Manufacturing idea promises customised shoes from mycelium
H&M Foundation has launched a virtual fashion collection to showcase ten “groundbreaking innovations that could disrupt the fashion industry”.
Calling it the Billion Dollar Collection, the H&M Foundation, an independent, non-profit global foundation funded by the main owners of fashion retail group H&M, has included MycoTEX among the ten ideas.
MycoTEX is a manufacturing technology that allows custom-made finished products to be crafted from lab-grown mycelium. The start-up hopes winning a place in the Billion Dollar Collection will enable it to raise the $3 million it believes it needs to scale its business up and run it between now and 2030.
Nicoline van Enter, founder of footwear design and manufacturing consultancy The Footwearists, is one of the co-founders of MycoTEX. She said at the time of the announcement that the solution can optimimise the entire fashion supply chain, reducing it to only a few steps and using a mycelium-based material that requires no farmland to produce.
She said the technology would enable full, seamless, custom production of footwear and other soft goods using a completely automated system and a home material that could replace plastic or leather.
She said there will soon be an announcement about a partnership between MycoTEX and “a technology supplier that is well known in the shoe industry”.
