Cashmere sweaters are everywhere these days, often at unbelievably low prices. The appeal is obvious. If you have ever worn cashmere, you know it is soft, light, and warm. It is an impressive fiber that is hard to give up. Unfortunately, those bargain prices usually come with a catch.
Cashmere comes from the fine undercoat of a handful of goat breeds. Typically, one goat will be sheared twice a year, producing just four to six ounces of cashmere annually. That is not a lot of supply for a growing market.
The producers of raw materials are actually under a lot of stress. What you are seeing now, especially with the advent of fifty-dollar cashmere sweaters, is that the goats are being sheared way more often. The quality of the fiber is not as good, and it is creating unsustainable herding practices.
Rather than try to change herding practices or convince consumers to only buy high-quality cashmere, one startup had a different idea. The startup, which has raised over eight million dollars from investors, set out to create an upcycled material that is nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.
To do this, the company has created a material science AI called Braid AI. The model can fine tune various parameters to create fibers with different qualities. Cashmere is one target, but so are other materials widely used in the textile industry.
At its core, the company’s process is the same regardless of final product. To make its material, the company currently collects waste from across the fiber supply chain, including cashmere and wool farms and mills, as well as down bedding suppliers. In the future, it plans to expand to other waste sources, including feathers from the poultry industry. These waste streams share one thing in common: they are all made of keratin, the key protein that underpins the process.
The company then chops the waste to size and combines it with proprietary compounds. The mix is pressed through a plastic extrusion machine, and the pellets that come out the other end are fed through spinning machines that are normally used to produce polyester fiber. That equipment is used for eighty percent of the textile market. You have to be a drop in replacement.
To transform waste into new fiber, all of the necessary chemical reactions occur within those two machines. The company can create fibers that replicate everything from polyester to cashmere by using its AI to tweak the formulation and how the two machines process it.
The startup said every fiber it produces should be biodegradable, even the polyester replacement. All the components that we are using are biodegradable. The company is currently running its products through accelerated testing to prove the hypothesis. And because it uses waste products, the environmental impact will be dramatically lower.
Plus, it should be cheaper, too. The goal is to be more economically viable for brands and consumers. There is a belief that eco-friendly products should not cost more. In order for a material to be successful, both in the supply chain and for the consumer, you have to have both a product benefit and an economic benefit to everyone who touches the product. That is what the company is aiming for.