Australian activewear brand LSKD has inked a 10-year agreement with circular materials firm and fellow Aussie Samsara Eco to incorporate its enzymatically recycled nylon 6,6 into key product categories, including leggings, bike shorts and running bras.
The partnership, which begins in 2028 as Samsara Eco prepares to break ground on its first commercial-scale plant, will mark LSKD’s first use of regenerated fibers gleaned from end-of-life textiles. It reflects the brand’s ethos of becoming “1 percent better every day” as it works to eventually kick its dependence on fossil fuel-based materials, said Logan McNally, its raw materials and supply chain manager.
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“Since there’s no silver bullet in sustainability, we’re looking at what we think is a long-term solution rather than either recycled or textile-to-textile at the moment,” he added.
Samsara Eco employs what it calls an “AI-powered enzyme platform.” In simple terms, it uses AI to design enzymes capable of breaking down plastics into their fundamental building blocks, including monomers for nylon 6,6, which is stronger, stiffer and has a higher melting point than nylon 6.
A 10-year agreement with a materials producer still scaling isn’t typical, McNally said, but it shows the “power of the relationship and the trust that we have in the technology.” He added that there is no tradeoff in the nylon 6,6’s performance, look, feel or, most importantly, consistency.
LSKD isn’t alone in backing the innovator. Last June, Samsara Eco signed a 10-year offtake agreement with Lululemon that could see it supply roughly 20 percent of the athleisure giant’s fiber portfolio. The company, which is planning a 20,000-ton facility in Asia, has also raised more than $107 million from investors including Temasek, Greycroft, Hitachi Ventures, Main Sequence and Lululemon.
All of that has given Samsara Eco the financial runway to continue refining its technology, which can drop straight into existing supply chains without changes to existing manufacturing setups, said Paul Riley, its founder and CEO.
“It delivers an incredibly positive carbon footprint reduction,” he said of the company’s nylon 6,6. “We’re talking in the vicinity of 75 percent. And it delivers true fiber-to-fiber circularity, which we know is incredibly hard to achieve in the fashion industry.”
Samsara Eco’s facility in Jerrabomberra, New South Wales, produces enough material for hundreds of thousands of items each year, Riley said, but its primary purpose is to validate the product and inform the engineering of the upcoming Asian factory.
While he declined to disclose margins on Samsara Eco’s nylon 6,6, the price is “clearly acceptable to the market,” given the multiple agreements the company has secured.
LSKD plans to embark on a pilot next year, but it’s still early days, McNally said. The biggest challenge so far: deciding which products to choose, since staffers have their favorites.
“With the passion that the team has for sustainability, it’s going to be fighting for which ones we want to put it in,” he said.
