather submerged long enough, the oils leak out and it becomes quite stiff, which is actually a technique used to make things like cowboy hats.
00:35:22
Speaker
So what we have figured out really is how does our material stand up to water so that it doesn't just turn into goop and doesn't become stiff with oils leaching out of the material. We've had some really big breakthroughs in the past, I'd say two months, where our material can be quite water resistant.
00:35:41
Speaker
The challenge with that is as you impart water resistance into the material, you start to lose some other pieces that you really liked. So the hand feel, for example, and so you try to you you make headway on one thing and then you lose some characteristics on another. And the innovation continues to try to bring back the best of both. So water resistance is incredibly special because 99% of products today, but whether it's animal leather or alternatives, must be coated with plastic. And so if we can create a material that doesn't have to require plastic in the core or on top, as well as can make it into the animal-based materials, that's something that is quite unique.
00:36:24
Speaker
You mentioned about being on the Entrepreneur First program, and that's where you met TJ. Another program that you did more recently was the Manufacturing Futures Innovation Award, 2024. You were part of the cohort this year. Tell us a bit about that experience. What was it like? What was the learning and takeaway that you had from that? Yeah, it was really great because we've done other programs in the past, Entrepreneur First to build the company, Creative Destruction Labs.
00:36:50
Speaker
which is based in Oxford, focused on climate. But this was the very first one we'd done that was focused on fashion. And so it was very specific, the different founders that were involved in the program, the different mentors they brought through. So it was much more targeted in terms of, who are the right investors to go to? What are the right business models? And also just speaking with other founders that are working in the fashion space, founders are often the most helpful to other founders. So that was really nice.
00:37:19
Speaker
Are there any other programs that you would recommend to our listeners, any other accelerator programs or funding or awards that you think are worth keeping an eye on? Definitely, we did the Tech Nation climate program based here in London. That was really nice as well. Creative Destruction Lab has many different kinds of programs. Space, there's also the climate one that we did. And I like to think of it as like the X-factor of it. So you go in and you get mentors in small group sessions and large group sessions. If no one's willing to help you at the end, you kind of get booted off the program. Over six months, it dropped from 20 to 10.
00:37:57
Speaker
but i i really liked the directness and it felt very productive so how they recommend and then entrepreneur first for anyone who's looking to build a company there's also ones like carbon 13 that are focused on climate marble.
00:38:10
Speaker
and there's others, it's just a really great way to find a co-founder. It's so important to have someone with you in building a business. At the very start, you have to do so many different jobs, and and many co-founders end up breaking up. But if you can find someone who with the right skill set that matches yours, and it's just really wonderful to find someone too to be there with you. ah What are the next steps for Artem Biomaterials? I'm assuming New Grain is just the first material. In the near future, what what are your next steps?
00:38:39
Speaker
Yeah, you got it right. we're We're not just a leather company at all. This platform can apply to other kinds of materials. So the first one is new grain. It's a really great market to be in. There's a lot of interest in replacing leather and plastic, and we think we have the right approach.
00:38:56
Speaker
But we can also use the tech and IP that we have to go after other things.
Arda's Fundraising Journey and Investor Relations
00:39:00
Speaker
So textiles, for example, adhesives, infrastructural materials, there's a whole load of different biomaterials, feedstock markets that we want to go after. Ultimately, though, we live and die on our first, which is the leather-like material new grain.
00:39:13
Speaker
but we're already having grant awards in the background that are supporting the R and&D on some of these other innovations. Hopefully the big vision is that with brewers and distillers we can operate these co-located factories to make leather-like materials, textiles, adhesives, you name it, next to local industrial hubs. So brewers in Germany, next to the German automotive industry,
00:39:36
Speaker
French and Italian with luxury fashion, and then also take a step back to other feedstocks, be it ones that come directly from farms or other factories that make different food or material ingredients. There's a whole host of of different things we want to do, but that's ah a much longer time frame.
00:39:55
Speaker
Amazing. It seems like sky's the limit for you guys, and you've only got just started on things. Very exciting. Now to think a bit more about investors, that's always a big question for fashion and textile startups. It's much harder, I think, for fashion and textile startups to get investors on board. You've managed to raise about 1.3 million from Clean Growth Fund in 2023, and obviously you're sort of moving on to other rounds in the near future as well.
00:40:21
Speaker
But what was that experience like in preparing to to meet with the investors? you know What are the pushbacks that they had? How did you come back and sort of really get them on board? It was our first time ever going out to the fees or angels for that matter. So it was a big learning process. And coming off of the entrepreneur first program, we decided to raise our pre-seed round. So now we're currently raising our seed, but the preparation was we wanted to punch above our weight for sure. Luckily my co-founder TJ had just come off a PhD. So he was absolutely fantastic on creating a really robust data room. And then I was handling a lot of the BC outreach and and initial conversations.
00:41:02
Speaker
Now that we're going in, well, we're pretty far into our seed ground now. I'm noticing some some trends, actually. So to your point, fashion and textiles is a really difficult segment. There were a lot of companies with a lot of hype, a lot of investment dollars going into them that didn't deliver. So funds that would typically be seed and series A funds, if they choose to invest in materials, are now stepping back to the later stage of that, where they have more confidence in picking a a winner.
00:41:27
Speaker
I just think it's a very miss misrepresented or under educated space, I'd say. So I was at a ah conference not long ago and there was a talk on family offices. The room was full and the next session was on fashion and they had some heavy hitters from different fashion brands speaking and the room cleared out. It was maybe 10% of what had been for the previous talk. I think things are changing.
00:41:53
Speaker
But there's this lag now because the startups are creating these wonderful innovations that have the right scalability, that have the right price points, right approach. But there's this education lag coming in. So a lot of the job so far has been on education. And there's actually a lot of.
00:42:10
Speaker
reasons that things are changing behind the scenes the fashion brands automotive et etc are picking up new materials investing a lot there's also regulation coming in putting material choice at the forefront for producers and brands so they'll be taxed based upon how good their material is all sorts of things happening but it's just not known about so i'm optimistic we'll get the round done i feel very confident but it's kind of made me a bit pessimistic on how new material innovators raising pre-seed or seed. The ah doors are closing and it's about who can be the last ones through the door to the hopefully greener pastures at Series A b and B. But I'd really like to see more investors open their minds to biomaterials because it's it's a really rapidly growing space and I think in a couple of years people will kick themselves for for not investigating it more deeply. Absolutely, I agree. And then we have new regulations like the digital product passport that's coming in from EU, which requires brands to be very transparent about the materials that they're using and consumers ah you know are more educated in a way and want better solutions. So they'll be pushing for changes as well, hopefully then getting the investors to take notice as well.
00:43:18
Speaker
Exactly. And in fact, one piece of feedback we get often from investors is they're worried about the uptake of new materials because they're looking back over the past five, 10 years and they say, Oh,
00:43:29
Speaker
There's nothing like at scale happening. It's just limited collection or pilot that's gone public. So it's really about moving the needle in terms of scale. And this is now coming about, but materials take time. A lot of materials that we know and use today took decades to get to market, which doesn't often align with the timeline of PCs.
00:43:51
Speaker
Some are now extending that timeline, so they fit better with hardware startups, but you do have to run really quick in order to fit into the venture model and find the right investors who are aligned with you, educated, patient, and are really excited about changing what materials are made of and where they can
Brett's Personal Interests and Hobbies
00:44:07
Speaker
be made. Now, I'd love to get to know you a bit more, Brett. ah Can you tell me about your background, where are you from, and maybe one of your favorite hobbies as a teenager?
00:44:18
Speaker
I grew up in a small town in New Jersey called Sparta, which one of the claims to fame is the karate kid has a house there. have People would see him at Dunkin Donuts. But it was a really nice place to grow up lots of wildlife. Then I moved over to Pennsylvania to do my undergraduate.
00:44:34
Speaker
followed by a sort of reverse gap year doing it after my undergrad instead of before I wrote my book and one of the founders I interviewed had done this program at Cambridge which was essentially an MBA for biotech full of doctors who didn't want to practice and scientists who didn't want to be in the lab.
00:44:50
Speaker
and be on the more commercial end. So yeah, I'm really enjoying being in the UK now. One of my hobbies I grew up doing is I played a lot of saxophone, a lot of jazz, which unfortunately I didn't get a chance to bring that with me to the UK. But during COVID, I bought a ukulele and I'd seen on YouTube all these different videos, people going out to ah herds of of cows and playing clarinet or trombone. So I decided to go out to the fields of cows in Cambridge And to my surprise, they loved it. They ran across the field, they came up, they lick you, they gather around, they knew, they're quite musical. So that was one of my more recent hobbies. Any recommendations of a good jazz club here in London? I haven't found one. I really like listening to Irish music actually. And okay to my surprise, there's not that many live Irish places around London.
00:45:40
Speaker
I also understand that you love making pizzas, is that right? I i do, yeah. Is that your secret skill? What's the secret to a really good pizza? I think the sauce. So back home, you go to Costco and get Rao's pasta sauce or marinara. You can't find it here, but the closest has been at M&S. They have a kind of similar one. Okay.
Lessons and Mentorship from Brett's Book
00:46:00
Speaker
Yeah. Now coming back to your book, you interviewed various biotech startups and others in that book. What was three key takeaways or learnings that you had from doing that research? I think there were several. I have 10 key lessons in in the book about being a gene I think Speed is is a big one for anyone who's founding a company. Speed is how you
00:46:22
Speaker
maintain safety. Are you able to raise? Are you able to lend commercial deals? We've and been able to run really quickly, accomplishing in about half the time with a very tiny team and tiny amount of funding in comparison to what some other companies have. So running quick is always good. I'd also say it's become quite popular to try your hand at being a founder. And I think a lot of that can be driven by looking for freedom or trying to find a way to make quick buck. Well, not so quick because you're in it for 10 years, but it's kind of outsized returns, especially here in the UK. It's a shame, but scientists and engineers are way underpaid. So we see a big migration of them towards other industries like finance. But I'd say working on things that are actually solving a problem and you're very passionate about so that even on the really tough days, you're still driven to to work on the problem. I constantly think about
00:47:13
Speaker
you know, every night I go to sleep and I know somewhere in the world there are just millions of animals being slaughtered and it really gets to me. I dream of the day where we're making millions and millions of meters of our leather alternative or other materials and displacing a large portion of that alongside other innovators in materials, in food, in other segments. that That really drives me every single day in a stop of mind.
00:47:36
Speaker
trying to think of some other lessons. Always trying to be helpful is something doing nice things just for the sake of it. In the world of of different founders, I've always gotten help from those who are a couple steps ahead. And it's been incredibly helpful to learn how to raise funding or manage teams or deal with lawyers, anything like that. So it's always nice to try to help others that come um after.
Arda's Office Culture and Community
00:48:02
Speaker
Have you got any mentors or so role models or others that you speak to regularly, advisors? Yeah, I often catch up with different founders who are a step earlier, a couple of steps later. So it's really nice to talk about investment or all the different founder problems that you might have. But I'm a big fan of listening to podcasts. I like to learn from from history. There's some really great ones called founders, which profiles hundreds of different founders of businesses.
00:48:30
Speaker
Acquired is another one which profiles how large businesses were made managed and there's another fun one called how to take over the world where he reads a bunch of books about Inventors and business people and artists and will profile them So I try to learn a little bit from from those as opposed to reading these really long Biographies just distilling it down into a podcast on my way to work Cool. That sounds great. I'll but try and put some of those links in the show notes as well. Last couple of questions. I rarely ask people about their office space and where they are situated, but I think you have a really interesting story about where your office is. Could you tell us about that?
00:49:07
Speaker
So in Bermondsey, as I mentioned, used to be tons and tons of different industries. There was leather and fur and a glue factory that took the scraps from the leather factory to make glue and pickles. And there's a story about how during World War II, the pickle factory was bombed and pickles were flying everywhere. It used to be a very industrial space.
00:49:28
Speaker
But there's one complex called the leather market. It's just south of London Bridge Station, about seven, eight minute long. And it's full of different companies working on everything from how do you set up a kitchen to making smoothies to fintech to architects, everything like that. But we thought.
00:49:45
Speaker
hey, it's a great place to be. It's quite central. There's actually some office spaces that we can convert into part office, part lab. And so we convinced them to let us build their very first laboratory on the premises. And so we're based the leather market, where there once was leather, there's now tons and tons of breweries. So we also just walked down the street and are right on the beer mile there, which is where we source most of our grain.
00:50:08
Speaker
We can walk it over or e-bike it or Uber it even, but at scale we really want to co-locate so we don't have to deal with the transport. And do you supply a free beer at work? You know, funny enough, we got a lot of free beer. We had a big event for the lab opening.
00:50:23
Speaker
And we're quite fortunate to have some beers given to us by Beavertown, Fort Pier, and others. And the fridge looked like a frat house fridge. We're currently out of it. We also took the team to brew beer at one of the places called Mash Battle, where you can go and brew your own.
00:50:39
Speaker
It's really fun. It'll take you through how to brew beer. You order pizzas. It's a great time. And MASH paddle, we made these beers and we give them out to different investors or ah brands coming to visit. And it was listed as like 4% or something, but it was quite potent. and We always had to warn people, be careful. yeah One will go a long way. So yeah, we usually have some stuff around the office, but hopefully at scale we'll have whiskey and beer and all sorts of things.
00:51:06
Speaker
I'm definitely coming to visit you guys. I don't live too far from London Bridge, so I'll hop in for a drink. You're more than welcome. um Thank you so much, Brett. That was so fascinating and really insightful about the leather industry and why we need to change it, why this this is such a big problem that we need to handle. And you guys are doing some amazing work, really transformed that space and creating new materials.
00:51:29
Speaker
I really appreciate you having me on the podcast, Millie, and I would just encourage as well anyone looking to start in biomaterials to really pursue something that is actually scalable to really think about the feedstock and and the approach and for investors to more seriously look at this space because it is trending. It has huge impacts across industries and it is really a way to decarbonize the things that we interact with every single day.
00:51:54
Speaker
Thank you again, Brett. It's been fantastic to have you as a guest on the show. What a fascinating episode. I've learned so much today. If we really start to look around, you'll be surprised to see how much leather, be that animal or plastic that we have around us and use every day. This is a huge industry and it is so important to make these materials far more sustainable and planet friendly.
00:52:19
Speaker
The bio-leather industry has had a rough patch, as Brett mentioned. There have been many startups who weren't able to deliver on the promises they made, leaving both brands and investors quite skeptical. This is a tough space, but ARDA has been clearly learning from the mistakes of those who went before them and building a solution that is both cost-effective and scalable.
00:52:42
Speaker
Brett mentioned that a single ton of spent grain waste can produce about a hundred meters of leather. I think that is so impressive. I mean, to take waste material from one industry to create such a beautiful and valuable material for another industry.
00:52:57
Speaker
And because they're able to fine tune the properties of the leather and customize it, they're able to supply in the future to different industries such as fashion and access accessories, automotive, sports, interiors, and capture a really large share of the market, which is fantastic.
00:53:13
Speaker
As Arda looks to revolutionize the material industry further Brett underscores the importance of aligning passion with purpose and speaking with him it was clear that his team is passionate to find ways to remove animals from material and food chains and they have such a bold vision to make a big impact in this area and I love that and I'm cheering them on.
00:53:36
Speaker
Check out the show notes for links to Arda Biomaterials website and social media links. so Do sign up to their newsletter if you want to find out when this bio leather will be available for you to buy and use. Your support as always means the world to me, so if you enjoyed this episode, please consider buying me a coffee using the link below in the show notes. A cup or two helps me work late into the night as I edit these episodes and bring them to you.
00:54:02
Speaker
If you found this episode helpful and inspiring please share this with your friend or colleague as well. I think it's great to spread the word about the new kinds of materials that are available so as designers we can start thinking about incorporating these into our work as well.
00:54:19
Speaker
Lastly, if you have any feedback, please leave me a review or connect with me via email, my address is in the show notes as well. Thanks again for joining me on another episode of the No Ordinary Club Podcast. Until next time, this is your host, Millie Therakin.