Cashmere sweaters are everywhere these days, and many of them are sold at incredibly low prices. Its appeal is obvious. If you’ve ever worn cashmere, you know that it’s soft, light, and warm. This is a striking fiber that is difficult to part with. Unfortunately, these bargain prices usually come with a catch.
Cashmere is obtained from the fine undercoat of a few breeds of goats. A goat is typically sheared twice a year and can produce only 4 to 6 ounces (113 to 170 grams) of cashmere per year. For a growing market, this is not a lot of supply.
“Producers of raw materials are really under a lot of stress,” Everbloom co-founder and CEO Sim Gulati told TechCrunch. “What we’re seeing now, especially with the advent of $50 cashmere sweaters, is that they’re being sheared much more frequently. The quality of the fiber isn’t as good, and that’s creating unsustainable grazing practices.”
Rather than change herding practices or convince consumers to only buy high-quality cashmere, Gulati and his team at Everbloom had a different idea. The startup, which has raised more than $8 million from investors including Hoxton Ventures and SOSV, set out to create upcycled materials that are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.
To achieve this, Everbloom created a materials science AI called Braid.AI. The model can fine-tune various parameters to create fibers of varying quality. Cashmere is one target, but so are other materials widely used in the textile industry.
Essentially, Everbloom’s process is the same regardless of the final product. The company currently collects waste from across the textile supply chain, including cashmere and wool farms and factories, as well as down bedding suppliers, to make its materials. In the future, the company plans to expand to other waste sources, including feathers from the poultry industry. These waste streams have one thing in common: That said, they’re all made of keratin, a key protein that supports the everbloom process.
The company then chops the waste into the appropriate size and combines it with its proprietary compounds. The mixture is pressed through a plastic extruder (which shapes the material by forcing it through a die), and the pellets coming out the other end are fed into a spinning machine, which is typically used to make polyester fibers. “The equipment is used in 80% of the textile market,” says Gulati. “You have to be a good person.”
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All the necessary chemical reactions occur within these two machines to transform waste into new fibers. Everbloom can create fibers that mimic everything from polyester to cashmere by using AI to fine-tune the formulation and how its two machines process.
The company said all fibers it makes, including polyester alternatives, should be biodegradable.
“All the components we use are biodegradable,” Gulati said, adding that his company is currently running the product through accelerated testing to prove its hypothesis. And because Everbloom uses waste materials, its environmental impact will be dramatically lower, he said.
Moreover, the price should also be lower. “We want to make it more economically viable for brands and consumers,” Gulati said. “I don’t believe in ‘sustainable premiums’, the idea that environmentally friendly products should be more expensive.” “For a material to be successful, both in the supply chain (and the consumer), there needs to be both a benefit to the product and an economic benefit to everyone who touches that product. That is our goal.”
