{"id":20572,"date":"2025-11-10T14:08:27","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T19:08:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sosv.com\/?p=20572"},"modified":"2025-11-10T14:13:54","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T19:13:54","slug":"wtin-examines-the-materials-transition-with-po-bronson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sosv.com\/wtin-examines-the-materials-transition-with-po-bronson\/","title":{"rendered":"WTiN Examines the Materials Transition with Po Bronson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In a recent interview with World Textile Information Network (WTiN)<\/a>, SOSV General Partner Po Bronson<\/a> spoke about the state of innovation in materials and textiles. See the full Q&A below:

Q: In the context of the industry\u2019s materials transition, what factors and focuses do you see as being critical over the next five years?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been an investor at SOSV for eight years and have overseen a lot of our investment in materials, and have seen both exciting breakthroughs and troubling gaps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fewer VCs are deploying money in this space, generally, than they used to. Right now, \u201cpure AI\u201d is sucking up all the money. And I don\u2019t mean the kind of AI that might make a textile machine smarter, but AI for its own sake. That shift makes it harder to advance the textile innovations the world urgently needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VCs are very frustrated with some very huge notable brands for never converting pilots into meaningful revenue. VCs are giving up on the fashion brands because of it. In turn, if brands depend on VC-backed startups alone, they risk losing the momentum needed to meet their commitments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s a thought exercise I encourage every innovation team at every brand to do during their annual off-sites: ask yourselves, \u201cWhat if VCs put US$0 in our sector for the next five years? How would we innovate differently?\u201d That scenario planning forces companies to confront the meager economic benefits they provide materials startups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The result is, VCs back new brands using new materials in innovative ways rather than fund materials companies to be just materials companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: If that\u2019s the case, what do you feel the industry’s priorities should be for the next decade?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an industry, people need to rethink how innovation moves forward \u2013 both inside and outside the startup world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Too often, I see promising technologies end up trapped in endless \u201cinnovation pipelines.\u201d Startup products will be used by a designer or get put into a capsule collection that generates tiny revenue. For startups, those pilots look great in a press release but don\u2019t scale into meaningful sales. For VCs, it\u2019s a dead end: small orders don\u2019t justify continued investment, and so capital pulls back. The result? Startups creep along at unsustainable revenue levels, brands get to experiment without real commitment, and the whole system teeters on collapse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not all startups survive. That\u2019s normal. Some technologies aren\u2019t economical or high-performance enough. But when a breakthrough is real, it shouldn\u2019t be funneled into a process that guarantees it will stall out. The \u201cinnovation pipeline,\u201d as it\u2019s currently structured, is essentially a walk of death. It simply doesn\u2019t convert revenue fast enough to satisfy VCs. So, something different needs to be thought out. That means putting some teeth behind offtake agreements. Use take-or-pay penalties. Buy more of these companies earlier vs. waiting years. Co-invent. Get big, long exclusivities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s lots of possibilities here, with no one way to do it. But what the industry is about to see is that the innovation pipeline has dried up with the current process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: Aside from its stagnant pace of adoption, how else does the innovation pipeline hamper emergent innovators? Which stakeholders are responsible?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rational innovation is the enemy of innovation itself. By that I mean when corporations decide on a narrow set of \u201crational\u201d priorities and ignore everything outside those boundaries, they think they\u2019re being disciplined and efficient. But that\u2019s exactly how big firms get disrupted. The real breakthroughs almost never come from the categories you were looking at. They come from the blind spots. And over time, those blind spots are what take entire industries by surprise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The textile industry has built a similar trap. Its innovation system is designed around dabbling\u2026 \u2018We\u2019ll use a little of this, we\u2019ll order a small run of that, we\u2019ll get some free press out of it.\u2019 Meanwhile, it takes three years to move from those tiny pilots to anything resembling scale, and by then the startup may be dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tragedy is that some of these technologies are exactly what the industry needs: they\u2019re economical, they save money, they deliver the sustainability brands have publicly pledged to achieve, and they meet or exceed the required performance standards. When an innovation checks all those boxes, it should be adopted system-wide\u2014not strung along for years in a marketing pipeline that kills momentum and starves the startup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the industry wants to meet its sustainability goals and remain competitive, it has to learn to recognize the difference: when something is real, stop testing it to death. Use it. Scale it. Now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: What topline strategies or solutions do you feel would best help the industry achieve its 2030 ESG goals and beyond?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Open-loop circularity.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a dream that the industry can do what\u2019s called closed-loop circularity: garments can become new garments. It\u2019s dreamy, it\u2019s utopian for sure. But it will not work. It\u2019s not grounded in physics or chemistry. If you design a garment to be endlessly recycled into another garment, you\u2019ll end up with something that falls apart in three months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Go for impact over ease.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The industry likes to prioritise innovation spaces that they see as doable and is kind of quiet about stuff they think is going to be harder. For example, how do companies make sure they\u2019ll meet emissions guidelines? Take adipic acid, a key ingredient in nylon and polyester production. Its manufacture produces nitrous oxide, which is 100 times more damaging than CO\u2082. That means even small amounts have an outsized climate impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, we\u2019ve backed a company that makes what we call a \u201cgreen adipic acid\u201d and a \u201cblue adipic acid\u201d. The green is entirely biobased. The blue starts with normal chemistry, petrochemistry, but has no nitrous oxide emissions in it; that one is basically the same cost of existing adipic acid, which makes up half of nylon. So, all nylons, all polyesters using adipic acid, adopt the blue or the green adipic acid immediately and you will meet all your 2030 goals. What do you think is a barrier? The innovation pipeline. Customers love the solution, but instead of adopting it broadly, they test it in capsule collections, pilot runs, or small batches. By 2030, at this pace, the industry will still be showing off a few pairs of yoga pants while missing its actual climate goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: Where do you see the greatest potential for disruption and systematic change?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The single biggest potential for disruption in textiles are used textiles, which are growing really, really fast. The industry is thinking we need to recycle more of our clothing back into clothing and then we’ll make people happy, and they’ll buy from us again rather than buy from Goodwill or Salvation Army. So, there’s no doubt that that sector is, in my mind, the most disruptive sector of the textile industry. And it is where fortunes will be won and lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q: What would be your key takeaway for the industry?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What no one wants to say out loud is that the entire innovation system in textiles has been structured to give startups virtually no revenue. And without revenue, startups simply can\u2019t survive. If that dynamic doesn\u2019t change, we\u2019re headed back to where the industry was in 1995 when VC-backed startups in textiles effectively didn\u2019t exist. I\u2019d say we\u2019re only about two years away from that point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The upside? The shakeout is already happening. The posers are gone. What\u2019s left are founders and investors who are genuinely serious. We\u2019ve seen this play out in the food sector too: less capital overall, fewer players deploying it, but the money that is being put to work is smarter, more disciplined, and more likely to back the right companies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a recent interview with World Textile Information Network (WTiN), SOSV General Partner Po Bronson spoke about the state of innovation in materials and textiles. See the full Q&A below: Q: In the context of the industry\u2019s materials transition, what factors and focuses do you see as being critical over the next five years? I\u2019ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2523,2526],"tx_company":[],"tx_category":[1357],"tx_trend":[],"tx_program":[],"posts_type":[17],"class_list":["post-20572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-materials","tag-textiles","tx_category-materials","posts_type-press"],"acf":{"founder_names":"","founder_positions":"","founder_companies":"","founder_spotlight_image":"","publisher":"World Textile Information Network","author":"","article_url":"https:\/\/www.wtin.com\/article\/2025\/november\/03-11-25\/concepts-2030-the-complete-guide\/","portal_id":""},"yoast_head":"\nWTiN Examines the Materials Transition with Po Bronson - SOSV<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sosv.com\/wtin-examines-the-materials-transition-with-po-bronson\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"WTiN Examines the Materials Transition with Po Bronson\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In a recent interview with World Textile Information Network (WTiN), SOSV General Partner Po Bronson spoke about the state of innovation in materials and textiles. 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