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🌱 Ep 14. Farm to Fibre: Spinning Yarn from Potatoes
373 Plays4 months ago
In this episode of the No Ordinary Cloth podcast, we chat with David Prior Hope (CTO) and Idan Gal-Shohet (CEO), founders of Fibe, a pioneering company converting potato harvest waste into sustainable cotton-like textile fibres.
Fibe was born out of a final year Masters project at Imperial College, London, aiming to turn agricultural waste into usable materials. Their innovative approach focuses on creating fibres from potato stems, which mimic cotton's feel and function while being more sustainable and cost-effective.
Here, they share about collaborating with agricultural institutes and industry giants like Grimme and McCain, to build a promising startup in just two years that has secured funding from the likes of Patagonia’s Tin Shed Ventures, emphasising their impactful vision to develop a solution that can truly impact the textile industry. They enthusiastically share about their feedstock agnostic technology and the power of storytelling in building a startup.
It wasn't an easy journey, they reflect on their early days working out of a shipping container and how thrilled they were to get just GBP3000 to get their university project off the ground.
The conversation is inspiring and reflects their ambitions for the company to scale up by 2027, and integrate their fibres into existing textile manufacturing processes seamlessly. David and Idan encourage brands and stakeholders to support early-stage innovations, highlighting the transformative potential of such collaborations.
Listen to them share about how they overcame challenges faced in finding funding to continue their R&D and scale their technology, their partnerships with potato farmers and fashion brands, the secret powers of being a student and how they manage a work-life balance while building an early stage startup.
Fibe is the winner of the Fashion District Manufacturing Futures Award for Innovation in 2024.
Get ready to gain a whole new level of respect for potatoes after this episode!
This is the second 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.
Connect with Fibe: website I Instagram I Linkedin
Connect with Fashion District: website I Instagram
Connect with Mili Tharakan: website I Instagram I Linkedin I Buy me a coffee
Cover art: Photo by Siora, Photography on Unsplash
Music: Inspired Ambient, Orchestraman
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Transcript
Introduction to No Ordinary Club Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome back to another episode of the No Ordinary Club podcast. I'm your host, Millie Tarigan. I'm thrilled to bring you a special series in collaboration with Fashion District in London, spotlighting fashion and textile startups that are tackling some of the industry's biggest challenges.
00:00:22
Speaker
In this series, we'll share insights, lessons and stories from early stage founders, industry experts and investors. They'll pull back the curtain on the fashion world, offering practical startup advice, success strategies, survival tips, investor insights and much more.
The Story of Fibe: Potato Waste to Fiber
00:00:40
Speaker
Today, I'm thrilled to have Idan Galchohit, CEO, and David Priorhope, CTO, the visionary founders of Fibe. These two young entrepreneurs have embarked on a remarkable journey, transforming potato harvest waste into sustainable, cotton-like fibers.
00:00:58
Speaker
FIVE started as a final year master's project at Imperial College London, where David and Idan, along with their co-founders, Hazel Gonda, the CIO, and Pramal Gaddai, CPO, set out to turn agricultural waste into usable materials.
00:01:14
Speaker
Founded in 2022, this young company has quickly gained industry attention with their technology that produces fiber from potato stems, offering a sustainable and cost-effective alternative to cotton. In our conversation today, David and Idan share how they've collaborated with agricultural institutes, potato farmers, and fashion brands to build a promising startup in just two short years.
00:01:39
Speaker
Their impactful vision has secured funding from Patagonia's Tin Shed Ventures, highlighting the revolutionary potential of their feedstock agnostic technology for the textile industry.
From Shipping Container to Innovation Award
00:01:50
Speaker
They reflect on their humble beginnings working out of a shipping container and celebrating their first £3,000 grant, which kickstarted their university project.
00:02:00
Speaker
This episode is filled with inspiring stories of overcoming challenges in scaling next generation materials, the power of storytelling in building a startup, and their ambitions to scale up by 2027, integrating their fibers seamlessly into the existing manufacturing processes.
00:02:17
Speaker
They also reveal the unique advantages of being students which help them build valuable partnerships and surround themselves with the right people and how they maintain their work-life balance while driving an early stage start. Get ready to gain a whole new level of respect for potatoes after this episode. Let's go right to the root of the story with Idan and David.
00:02:40
Speaker
Hi, David and Idan. It is great to have you both here with us today. First of all, you guys must be the youngest founders and guests on the podcast and congratulations on being the winners of the Fashion District Manufacturing Futures Innovation Award.
00:02:55
Speaker
in 2024. Yay! Idan, you had the biggest smile on your face when they announced the winner, but you also looked quite surprised. I guess you had some tough competition there, right? But you managed to come out on top and I was thrilled to see how you guys are being supported by Fashion District and continue to get that support being the winners.
00:03:14
Speaker
Fibe is doing some fascinating work that we're going to dive into, but I have to tell you a little story before we get started.
The Journey from University Project to Partnership
00:03:20
Speaker
So I went to an amazing boarding school and I loved it. All of it was great, except I really struggled with the food. We were given potatoes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I'm not kidding you. It was every shape, size, and form and recipe of potato that I had to live through for the many years that I was at boarding school.
00:03:39
Speaker
So when I left school, I just couldn't stand the sight of potatoes. This is not a vegetable that I ever want to go near. But when I heard about how you guys are using potato harvest ways to create textiles, and I love all things textiles, suddenly I'm like, oh, potatoes, tell me more. And now I'm interested. And I think by the time we finish this chat, you'll help me to look at potato plant in a new light and appreciate it.
00:04:01
Speaker
So let's start right at the beginning. I understand that you both met at Imperial College where you were both studying. How did you run into each other and where did it all start? David, would you like to get started? Idan and I actually did meet each other at Imperial College both studying design engineering. It's actually quite an interesting story because we met once in the workshop when Idan was building a skateboard and I was working on another project. And I remember meeting Idan and thinking, wow, he seems really cool.
00:04:29
Speaker
That seems like a pretty cool person on this course. And then during 2020, obviously COVID happened and I decided to, I was actually in the year above, Edan originally. And COVID happened, I was on my industrial placement in the Netherlands and I decided, hey, I don't really want to do my last year of university during COVID remotely. So I decided to actually stay in the Netherlands and work for another year. And then when I came back, I was obviously now the people who used to be in the year below me. I was lucky enough to be put in a group with Edan. And yeah, that's kind of how I met Edan and the rest of the team.
00:04:58
Speaker
And Idan, what were you doing at Imperial? David, myself and the other co-founders, we all studied design engineering, which essentially is a course that I would like to say that in short, that you turn an idea into something that's a bit more of an actual product. You don't always take it to the full business, but you're always tasked with, you need to solve X problem, figuring out how you're going to design it, how you're going to prototype it, how you're going to then communicate it to the rest of the world. And yeah, we all came from an engineering background.
00:05:25
Speaker
and specifically we started in our final year project to develop this. Give us a quick intro to Fibe. What does the company do and when was it
Transforming Waste into Cotton-like Fibers
00:05:34
Speaker
set up? Fibe was founded around end of 2022 or somewhere 2022, where what we do is essentially we take the leftover crop with the potato and we turn it into something that feels like cotton, looks like cotton. One day it can be the same price as cotton, also being significantly more sustainable.
00:05:50
Speaker
And there's kind of two parts to our company. There's the potato side of it, where we are trying to develop how we're going to collect it at scale, how we're going to extract fibers from the specific crop. But then really, underneath this entire company, we have an entire technology side to it, which is developing technology that can be able to extract fibers from any agricultural waste stream in order to help the fashion industry transition to the sustainable materials it so desperately needs.
00:06:15
Speaker
So what was the motivation? What was the big problem that you were trying to solve? Because we came up with it as a university project, we were kind of pushed ourselves to going to slightly more extreme kind of ambitious ideas because at that point it was just a project. And we were really fascinated with the idea of materials. Materials is what we kind of set ourselves to focus on. We had different ideas of extracting
00:06:38
Speaker
fibers from crops. We didn't exactly know which crop, but we knew that that is possible purely because you have hemp, linen, other kinds of fibers that are extracted from plants. We just said, how about we look at waste streams rather than things that are traditionally grown for fiber extraction. We got inspired directly by one of the people on the team who grew potatoes over lockdown and realized how tall the plant got
00:07:03
Speaker
and how quickly it grew and i kind of beg the question of what do we do with it and we realize that you can't feed it to livestock because it's poisonous it has no real nutritional value so it's not a good fertilizer and also because there's a disease called blight farmers don't really want to move it too much so most farmers just leave it to rot on the ground.
00:07:22
Speaker
And that opportunity of seeing this massive waste stream that's getting thrown away every single day and the problem with the fashion industry and this idea of creating textiles seemed like a perfect marriage of ideas. And we didn't really have to pivot so much since that very crazy idea at the start of our project. Amazing. And David, when you all got together and decided, okay, there's some potential here and this could be a startup where we can really think about scaling up, what was the vision that you had for Fibe?
00:07:51
Speaker
Yeah, I think that the shared vision that Idan and myself and the rest of the team always had is we wanted to do something that was genuinely sustainable. So I think that's something that engineering and design is really good at kind of teaching you. It teaches you to kind of think very systematically and kind of break everything down into numbers, the equivalent CO2 impact and things like this. So we were really focused on that from the very beginning. So that's why we thought that working with a waste stream could be the best way of tackling a lot of the issues with land consumption, water usage.
00:08:21
Speaker
energy, so on and
Challenges and Logistics of Potato Waste
00:08:22
Speaker
so forth. So I think there's a genuine interest in sustainability from the very beginning. The next thing for us was having a real impact. We've seen lots of solutions being proposed and what we kind of felt is a lot of them at times were very niche. Potentially you'd hear about a very cool fancy material but then you'd think okay well
00:08:38
Speaker
How much of the textile industry can that actually affect? So for us, we really wanted to work with something that could have a scale that would have a real impact. And that's why we have identified a potato. One of the reasons we love the potato is a completely untapped waste stream. No one works with this stuff. Could you explain now the process from starting at the farm with the harvest waste and all the way to it becoming fiber, yarn and fabric?
00:09:04
Speaker
So it all begins by getting the leftover crop off the farm. And our goal is to not disturb the farmers and essentially allow them to do everything they were typically going to do with the potato crop, but just get the leftover waste from them. So we're developing various different machinery and logistical process in order to collect the leftover crop. We then transport it into our facility once it's being collected. And then this is where really the FIBs in-house technology comes in.
00:09:31
Speaker
So we have a biological process in order to break down the non-fibrous components of the crop, which is then followed by a mechanical process, which is then in charge of taking these fibers out and also cleaning them, filtering them, everything that we want to do. And then those fibers can essentially be packaged up and sent to yarn spinners and those across the world, which can hopefully use it in the exact same way that they use cotton.
00:09:54
Speaker
So you're hoping literally a cone of cotton can just be replaced by a cone of five yarn without changes required in the machinery itself. Yes, that is the goal. So we know that if the entire supply chain had to spend millions and millions and millions of pounds on upgrading their machinery to process our material, we won't be in business. And more importantly, we won't have the impact that we hope to achieve. So it is absolutely crucial to all our targets.
00:10:20
Speaker
to directly fit into the existing infrastructure that has been developed now for hundreds of years because that's not going to change.
00:10:27
Speaker
Can you tell me, is this a seasonal thing, potato harvest? How often do they produce waste? And is it something that you have to wait for when it's season to harvest potatoes? Absolutely. And it's a bit difficult to answer, but essentially in the, in the UK, the potato harvest starts around July. So that's when you can start expecting to get potato stems and ends around October. So you have a pretty large window to get potato stems.
00:10:53
Speaker
Now this does change from location to location. So for example, warmer countries, for example in India, they actually have two harvests, which is really interesting and quite exciting. But even if there is just one harvest, that's not necessarily too problematic. Most of agriculture deals with this challenge of you only harvest once a year. How do you store that material over the period? So a lot of the infrastructures are actually already built to handle these challenges. There's already a lot of things around how do you store the material.
00:11:18
Speaker
How do you compact it so that you can store it more space efficiently? The seasonal
Farmer Partnerships and Sustainable Practices
00:11:24
Speaker
challenge at first felt like it could be quite problematic, but we're learning that it's just something that there are solutions that exist. It's just trying to find the right pieces to put together. And I'm curious to also find out how much of the harvest waste you need, for example, to spin five kg of yarn. Have you been able to work that out?
00:11:44
Speaker
Yeah, so I can't share too much information on this just because there's a lot of variation in the process. It depends on yours, on the stem, it depends on the blend of yarn, let's say you want to add other materials. But generally what we say is to the growers and to our other partners is if you get a seven by seven meter area of potato field, that'll be enough for a yarn. So that's that's roughly what we're working with at the moment.
00:12:10
Speaker
Sorry, so seven by seven meters is enough for how much yarn? So that'll be about a two to five kilogramme yarn.
00:12:19
Speaker
Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Amazing. Tell me a bit more about your partnership and relationship with the farmers because that's where it all starts. How has that interaction been? What has been their, their response? I think that there's actually, working with farmers is quite interesting. I think something that we've kind of encountered in our journey is that we're always working with people who are from new industries. We're working with biochemists, we're working with farmers, we're working with people in textile space and we're from an engineering background.
00:12:45
Speaker
So I've actually really enjoyed working with farmers. It's one of the things that I probably enjoy the most in what I do. Farmers are very, especially in the field of potatoes, are very open to innovation. There's been lots of legislation and lots of changes recently in terms of how they harvest potatoes. That means that they're very open to exploring new ideas. So we've actually had a lot of very positive response. I think at the very beginning, there was a bit of trying to sort of understand how it would work and understand like if it would be feasible.
00:13:15
Speaker
but I think now we've been able to actually bridge that gap so we're very fortunate we're supported by some pretty big players in the field so we have support from the National Institute of Agricultural Botany who's really kind of helping us spearhead the research into this feedstock because of course no one has ever worked with it so a lot of that work has to be done from the ground up.
00:13:31
Speaker
We also have support from the world's largest potato harvesting manufacturer. They're called Grimate. So that's pretty cool. I never thought that we would be doing that. And now we've been finding ourselves getting invited to events. So on Tuesday, I'm actually going to be going to talk at the Cambridge University's Potato Growers Research Association called Coupe Growers. I'm very excited for that. And we're going to be even exhibiting a potato event between the 4th and 5th of September. So the reception has been really good. Overall, it's all quite positive.
00:13:59
Speaker
And do they see this as a potential revenue stream then? Or they're just grateful that someone's handling their waste and they're not really bothered about it being a revenue stream.
00:14:08
Speaker
Yeah, so I think it's a combination of things. I think on one side, it's really good for them to be able to have an additional income from the harvest. So that's obviously helpful. But another thing, of course, is the sustainability aspect from them. There are the potato growers and growers in general are under really harsh challenges to try and be more sustainable with more kind of ongoing legislation and push from their customers. So in fact, McCain has required growers to be regenerative potatoes by 2030, I believe.
00:14:37
Speaker
So working with us, Grow with Sea, an opportunity to be able to meet these targets. That's also a pretty exciting thing. And I think another thing as well that's kind of been brought up is a lot of times having this material lying around the land, as Idan previously mentioned, can actually foster diseases and spread them around. So by removing it off the land, potentially we're reducing the chances of that happening.
00:15:00
Speaker
I was curious to know how much potato harvest waste is produced in the UK at the moment. In the UK, there's about 2 million tonnes of potato stems, which is completely untapped every single year. We definitely see our company in the future going towards collecting things internationally, because in order to have the scale that we want and also a continuous supply chain, we want to work pretty much everywhere in the world. But luckily, because potatoes grow in pretty much every country, it's very easy to replicate our supply chain anywhere we want.
00:15:29
Speaker
So now coming back to the material itself that you're producing, the fibre, tell us some of the main features about the fibre. You mentioned it briefly earlier, it's a lot like cotton. Can you expand on that? So in terms of the qualities of the fibre itself, so we are still quite early, so we are still kind of understanding completely the range of performance.
00:15:47
Speaker
that we can achieve with this fiber. But generally what we found is that it has very similar tensile strength kind of geometry to existing natural fibers. So that's all looking very positive. When speaking to textile mills, it's been likened to other seed fibers like Kvark, like cotton. And it's also been likened to premium plant-based fibers like linen. So that's obviously really nice for us to hear. We're very excited. But there is still a long way ahead
Failing Fast and Broad Experimentation in R&D
00:16:11
Speaker
for us. So a big thing for us is understanding a bit more about the diability
00:16:15
Speaker
of the fibre, also understanding what different things could we spin it with, how does that fabric actually feel. We have a lot of data to be able to, I guess, infer this, but it's not too clear quite yet.
00:16:27
Speaker
Do you have textile yarn specialists helping you develop the fibre in the yarn? Yeah, so we're actually really fortunate. We got some funding to work with the University of Leeds to help us develop the world's first yarn with potato stem fibre. It's very exciting. So we have a collaboration with University of Leeds, a really good relationship, and they've been really helpful for us in trying to optimise yarns and understand how we should improve our fibres.
00:16:50
Speaker
We do also work with textile mills in Portugal, so that's obviously lovely. Being Portuguese, it's really nice to kind of show my granddad what we've been up to whenever we go. He's also very interested in this. But yeah, we work with some mills in Portugal who are obviously big innovators in the scene.
00:17:07
Speaker
In general, we try to create a network with brands, mills, anyone who we can. There is not one single person because also people tend to have various different opinions. So you can give our material to one person and they'll say it's great. And then you give it to another person and they say it needs a lot more work. So I think it's really important to get every single person's feedback. And every time we meet a brand or a new expert, the first thing we want to do is to send them some samples because hand feel is so important in this industry.
00:17:33
Speaker
Absolutely. David, this one's for you. I understand that your philosophy has been to fail fast and take a broad approach to experimentation. And I can completely understand that's what's driven innovation at your company. But when it comes to developing materials, trying to be agile and doing lots of experiments take a lot of time. So how do you focus there? You kind of have to go wide, but you also have to focus there. What's your approach to balance that?
00:17:59
Speaker
Yeah, I love this question. I'll try and keep it a little bit concise. But yes, you're right. There's an explosion of possibilities. And I think that it's very woven into the company DNA to be very curious and to want to explore a lot. And at times that's something we need to kind of try and limit ourselves with. But I think we have to take this approach because we are doing something that really has never been done before.
00:18:23
Speaker
very unusual to take a real waste that has never been touched before and try and get usable fibres out of it. So it means that we really need to kind of find new ways of doing things. The feedstock is not grown for fibres, it's grown for potatoes, right? So with that, you're going to get all sorts of challenges that we need to address through thinking completely radically. But in terms of being able to kind of limit ourselves, there's a lot of kind of constraints we put in very early on.
00:18:48
Speaker
And there's a lot of prioritization we do. So for us, it's all about the sustainability, the scalability and the affordability. If there's this really cool technology that potentially could work, but there's no clear way of scaling it, then it's not a very big priority. So that's kind of how we limit the technologies. We also prioritize technologies, which are versatile. So the way that our process works is a series of sub processes and some sub processes can connect to others, but others can't connect to other ones. So for us, it's always very important.
00:19:18
Speaker
to prioritize ones that can connect to lots of other ones. I know the founder of SmartX was saying, always open the door that opens further doors. And I guess that is kind of the approach that we've been taking with our technology as well. It's thinking, okay, well, if you, if I do it this way, then maybe I can do it these other following ways. A couple of that, I think another thing which, which we're trying to kind of do, which I think is potentially a bit
00:19:43
Speaker
uncommon in our space is we're looking at using data driven approaches to really kind of cut down what we do and identify patterns that otherwise wouldn't be possible. So a lot of times you can do a full factorial experiment, which is basically you do every single possible combination a number of times and you'll have thousands of experiments. What we do a lot of times is we figure, okay, how can we design this intelligently? Maybe we can use data science approaches to half the amount of experiments we do.
00:20:11
Speaker
So that enables us to be more agile with the way that we approach and more resource efficient. Idan, could you explain the loop that you guys talk about? So the fibre, once it's made into a garment, can potentially, after use, come back into being a fibre, or go back into the land. Yes, so this is something that we're really debating a lot internally, is how do we look at the end of life of our material?
00:20:35
Speaker
Durability is incredibly important on one side. You want a product that's going to last a long time, especially when your initial customers are going to be.
00:20:43
Speaker
more upper price range brands, more luxury brands, these kind of brands, and they're not going to be okay with a garment that's going to fall apart very quickly. So there's a lot of push for durability. David said, you know, we're the first to work with this potato. We have this new feedstock, but another reason why things are very complicated and there's also lots of opportunity for us is we're pretty much developing an entirely new process in order to extract those fibers. So using this biological approach and this mechanical approach.
00:21:10
Speaker
And by using a completely new process that is non-toxic, that's safe for aquatic life, that can be biodegraded, we can actually have the fibers that we deliver to our supply chain be biodegradable. But the big question is how does our supply chain use it?
00:21:29
Speaker
Because if we give it to a brand that may want to dye it in a certain way, do we intervene and say this is how we want our material to be used and potentially reduce the scope of where a company has impact? Or do we accept that overall, we need to have as many brands as possible sign up to our material because it is the most sustainable approach for them and them having
00:21:52
Speaker
you know coating it in material although might reduce part of that biodegradability that we care about will still allow them to use our product in the first place so it's really looking at the the cost benefit to to these opportunities and overall we kind of sign ourselves to the philosophy that different players in industry will want to do different things with our material they will want to use in different contexts
00:22:15
Speaker
But we need massive change for the industry and we can't limit ourselves right now to very, very specific ways and how we're going to use it. So we want to create a material that goes into pretty much every brand's needs. And that's why in some cases, I think it will be biodegradable. In other cases, it's not 100% predictable. True, because it's sort of out of your hands, isn't it? But tell me a bit more about the environmental impact of, for example, making a t-shirt with cotton or making a t-shirt with fiber.
00:22:44
Speaker
It is still early stages and our product is extremely agile, so the process can be completely different in the next three months than it is today, so we haven't done a complete LCA. But from the internal environmental impact that we've seen on our material,
00:23:02
Speaker
as well as things to be verified by speaking to some brands and experts who have looked at our calculations. We think that our material has the potential to use 99% less water than cotton and also use around 82% fewer carbon emissions compared to it. And very importantly, there's also massive land saving. Because potatoes are grown, for potatoes anyway, we're collecting this crop, then actually all that land isn't attributed to us because we're not, and that's why it's so important
00:23:29
Speaker
that we don't change the behaviors of farmers. We wanted to continue to focus on growing the crops solely for the potatoes so that the stems of the crop will remain a waste stream. And that's why we see our product is also using no land. Once you figured out you had a solution, you wanted to experiment further and develop the yarn and the fiber, how did you go about funding for developing your idea
Funding Journey and Scaling Up
00:23:51
Speaker
further? That's always a big hurdle, right?
00:23:53
Speaker
Definitely, definitely. I mean, during my final year submission, we said that we'd need about, I think 30 grand to bring our product into the market. Now I know that is very, very inaccurate and it is magnitudes more. I like to think back about that time and wish I was correct.
00:24:12
Speaker
But yeah, funding was a massive endeavor for us as soon as we graduated because we had the idea, but we didn't have any money. The first bit of money we got was from a fund of a widow who her husband liked to engineer various different things. And so when he passed away, he took some of his savings and now gives it out to young people who are also building interesting things. It was a very, very obscure grant.
00:24:37
Speaker
But it was absolutely crucial for us because we got around 2.7 grand at that point. We went from zero to nearly three grand. It was amazing. And we used that money to actually write a grant. So we worked with a grant writer and we applied to something called the Fast Start Grant, which is an Innovate UK grant for people who've never won grants before.
00:24:58
Speaker
and it's a smaller grant, so it's a higher ability to get it. And we were incredibly fortunate that around two months after we graduated, we actually got our first bit of funding and 50 grand is a pretty good place to start. We had a lot to do, but that was enough to kickstart the process and the more traction you get, the more developed your R&D, the easier it is to get more grants.
00:25:19
Speaker
We also would tirelessly apply for competitions, accelerators, any source of funding that we could find. We would probably spend around two days a week just looking for funding and then three days a week or four days a week doing R&D. And then that eventually allowed us to build a distraction. We needed to get these
00:25:36
Speaker
investment funding, which we closed a few months ago, earlier this year, and continue to go for these bigger grants. But that's really what kick-started it. Just to add to that, it was really tight at the very beginning. I mean, Idan and I were working allegedly part-time on the grant, but we were working full-time in reality. We were in a tiny little shipping container with literally no running water, which as you can imagine, developing a technology in the space of biotechnology is quite a challenge.
00:26:03
Speaker
Oh, that's quite a story there. And how far are you on that journey from it being an R&D lab version to a scalable solution that could meet manufacturer demands? It's still a pretty long way for us to go. Right now, we are past, I think, this proof of concept stage where we've proven that the material has high quality properties, we've proven that it can be spun into a yarn, but all of this needs to be proved at scale.
00:26:30
Speaker
Because things can behave very differently once we're dealing with tons and tons of material or dealing with industrial manufacturers that have very specific margins which then in terms of how the machines work which are not willing to move on so we're now transitioning to proving everything in an industrial scale.
00:26:48
Speaker
And hopefully that would mean that we can potentially have a garment of our clothing made in 2026, with sales of it potentially being 2027. But this will still be a bit of a smaller scale. The larger
Collaborations and the Role of Storytelling
00:27:01
Speaker
scale will be towards the end of the decade.
00:27:02
Speaker
Are there some exciting partnerships with farmers, manufacturers, maybe even brands that you're able to share about what has been the reaction in some of these partnerships? In terms of partnerships with farms, so we're very fortunate that we have support from National Institute of Agricultural Botany. We also, of course, work at Grimade, the largest potato harvesting manufacturing company in the world.
00:27:24
Speaker
We're also very fortunate we actually work with the Dyson Farms as well. They're a pretty exciting name in the space. Yeah, in terms of the brands, so obviously we came from an engineering background and going to the world of fashion is a big change. It was incredibly complicated to start to understand who we should speak to, what each person does, where do our fibres even go because the supply chain is so complicated. So we really
00:27:48
Speaker
leverage trying to build a network when we were students. We found that people were far more accommodating when they realized, oh, we're just students. We're just trying to learn a little bit more as opposed to we're a startup that's been developing for two years. Can we sell you something? We really made the most of that opportunity. That's how we met a lot of the farmers. That's how we met a lot of the brands. That's how we met a lot of our experts and advisors that are helping us with our company. Luckily, we've nurtured these
00:28:12
Speaker
relationships over a long period to the point that we can have very honest discussions with them and we can really make the most of any advice they have for where a company should go.
00:28:20
Speaker
I mean, it really sounds like you're listening on the ground to all the different partners that you want to be working with. And that's so important for a startup to hear their problems, understand what they want, what is important to them, what is the pain point for them, and then coming back to the drawing board. Definitely. I'm a real believer that outsiders through an industry can offer a lot of innovation, a lot of progress because you see things differently to someone who's been in that space for a very long time.
00:28:46
Speaker
But you can only really kind of succeed as an outsider while still being aware that there's a reason why the industry is the way it is and trying to learn as much as you can and respecting the people in there as much as you can. So it's just a balance between those two, which has really helped our approach. Just to add to that as well, I think this is really a philosophy that we foster across the entire way we do R&D in the team. We invite ideas from
00:29:09
Speaker
literally anyone. In fact some of the innovations we've had in engineering have come from the biochemistry team or sometimes the most junior staff have ideas that completely change the way we do stuff. I really think this philosophy of kind of inviting ideas from any perspective is really good and I think that's a crucial part of innovation.
00:29:27
Speaker
I also feel like storytelling is a big part of your early days as a startup as well, isn't it? The story about what you're building. How do you communicate that, not just to brands, but potential customers who might be buying these products at the end? And how important has storytelling been for getting this startup off the ground?
00:29:46
Speaker
I think storytelling has been really, really important to at least the very beginning of the company. And it's probably going to become very important again as we start marketing what we do more. But one of the most powerful things that you can have as a startup is having an idea that can really, I like to say that is stupid, simple. You know, someone can understand it in about three seconds. Although maybe there's, you know, an iceberg of different technologies and things that are happening underneath the surface. If you can just go, hey, we make textiles from potatoes.
00:30:16
Speaker
in a way like that and get people's attention, then that really opens a lot of doors for you. It also means that you're spending way less time on, how do I communicate this super complicated technology to people who are external, to people in the farming industry, to people in the fashion industry, especially when you have so many stakeholders in what you do, that having that very, very simple messaging has been absolutely crucial for us. I think that's where the storytelling has begun. It's something that we really leveraged a lot
00:30:43
Speaker
I mean we found that when we go to networking events and other events like that it's always very easy to meet people simply because it's such a captivating story. On the networking side it's been crucial and also on the way
00:30:59
Speaker
our company kind of presents itself and is able to enter the market. I think there's also lots of benefits because in the end of the day, brands are storytellers. They want to communicate a story about their product because you don't really feel that it's made from potatoes. You just know it's made from potatoes because they told you this.
00:31:14
Speaker
So for them to be able to tap into our story and easily communicate that to the public is a very powerful tool for them. And I like to say that it's one of our key unique selling points as a company is we have the story which people can easily gravitate towards.
00:31:30
Speaker
Absolutely. I agree. And in a landscape where there are many exciting new materials, next gen materials, which are made from feedstocks and waste byproducts, how do you set yourself apart? You definitely do a great job with storytelling, but how else do you set yourself apart from these other materials that are also being developed?
00:31:47
Speaker
There's lots of different companies that are making fibers and waste. I mean, that is true. But what really sets us apart is A, we're the first to work with a speed sock. So some other crops like pineapples, banana, these kind of things have already existed for a long time.
Global Scalability and Adaptability
00:32:03
Speaker
And whilst they have this incredible marketing potential.
00:32:05
Speaker
they are still something that already existed before and brands have already heard of it. So when we come in with this idea of potatoes, there is this real excitement because it's just something that's so fresh. But apart from that, there's also the properties of the material itself. So our fibers, as David was talking about, are actually very, very high quality and are far finer than some of these other waste-based products.
00:32:30
Speaker
And that's not completely due to the technology we're developing. It's also actually due as well to the inherent quality of the fibers in the crop. What's really exciting about this is that means that we can get very high quality fibers with less processing, which saves on cost and then helps us meet that scale and affordability criteria that's really important for us.
00:32:50
Speaker
But what i think is really the most exciting bit about the company is the technology part of it because although there's all these other fiber manufacturers we actually see this as a massive opportunity for us because a lot of the technology we're developing is completely feedstock agnostic so it uses less steps than conventional processes.
00:33:09
Speaker
It is more sustainable than conventional processes and it can be more easily replicated than conventional processes because we do it in a controlled environment. So we actually see that a lot of these other fibers you may hear, we hope to work with and help them scale up as well because we all need to work together in order to really help the fashion industry.
00:33:28
Speaker
I love that. I think it's all about partnership. If we really want to change how things are done, I don't think one company is going to be able to do it all. And it is about partnership and finding the right technologies that can help everybody sort of scale up and do this together. David, was there anything else that you wanted to add in there?
00:33:46
Speaker
The only thing I was going to potentially add is that another really exciting thing about potatoes is that scalable aspect of them. I mean, this is a crop. It's literally, it's part of local cuisine everywhere. It's grown in over 130 different countries. When you look at other plant-based fibers, you'll find that they're often restricted to certain regions. Maybe you need a tropical climate or maybe you need a lot of like kind of mild climate, let's say for more kind of like linen crops, flax crops.
00:34:15
Speaker
So I think that's a really exciting point about potatoes and just going back to that point you didn't mention about the technology, we found that it does work with other waste-based materials as well. So there's a whole range of other crops that have never been touched before that we've been able to get fibers out of and some of them are good enough to potentially be used by the textile industry.
00:34:36
Speaker
The reason we think that this is the case is because potatoes are really the most extreme example of a crop that you can extract fibers from, purely because it's a bit harder to collect. There's no infrastructure to do that. It hasn't been selectively read for fibers. No one's used it before. So if you can make it work in the potato example, you're essentially encompassing every other crop in that process.
00:35:00
Speaker
That's another reason why we're working with potatoes to begin with, because people often ask us, you know, you're building technology, why don't you work with linen? Why don't you work with hemp? These are already existing fibers.
00:35:10
Speaker
But our technology is only as good as it is because we set ourselves the challenge of going for the most difficult thing to begin with. And hopefully in the future, the strategy is that we will kind of see the benefits of this and be able to far more easily put our technology into everything as opposed to having to develop every single time we want to expand our company.
00:35:30
Speaker
Just another thing to add as well is potatoes are a completely unvalorized crop. It is the only crop in the research that we've done so far, but it's almost completely unused at all. If you look at other kind of waste-based materials, a lot of times they'll actually have another use for something else. Maybe they can be used for animal feed.
00:35:50
Speaker
potentially valued in AD plants. But what's really unique about potatoes is that they're poisonous. The potato stems are poisonous, so you can't actually feed them to livestock. And additionally, they are just considered a nuisance by the growers. So a lot of times the thinking of the grower isn't, what can I do with this potato stem? It's how do I destroy this potato stem as quickly as possible and as cheaply as possible?
Overcoming Challenges with Mentorship
00:36:11
Speaker
So you've got this incredible solution to really big problem in the textile industry. Have you been able to figure out a business model that's going to work for this? Cause that's really what a success of a startup finally hinges on. Is that something that you've been able to map out?
00:36:24
Speaker
The business model is something that we think about a lot. In general, we're in a really, really kind of freeing period, I would say, because we have spoken to various different brands and we know that if we meet X price and we have X sustainability targets, which they give us, they will buy our material, which is why it's really, really exciting. I think a lot of companies, a lot of startups to develop the business
00:36:50
Speaker
and the product at the same time, because even if the product exists, it might not necessarily have a direct market fit, and then they're going to need to convince people to switch over. But because we have this philosophy of we're going to have something that is as good as cotton in terms of performance, is the same price, and also is more sustainable, we know that once we meet these criteria, there is absolutely no reason why brands wouldn't want to work with us.
00:37:16
Speaker
They want to be sustainable. The problem is that they just don't have anything that's financially suitable towards making that jump. So the first person that's going to be able to kind of meet that big demand is going to have a huge impact on the industry. So is your approach to make the yarn and supply that or make the processes, the manufacturing processes and license that out or both?
00:37:38
Speaker
To begin with, we want to start with direct sales of fiber. So we won't make yarns because spinning yarns has this entire areas of expertise and you need to spend millions of buying yarn spinning equipment. But we are going to try to deliver bales of fiber in the same way you deliver bales of cotton straight to these traditional cotton spinners. What we will do to begin with is sales really through collaborations. So that means working with one or two brands.
00:38:04
Speaker
having an agreement with them where they support us and in return they get to use our material first. And these kind of deals are a bit more complicated to set up because you need to have the entire supply chain already set up to have the sale facilitated. But we think that once that is proven,
00:38:20
Speaker
we can easily move to a more generous direct sales model where we don't necessarily need to have a brand already confirmed as the buyer because the industry will know at this point that if you are a mill and you manufacture a material you will be able to find a brand that will want to use it and that should hopefully be possible.
00:38:37
Speaker
once a few brands already start doing it through collaborations. But the long-term goal of the company to have the biggest impact possible isn't to constantly build bigger and bigger and bigger production facilities, which will cost hundreds of millions of pounds in order to achieve. Far faster way of doing it is actually through licensing this technology out. And I think that's where the company will become in the long-term. So I think you will see us transition a bit more from a fiber company to a technology company as the company develops.
00:39:06
Speaker
Oh, very exciting. Now you mentioned a bit about the challenges, you know, the financial challenges you had initially to try and get money into continue your experiments. What was one of the other challenges that you faced in setting up a startup straight out of uni?
00:39:20
Speaker
The big challenge as well was just, there were so many things that we absolutely had no clue about and we didn't even know what they were called. There were so many unknown unknowns and it was very difficult to teach yourself certain things. So for example, one of the scariest experiences, I think David and I had in our experience at five.
00:39:37
Speaker
was when we got our first grant and we're trying to figure out how to do all the paperwork and we didn't know who to speak to we didn't know how these rules work we didn't know how strict they are and it was it was really really stressful and very very complicated and i feel like if i spoke to my previous self i can probably explain to them in 30 seconds hey this is what you need to do you don't need to worry but at that point because you know it's your first time getting money can be very very confusing so that was a very difficult bit i think
00:40:01
Speaker
The legal world as well is a very difficult one for us to kind of deal with. I mean, especially when you're developing tech, you have NDAs, you have all these kinds of things. So having legal support very, very early on was quite important for us. We were luckily able to get some pro bono support. And also we were part of university externship programs from legal students that were able to help us. It was a very confusing point at the beginning. So I just wish there was a bit more advice for startups on how to do that.
00:40:28
Speaker
Another big thing for us when we created the startup is we came straight out of the university. We obviously had a little bit of experience in the past working at some other companies, but something we really had to kind of do and learn on the job was how to be leaders and managers. So I think that I'd credit a lot of this learning to the support we got from mentors. Both Idan and myself have access to mentor support. Idan was actually on the Royal Academy of Engineering.
00:40:54
Speaker
So I think that was also really helpful. But I think really for us that was quite a big challenge very early on. Yeah, especially that we expanded the team by so many people since we closed our fundraising round. It meant that there was a lot more focus on the people side of things and the emotional side of things, as opposed to the project side of things, which you really focus on right at the beginning.
00:41:16
Speaker
So many startup founders talk about the value of having mentors and having that sooner rather than later. As part of winning the Fashion District Manufacturing Futures Award and also being part of the cohort, you got a lot of support from Fashion District. Could you tell us a bit more about what support you got, what you learned through that process and what you gained from that experience?
00:41:36
Speaker
The Fashion District was actually one of my favorite programs at BNOD. So we've actually applied to it when I think we were in a bit of a accelerator burnout, program burnout, because I think it's quite common when you're the start of the, apply to everything that you can find.
00:41:51
Speaker
And you find often that they repeat very similar things. I mean, there's always nuggets of information that you take out of there, but sometimes it's not always worth it. But because the future manufacturing one was very, very specific to what we're doing, I thought it was actually a lot of things to be getting from it. I really enjoyed the structure of the one-to-ones that we would get or the, we had like a critical friend day where we would go sit on the panel and speak to everyone and essentially have them challenge our idea.
00:42:18
Speaker
but what i found most useful more than anything was just being around people with a very good network so i would come in with specific problems like we're struggling with this legal channel and turtle and they'll be like the next day i would get like three emails from people who might be able to help me so that was that was really amazing and also i would like to also really thank the judges because i've never been in a pitching opportunity where the judges were so
00:42:41
Speaker
attuned to what we're doing. And they really picked up on things and asked very intelligent questions, which in most of my experience in competitions is not the case. So I think they did a fantastic job at choosing judges. And really it's a, it's a great program. I'd recommend it for anyone who's in the textile tech space.
00:42:58
Speaker
Absolutely. And the judges all came with so much experience in the textile and fashion industry, isn't it? They really were immersed there and they knew what the industry needed, what the challenges are, and could clearly see this was a solution that had a lot of potential, which is why they supported you. I think it gave us a lot of information on speaking to other startups and learning about their experiences was quite interesting. I think one thing that we always struggle with
00:43:23
Speaker
figuring out is how important marketing is for us. Because we're a B to B to B to B kind of business, right? So how important is that we actually communicate with the public and speaking to how the startups and learning from them was really useful. It was also very good to speak to some of the people who, one of the speakers there that was from a Portuguese mill.
00:43:42
Speaker
and they provided a lot of information in terms of what is the exact quantities that we need, how large we build our pilot production facility. These are really, really specific questions that you would only be able to ask to very, very specific people. And it was fantastic that those people were there. So it was just being able to quickly go tap people on the shoulder and go, what would you do in this scenario and get a quick response that was the most useful. Were there any other accelerator programs or incubator programs that you were part of in the early days?
00:44:10
Speaker
Definitely, yeah, we're a part of a few. I think probably the best accelerator I can recommend is just the first one that you apply to, because when you go from knowing nothing to knowing a lot, it's really useful. So we first applied to the Climate Launchpad. The one I enjoyed the most was the Royal Academy of Engineering's Enterprise Fellowship, which is very, very specific for engineering deep tech startups. And the teaching that I got there is something that I use every single day. It was almost like doing like a very, very short
00:44:40
Speaker
MBA specifically for deep tech so I would have lessons essentially twice a week for about eight hours just like going to school. I really really enjoyed it and any person who can apply to definitely should. I just wanted to add to that as well and say that we really I think across the whole company we really felt the benefits of that program as well so it wasn't exclusive to just Idan it was kind of it helped the entire company. It taught Idan things that then he passed on to the company that fundamentally improved everything we were doing.
00:45:09
Speaker
And I think that without that program, we probably wouldn't be as far developed as we now are. So I think it was a huge help. So there are four founders at Fibe. What are the strengths that each of you bring to the table? I think one of our biggest strengths overall, especially our big founding team, is our alignment. Because we all went to university together, because we understand each other on a deep and personal level,
00:45:33
Speaker
when each one of us manages a different department of the company, because that's how it's split. David is the CTO, who manages most of the R&D. I'm the CEO, I manage more of the business and general operations of the company. We then have Hazel, who's in charge of the engineering, so that mechanical separation bit. And we have primaries more in charge of actually delivering samples and scaling up our operations. And these are all really core focus areas of the company. And each one of them manages a group of people to achieve that goal.
00:46:01
Speaker
So because we know each other so well, I feel like we have this alignment that's incredibly important. And I think if we brought someone in to fill in those roles as an employee or someone that we met forever long, it'd be far harder for us to fully align. And I think that's really, really important. I think another thing that's a really strong suit in the company is this ability to do rapid engineering and working in an agile way. So again, this kind of goes back to the alignment bit.
00:46:30
Speaker
We are all very attuned to, OK, this is a very quick experiment that can have very, very beneficial gains for us. So this should be the number one priority. And every one of the team pushes themselves to do that. And the final thing I would say, just to round all this off, and the one that I think was not the most obvious to begin with, because when you're a very small team, you're not very aware of this. But I think the emotional intelligence of the founding team
00:46:57
Speaker
is something that's really, really been impressive and it's continuing to show how important it is because we seem to be very attuned to when things are going wrong, when people are potentially not as happy as they can be and not as productive as they can be. And being able to pick that up and build personal relationships with the rest of the team is an absolutely crucial way to manage them and get everyone in mind to this really ambitious thing that we're doing.
00:47:22
Speaker
Your role as a CEO is also to do some fundraising and grow the company. And you've recently managed to close a pre-seed round of 1 million. You've only been around for a couple of years. So that's really incredible achievement right there. Tell us what it was like to pitch to different investors and what was the prep that you needed to do? Yeah. What was that experience like? It was one of the most incredible things I think I've done in my experience in a startup.
00:47:51
Speaker
incredible both being fun but also being incredibly tiring and difficult. Nonetheless, I think it was an amazing experience.
00:48:00
Speaker
And overall, we quickly realized that we are a high risk company, right? We're not going to be, if you're looking for a very, very detailed business model with guaranteed results and traction, that we're not the right company to do that. So I think we really accepted that that is the case and spoke to as many people as possible and made that very clear and we're very honest. And we found out that.
00:48:24
Speaker
There was a bit more interest in us and a bit more kind of willing to accept the risk of our company in the U.S. And that's why we were able to kind of get brands to get Panagonia's investment arm Tension Ventures to be our lead because they really align with how we work.
00:48:42
Speaker
and also Allante Capital, which is another textile-focused VC. But one of the really big challenges is it wasn't really getting those investors to sign up, it was all the negotiations afterwards. Because investment, I found, is very much an art.
00:48:59
Speaker
Every single person I've spoke to, regardless of what experience they had, gave me something completely different. And it was very difficult to go, how am I going to combine all these thousands of opinions that I'm hearing and actually translate this to the commercial agreement that we're putting in place right now with what these investors. So that was really, really difficult. I think that hopefully the next round will be far easier because
00:49:20
Speaker
I'm far more aware of how specific clauses will affect us and also what commercial terms do I believe is best in that company because at the time I didn't really know I was looking for other people's advice. Balancing people's opinions is something that's really really difficult and whilst it's great to have a big network you need to then also build the ability to kind of focus in on exactly what you want to do still.
00:49:40
Speaker
I mean, it's generally quite difficult anyways for startups in textile and fashion industry to get investment. So you've done incredibly well. What will this 1 million help you to achieve? So the 1 million is essentially going to fund all of the R&D that we need to get technical and the commercial validation so that we can go to investors in end of 2025, mid 2025, which is when we're going to do our next round and go.
Support from Brands and Work-Life Balance Strategies
00:50:06
Speaker
you give us three to five million and we know that we're going to build this pilot production facility using this process in this location and we're going to be able to sell to this company and generate sales in 2026. So everything is to answer those key questions because we don't want our next fundraise to give us a bit more money to do a bit more R&D. We've already sold that story and I think we've exhausted that story. So the next story has to be about generating sales and that's why it's so crucial that
00:50:35
Speaker
We really focus how we use this money, although it's a decent amount of money to have in your first pre-seed round, especially as a UK-based startup. We still need to be really, really focused with it, and we also still need to continuously look for grant funding because it'll be far, far harder for us to fundraise again if we haven't answered those key questions, which we promised investors we will.
00:50:58
Speaker
What do you believe more brands should be doing to support such developments and help you get to market? Not just five, but you know, early stage startups in textile and fashion. How can brands support you guys more and what should they be doing?
00:51:12
Speaker
I mean, our overall experience, there's definitely more things that they should do, but our overall experience was that the fashion industry has been incredibly accommodating for us. And that's one of the main reasons that we chose to have five become a startup as opposed to die off as a university project.
00:51:28
Speaker
And that's because we were like, all these brands are wanting to speak to us, they're wanting to advise us, they're telling us that they can help us, even though the idea is pretty much the equivalent of like a napkin, napkin idea. So there was a lot of advice that we received from fashion brands. And I hope that they can continue to do this, speaking to students, speaking to people who are very early stage and just saying, we're going to help you guys out where we can. Another big one is funding. I think that is something that can be improved a bit more.
00:51:57
Speaker
So we were in a very fortunate position where one brand funded very, very early preliminary testing that the company wasn't able to, couldn't have afforded. And that helped us a lot. It also provides a lot of traction for investors. So investors will not give you money if they don't see the brands are interested. So even something which is quite small to them can be absolutely massive to us. So not everything needs to be a massive
00:52:21
Speaker
Join development type of contract which runs over a few years it can just be something very very small because that just is concrete proof that the industry is interested in you and I think one thing that fashion brands can do to help fiber companies a bit more is having more people with technical expertise in our specific space.
00:52:41
Speaker
because we're quite distant from the garment world. You need to spin it, you need to then make it into a textile, you need to cut it. There's a lot of different players in between us and them. And for them to have a bit more of an understanding of what we're doing and what our needs are, they need to have people in their company that have worked in the fiber world. So we've seen certain brands which we resonate the most and the ones that are able to support us the most.
00:53:07
Speaker
and give us the best advice or the ones who had people who have worked in our industry. And some brands simply don't have that, unfortunately. On a slightly different topic, maybe, how do you manage work-life balance? You're a very, you know, young early stage startup. You've only been around for two years. You've managed to achieve incredible amount already. So clearly you're sort of running at 300 miles per hour. Do you manage your work-life balance? How do you prevent maybe founder burnout, which is very common?
00:53:37
Speaker
I think this is a real testament to the person that I am. About the time we started Vibe, I actually made a chance of things that bring me happiness and relax me versus how productive that thing is. And this really helped me work out the things that I should be doing to achieve a work-life balance.
00:53:56
Speaker
So that for me was really helpful. So for example, yeah, I know it's really nerdy and a bit embarrassing to share. But anyway, yeah, I love flow charts and diagrams. Anyway, so I think that that was really helpful. So it really had changed a few of the ways that I operate. So for example, I put a lot of emphasis in trying to cycle to work every day because cycling for me is
00:54:17
Speaker
is an incredible way of kind of just relaxing and feeling refreshed I also decided to move somewhere where I could rollerblade to work as well and I love rollerblading it's per minute you're burning some amount of calories as running so I arrived to work all sweaty which probably isn't a bit of a discomfort I'll be down here just next to me but
00:54:35
Speaker
So things like that have really kind of helped. But I think as well that inevitably, when you push yourself as hard as we need to push ourselves, there are certain sacrifices that you need to make. And I think that that is something that on a personal level, we've all kind of had to encounter. But the hope is that the benefits of what we're doing will outweigh the sacrifices. With my role as well, that took a long time to figure out. I mean, I think once I knew
00:55:03
Speaker
that the most important thing for me to offer the company is to be able to
00:55:09
Speaker
be sharp on the day and be able to connect different dots very quickly and help make quick decisions. I've kind of prioritized my work-life balance in order to achieve that. So for example, when I was raising, when I was doing the fundraise, I barely slept. I was going through also pretty intense time, but it was very, very, very difficult. And I felt like because I was so tired, I kind of entered a cycle where I was being unproductive, which made me have to stay up longer in order to get everything done.
00:55:37
Speaker
and then having to get less sleep and it was very difficult to break out of it and I had to wait until we closed around to stop that but after that I kind of realized that for me to be sharp and to be energetic I do need to be around people and I've just kind of said I'm going to work until the evening but in the evening I'm going to quickly
00:55:56
Speaker
see a friend for a pint or just grab dinner with them. And that really keeps me energized. So it's kind of figuring out that I can spread out my breaks as opposed to taking an entire weekend off, which I can't do, unfortunately. So it's all about realizing what you need to do, what is the most important skill set that you offer the company, and how does your work-life balance affect your ability to do that. And what would your advice be to other startups in the fashion and textile space?
00:56:24
Speaker
My biggest advice, well, I mean, this is going to go to people who specifically came from our context of being students, is make the most of the fact that you're a student. Not everyone's a student, but people are way more accommodating to speaking to you when you're students. They will offer way more time than you imagine, and they will help you a lot more. So that's one thing.
00:56:42
Speaker
And I think to more general companies, I think failing fast and building prototypes and having something physical and tangible to show them goes a really long way. And that's not just because it helps you improve your technology, but it also proves your commitment to what you're building.
00:56:59
Speaker
that we could have easily delayed making our first fiber, probably by six months, 12 months, because it was still theory back then. But the fact that we just were able to, you know, quickly pull out one fiber and show that it existed went a huge way towards having brands and our network to support us. So I think I would recommend everyone to build as soon as they have an idea.
Curiosity, Resources, and Community Engagement
00:57:26
Speaker
I think another piece of advice that I would give is just really try and keep an open mind things. I think a lot of times something you Dan and I would always do, we'd ask why, why can't we do this? Why can't we do that? Like what are the limitations here? Why isn't it done this way? And I think that really helped us with kind of the ambitions. I think that it's really important for people to try and seek inspiration from as many different places as possible. This is one of the reasons I went to design school before I went to Imperial College. I think that
00:57:54
Speaker
being able to learn about how different things are done and get inspiration from lots of places really important. Things like attending exhibitions and seeing and learning about how those things are made or just looking around you. One of my lecturers at Kingston School of Arts said to the class one day, just look around you and just look at different things and think how was that made? Why was that made that way? And just having that constant active approach of looking at things and questioning them and looking for inspiration from any place
00:58:24
Speaker
Are there any resources, books, podcasts, anything that you guys might have that could help others learn more about next gen materials or learn more about being a startup in fashion and textiles, anything that's been helpful for you?
00:58:39
Speaker
Yeah, I think that there's a number of different resources, which I think for me have been really, really helpful. I think that the most, the biggest one for me was actually just working at other startups. So when I was a student at school, I did work experience at a big engineering company and I straight away was like, oh my goodness, I can't do this. This is
00:58:57
Speaker
This is hell for me and after that every single place I worked out afterwards so I worked about four to five different other places they were all different startups and I learned so many things and a lot of challenges that I now see and what we do are challenges I saw back then as well.
00:59:13
Speaker
which is quite nice to see. So I think definitely working in startups is a huge thing. I think going to exhibitions and exposing yourself to other startups and what they do is also really important. I mean, one of the things that fundamentally changed me as a person was the designs of the year awards at the design museum. I went to that in 2013. I noticed some friends every year and I discovered Mango Materials there, who obviously now we share and invest with them, which is incredible.
00:59:40
Speaker
But at the time, they're a huge inspiration for me. I was like, wow, this is so cool. So yeah, I mean, I love what they do. And I think there are a few podcasts I love listening to. I love your podcast. The stories in there are really inspiring and it's quite incredible to share a platform with these amazing people.
00:59:59
Speaker
Also the How I Built This podcast by Guy Raz is a huge inspiration for me personally. I'd also like to add as well, reading autobiographies of founders for me was very fascinating. Definitely some of those also helped. Just one other thing to add as well, there's a little trick that I learned when I was at Kingston School of Art. My tutor once asked me to show me
01:00:20
Speaker
my instagram to her and she looked at it and she was like this is terrible and she she told me you need to start following like these design media pages and i just saturated my instagram with design engineering innovation all this and i think that was a huge help to funnel in innovations i mean the amount of media out there on instagram and other social media platforms which share innovation is is outstanding a lot of my in fact some of my past experiences work experience i actually just the end people who i knew worked at companies on instagram
01:00:49
Speaker
And I was lucky enough at times to have interviews. And for one case, I actually did a collaborative one. So I think that Instagram is a really good underutilized resource. I align a lot with what David said, is exposing yourself to as many things as possible. That's why I think the number one thing that's the most important is, again, going back to that network, because the common theme of everything David said is these are all about experiences that other startups had, other people had.
01:01:18
Speaker
I would just really go and focus on surrounding yourselves with the right people and people that can help you because people do want to help each other. I think the vast majority of people are good people. That's what I learned since I've started this company and they're willing to support anyone as long as they align on that vision that we should share.
01:01:36
Speaker
That's an amazing note to end on, just to know that people are out there and they are happy to help if you're willing to go and ask. And you guys have put some great ideas out there of how you can do that. Thank you again, David, Ida, and such a fascinating conversation, not just because you have a really interesting solution that solves a big problem for the textile industry.
01:01:56
Speaker
But hearing your philosophy about innovation and how you're building your startup and how carefully you're thinking about the team, work-life balance, all of that is brilliant. And it's great to hear such a young startup being so mature about things from day one. Good luck with everything and thank you again for your time. Thank you for having us.
01:02:17
Speaker
I can tell you, I will never look at potatoes in quite the same way again. Did you know that potato plant is poisonous and not really good for much else after it's been harvested? I didn't know that. After decades of avoiding this vegetable, I'm now fascinated to learn that it provides us with so much more than just potatoes.
Reflections on Textile Industry Revolution
01:02:37
Speaker
It is absolutely fascinating that Fibe have developed a technology that can potentially extract fibers from any feedstock and that is something I know investors are going to love and brands are going to love to hear because they can see the scale of this technology that could potentially truly transform the textile industry.
01:02:55
Speaker
I love David and Edan's energy and vision for where this technology could go, but also admire their current focus on really developing a solution with potatoes before they branch out to all the other possibilities. They're also laser focused on creating a solution that is going to be scalable and cost-effective and make this a no-brainer choice for brands as a sustainable replacement for cotton.
01:03:22
Speaker
This is definitely a startup I want to keep an eye on as they grow and scale over the next few years. Check out the show notes for the links to Fibe website and social media links. Your support means the world to me. So if you've enjoyed this episode, consider buying me a coffee using the link below in the show notes. It's really easy to do. And a cup or two helps me work late into the night as I edit this episode and bring them to you. If this episode was
01:03:49
Speaker
Inspiring and helpful. Please share this with a couple of your colleagues and friends as well. David and Idan have shared very transparently about their experiences and what they've learned along the way to building this startup and putting a foundation in place for success and growth. It is so valuable and helpful for anyone. So please do spread the word. And lastly, if you have any feedback, leave a review or connect with me via email. My address is also in the show.
01:04:18
Speaker
Thanks again for joining me on another episode of the No Ordinary Clock podcast. Until next time, this is your host, Millie Tarakin.