Even if you haven’t heard of California-based Mycoworks, there’s a chance you’ve owned a piece of their tech. The fast-growing biotech company has had partnerships with several retailers, including Ligne Roset, Nick Fouquet, and Hermès—and more recently General Motors.
Its primary pitch is its lab-finished flagship product, Reishi, crafted from its proprietary fabric, fine mycelium, which is the renewable substance found in the roots of mushrooms. The end product aims to provide the look and feel of leather—created without using any animal skins or products.
“Mycelium is biologically kingdom-wise, neither plant nor animal,” Sophia Wang, Mycoworks co-founder, told Retail Brew. “We have a patent protected process that enables us to grow to any thickness that we want. And we can adapt the surface features by just modifying the environment and with the interventions that we do during its growth process.”
Founded in 2013, Mycoworks’s proposition is also what drew the attention of GM Ventures, the investment arm of General Motors, in 2022. Together, they formed a partnership to help develop sustainable automotive materials.
Enter: the Cadillac Soleil, a concept vehicle that uses mycelium in its automotive design.This also marks the first GM automobile to incorporate a mycelium bio-based material and is used to create various interior elements of the eco-conscious cars, such as in the charging mats on the console and the door map pockets.
Need for speed: But while the need for alternative materials in industries such as fashion is apparent, the auto industry might seem like an odd choice for a partnership. Wang doesn’t see it that way.
“Everywhere you can imagine a leather or a leather-like material, it’s an automotive horizon for us in terms of applications for our fine mycelium material,” she said. “It is [also] huge when you think about how you want to have an impact on the world with a new elite, sustainable material. The big challenge, the big opportunity is broad adoption, because [that’s] how you have a huge impact on an industry, and practically no better industry than automotive, because it’s ubiquitous.”
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And if there is one thing that goes hand-in-hand with broad adoption, it’s scalability. While the company has struck up collabs with a number of brands, does it actually believe its tech can be adapted on a broader scale?
“It’s absolutely scalable,” Wang said, adding that while the company started with “a plant in the Bay area,” producing tens of thousands of sheets every year, it has expanded to another facility in South Carolina with a capacity of millions of square feet of material per year.
“In terms of the inputs, there’s the perception of it being very rare and elite, and that’s in part because of the volumes that we produce now,” she explained. “So you have the relationship between demand and supply and it becomes a very rare material. But the fact is, the inputs are quite accessible, really simple inputs. It’s just byproducts from the wooden industry. We’re talking sawdust and wood chips, a little bit of water, the mycelium inoculum, and then some nutrients. We have entirely organic inputs that are absolutely scalable using recyclable materials that come from other industries. This has a really huge potential to be a fully circular, low-footprint product, and it’s just about actually getting us to scale, so that we can create the volumes, so that we can meet an industry like automotive, or a fashion or footwear brand that has a huge market.”
The company is in the process of tapping into several different categories. Over the coming months, Mycoworks is working on unveiling projects showcasing its products within architectural, interiors, and design spaces.
“[It’s the] very rich partnerships that we’ve been invested in and that we think will continue to open up possibilities beyond,” she said.