The apparel industry is in a constant state of innovation, but it takes time and tenacity for disruptive ideas to find their audience. At Bluezone, however, several forward-thinking companies demonstrated how technologies once seen as niche or experimental are now at the forefront of industry-wide transformation shifts.
Here, Baytech Sustainable Technologies, Gozen and Coloro share how they’re delivering solutions that the fashion industry didn’t even know it was missing.
Baytech Sustainable Technologies
Thomas Leary, global sales director and a business partner at Baytech Sustainable Technologies, stressed the importance of designing products that are both desirable and truly sustainable. For denim, that means delivering authentic washes and abrasive looks without compromising durability.
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Baytech Sustainable Technologies delivers this with its family of sustainable denim washing stones called Hand Made Stone (HMS). “We really found a way that you can have that same authentic look and feel of it,” he said, adding that with HMS, companies are “getting more with less.”
Made from recycled pumice dust and organic polymers, HMS requires 20 percent less water per load than pumice stones and reduces the need for frequent stone changes. Additionally, there is no toxic sludge with HMS.
“Design, aesthetics and innovation and sustainability can work together in this beautiful ecosystem. And HMS is a great example of that and is commercially viable,” Leary said. Baytech is now an official vendor for Levi Strauss & Co. and Kontoor Brands. “We’ve crossed the point of attracting some large brands,” he said, adding that the Turkish company is also in discussions with Inditex and H&M Group.
“Every step of denim production is really its own industry. Each step has their own needs and application of sustainability,” Leary said.
Getting the stones into denim mills, where their impact could be measured and results seen firsthand, has been a crucial step in HMS’s journey. Leary said it really began with word of mouth in 2020—mills saw the outcomes, appreciated the benefits, and it grew from there. With the denim industry being a “tight knit community,” he said suppliers value feedback from others.
Gozen
Imagine a world where materials are not extracted or manufactured but grown instead. No farms, no fields and no factories.
Biomaterials company Gozen envisions building this world with Lunaform, a cellulosic textile with a lettuce-like structure grown under controlled fermentation. The structure takes just seven days to produce—a fraction of the time it takes to grow cotton, spin, weave and finish traditional textiles or to grow an animal for its hide.
With Lunaform, Gozen’s CEO Sedef Uncu Akı said the company is not only making a new category of bio fabricated cellulose but is also creating a “system change.”
“We really want to educate brands how to use this material and how to turn it into a beautiful product,” she said. “That’s why we have a design studio in house, and the sole aim of that studio is really to create that bridge between the material itself and the final product, to make it real for people to see that you can use the material and create beautiful products.”
Gozen currently offers three versions of Lunaform: opaque, transparent and indigo. Brands can customize the color, thickness and texture of Lunaform.
The pioneering material drew the attention of the fashion industry last year when Balenciaga debuted a robe coat made of it. Though the luxury space is often the first to brave a new material, Uncu Akı said the aim to reach the mass market to increase the impact Lunaform can make. She added that its applicable to other product categories in technology, automative, interior design, sportswear and accessories.
“We don’t want to stay in small quantities. We want to increase the capacity and be scalable for mass market to use the material. That’s how you can make a system change. That’s how you can make a create a new material category,” she said.
Coloro
Coloro isn’t reinventing the color wheel, but it is changing the way companies select color.
Having spent decades in the industry prior to supporting the launch of Coloro in 2017, Thorsten Traugott, Coloro’s managing director, said he noticed that the way people worked with color is outdated. Most teams see a color library as just a book of swatches—they pick a color and move on, hoping for the best. But Traugott said color is one of the most complex processes in product development. Though it involves multiple departments and steps, he said these aren’t always well-connected. That disconnect leads to inefficiencies, mistakes and extra costs.
Coloro aims to solve that by offering not just colors, but a complete, structured color process. Coloro’s approach color science entails identifying color by hue, lightness and chroma—the same way the human eye and brain work together to recognize. “That’s how we structure the color, and that’s what makes it easy for design teams to select the right colors and to select the right shades immediately,” Traugott said.
Coloro is as much about fiber and dye innovation as it is of color. The company has a R&D lab and dyeing facilities for testing new materials and dyes. Traugott added that Coloro remains independent and does not have exclusivity with any dye companies, which allows the firm to stay flexible and create custom solutions for brands using whatever works best.
Active and outdoor brands have been Coloro’s earliest adopters, though Traugott pointed out how the categories are generally more open to new innovations. “They’re looking into new processes and new technologies. They are much more open to something new than maybe the traditional retail or fashion brand,” he said, adding how they’re reaping the rewards by making decisions faster and saving costs.
“This is a higher efficiency, and it’s much more sustainable way to work,” he said. “And we hope that this is moving toward fashion and retail as well. This is normal in the industry—innovations come from sports and then is translated into the other areas later.”
