Keel Labs Wants to Put Kelp in Your Closet
Some species of bamboo, the fastest-growing terrestrial plant, grow at about 35 inches a day. Duckweed, a tiny, humble aquatic plant of the genus Wolffia, can double its size in two hours.
Similarly, kelp can grow by an impressive 18 inches to 2 feet per day. That puts the growth rate of this amazingly regenerative organism among the highest on Earth. This drew the attention of Keel Labs, an emerging innovator in the materials technology space.
Aleksandra Gosiewski, co-founder and COO at Keel Labs, stopped by the Business for Good Podcast recently to talk about kelp, particularly its fascinating potential for materials, its ability to absorb carbon dioxide, and how it’s setting her company up to become an emerging player in the B2B alternative textiles market.
Changing the course of fashion sustainability
There are many problems associated with the leather goods industry, in addition to the obvious animal suffering it causes. Fashioning human-usable leather from animal skins sucks up substantial amounts of energy and requires the use of dangerous chemicals such as dyes, coal-tar derivatives, and formaldehyde. People who work in tanneries handle pollutants like lime and sulfides, and as a result, cancer risks for tannery workers are alarmingly higher than average.
But until now, the alternatives have been far from ideal. “Pleather,” for one, is made from environmentally toxic PVC or polyurethane. Cotton requires large amounts of water for propagation and processing, and the pesticides and fertilizers used to rapidly grow the cotton can leach into nearby bodies of water. Pleather and cotton are of course superior to cow’s leather, but Keel is betting on something even better.
Kelp, a naturally growing macroalgae, is readily available in our oceans — no fertilizer or pesticides needed. Moreover, while it’s growing, kelp absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere and sequesters it more efficiently than most trees. Recent research shows that the world’s macroalgae absorb 200 million tons of CO2 annually.
From FIT to yarn from the sea
The product of a group of undergraduate students, Keel Labs got off the ground in 2017. Today, it’s churning out designer-ready, kelp-based yarns in its North Carolina factory. The company has raised close to $20 million in venture funding and provides jobs to two dozen staff.
COO Aleks Gosiewski has a background in economics and fashion, and she’s focused on working with her company’s researchers to scale the output of their leading product, Kelsun. Aleks, a honoree of the Forbes magazine “30 Under 30” group, has developed expertise not only in financial strategies but in the logistics of supply chains as well. It’s safe to say her work brings together the two complementary skill sets of science and design thinking.
Studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, Aleks found herself interning with a variety of clothing companies, but she felt increasingly uneasy with that choice. She became hyper-aware of the many ways her chosen field put toxins into the world every day.
She and her business partners talked about developing their own sustainable fabric manufacturing company, but things really got off the ground when they won a multidisciplinary Biodesign Challenge. The team’s entry consisted of a shirt knitted from yarn made from biopolymers in easily available seaweed.
Other companies became interested, which prompted Aleks and her team to establish Keel Labs. They worked with Rebel Bio (now IndieBio), a San Francisco-based accelerator linked to the venture capital firm SOSV, and put their first funding into building out their team of scientists. After that intensive program, they partnered with Horizons Ventures, a firm with a record in the alt-meat and alt-leather space.
After building a headquarters in Brooklyn, Keel Labs transitioned to its current North Carolina facility. It’s working at various points along the supply chain, for example with kelp harvesters, to scale bigger. The harvesters deliver a seaweed powder, and Keel Labs extracts polymers from that.
In preparing to move its flagship Kelsun product to market, Keel Labs is talking with fashion and home goods brands. The driving force in the company is always, as Aleks put it, to make materials that last, but not longer than necessary. Unlike polyester fabrics, Kelsun is built to do exactly that. In-house testing of the Kelsun fabric shows that, during composting or landfilling, it’s exposed to a much more diverse set of organisms than it would be during normal wear as a garment, and that therefore the expectation is that it would undergo a robust cycle of biodegradation once composted.
One of the other interesting takeaways from talking with Aleks was her idea for further development in the alternative materials space. While Keel Labs is making never-before-used materials, there’s still a need for someone to categorize, catalog, and bring order to this universe of emerging fabrics and other materials.
So go enjoy the full episode to get all the details on how Aleks and her team are trying to turn the tide away from unsustainable fast fashion toward a new world of stylish and sustainable threads.
