The winding path to scaling a plant-based leather bag brand

To receive the Vogue Business newsletter, sign up here. In 2018, fashion designer and entrepreneur Amanda Navaian received a text from her father, a chemical engineer, telling her about plant-based leather alternative Piñatex, which he had heard of at the Danish Sustainability Summit. That was the start of House of Marici, an independent luxury handbag brand that uses plant-based leather. Navaian, who had launched her first accessories brand almost a decade earlier, had been on the lookout for a new idea — one that placed community, workmanship and purpose at the forefront, and veered away from animal leather. But she was frustrated with the leather alternatives on the market. “I noticed that pleather had been rebranded as ‘vegan leather’ and a lot of people were calling it sustainable,” Navaian tells Vogue Business, before heading to COP28 to speak on a panel about fabrics of the future. “People don’t realise, when they’re looking for an animal-friendly product, that these vegan leathers are made from plastics.” Piñatex was an appealing solution. Developed by designer and social entrepreneur Carmen Hijosa, it uses discarded pineapple fibres to create a leather-like material that is relatively durable and lightweight. Navaian began research and development in 2019, and in 2020 launched House of Marici (a Sanskrit word meaning “ray of light”). The brand currently sells 10 colourways in eight different styles made from Piñatex, ranging from £650 for The Chelsea to £1,595 for The Marylebone Stud. The bags are made in Italy, using high-quality materials such as raw silk for the linings and Japanese brass for the zippers. Each bag is signed and numbered by the artisan who made it. Launching a fully plant-based leather brand in a landscape where these materials remain relatively nascent was a risk. The next-gen materials market has seen some challenges — earlier this year, Bolt Threads halted its production of mycelium leather Mylo because of a lack of funding — and investors say quality and pricing are still barriers to scaling their use. Larger players like Stella McCartney and Ganni are still using plant-based leathers in limited runs, SKUs and colourways. Piñatex has its own obstacles: the material can be expensive, and for now, it requires polylactic acid (a vegetable-based plastic material) to bind the waste fibres as well as polyurethane (PU) to coat it, and because of that it’s not fully biodegradable. As Navaian scales her brand, these are challenges she’s hoping to tackle. Marici’s annual sales have been growing since the pandemic, up 65 per cent year-on-year in 2023 to reach its low six-figure revenue. The UK is its biggest market — through stockist Selfridges and the brand’s own website — but Navaian has her eyes on the US, Middle East, Scandinavia and Germany. She is looking for investors, with hopes to build the team and focus on product development, alongside investing into marketing that’ll raise brand awareness. In February, Marici will launch four bag styles made from Mirum: a next-gen material developed by Natural Fiber Welding (NFW) and created from natural rubber, plant oils and minerals, which has been used by Ralph Lauren, Stella McCartney, Allbirds and Pangaia. Production for the Mirum bags is starting at the end of December, after more than three months of testing. The majority of Marici customers come to the brand because they like the styles and how the crinkled, pearlescent Piñatex material looks — not necessarily because it’s made from a plant-based material, says Navaian. “If I can convert somebody that’s not ‘into’ sustainability, I feel like I’ve done my part,” she adds. Larger brands have more resources to fund industry-changing research and development into new materials, which eventually should lead to their broader commercial availability, experts say. Nevertheless small brands play an important role, too. “Small and emerging sustainable fashion brands play a powerful role in showing consumers that the products and designs they love can be made with more sustainable materials and inputs,” says Karla Mora, founder and managing partner at Alante Capital, which invests in sustainable innovations. If smaller brands are innovating, it puts more pressure on bigger brands to do more, says Mora. “It’s the small, nimble brands like House of Marici that are often the arbiters of change in markets such as fashion,” agrees Brent Baker, new business development manager at NFW, which developed Mirum and has been working with Marici since September. “You need people who are visionary and don’t have to run product designs or material finishes through multiple teams, but instead can act quickly, driven by a passion and a vision.” Next-gen leathers: Baby steps While some critics are concerned with the 20 per cent plastic used in Piñatex, Navaian argues that it’s important to support the plant-based leather revolution as it develops, even if it’s not perfect. “Nothing is black and white,” she says. Piñatex’s role in waste management and the income it provides farmers is a factor, she explains. “That material would have otherwise been burnt. For every metre of Piñatex we purchase, we’re saving 12 kilos of carbon dioxide from being burned into the atmosphere.” Navaian works closely with Piñatex founder Hijosa, and says she’s in ongoing conversation about what a plastic-free Piñatex would look like. (Hijosa was not available to comment at the time of writing.) Experts and investors agree that there needs to be some flexibility while next-gen materials are in their infancy: it’s about supporting startups as they scale and improve their product. “Perfection isn’t required from day one, that’s not realistic in the world of startup innovation,” says Alante Capital’s Mora. She is looking to invest in a company called Matereal, which makes polyurethane from bio-based feedstocks and air carbon, meaning it’s biodegradable — a potential solution for plant-based leathers that require a coating or a binder. “When we look at the environmental impact data, choosing next-gen leathers that are coated in PU are still significantly better for the environment than animal-based leathers or 100 per cent PU leather,” says Nicole Rawing, CEO at non-profit think tank Material Innovation Initiative, adding that most animal leather also has a PU coating. Since Piñatex is not fully biodegradable, Navaian implemented a lifetime warranty. “Any time there is a problem with the material [such as the colour wearing off], I urge clients to contact us and send it back and we’ll give it a facelift,” says Navaian. She’s thinking about end of life, too. “We tell customers, send us back your bag that you’ve used for X amount of years and here’s some credit that you can use. Then I can remove the components of that bag and reuse them and send the Piñatex back to the source [to be reused or upcycled] and put it back into the circular economy.” Down the line, she’d love to introduce her own in-house resale platform that would make use of the numbering system on each bag as authentication. A learning curve for suppliers One of the biggest learning curves for Navaian has been working with suppliers to develop a product line that uses these new materials. She spent weeks tracking down an artisanal supplier in Italy who could work with on the development, eventually partnering up with Florence-based family-owned leather goods manufacturer Liopell, founded in 1993, which has produced for brands including Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga and Tod’s. It took six months to develop the Piñatex prototypes, and after a few sampling iterations, the final Mirum product is set to launch early next year. “We thought it would be interesting to combine the [artisanal] technique we use for leather goods with another material,” says Liopell senior project manager Vanessa Lucarini. “At the beginning, it was challenging and we were scared about this material because the leather needs to be painted.” Challenges included Piñatex’s requirement for a new type of reinforcement or backing; its spongy texture required many more layers of paint than usual; and that the material required extra ironing before production. “Now, if other brands ask us to work with a similar material we are prepared,” says Lucarini. Lucarini says Mirum has been “more difficult” than Piñatex: it’s harder for glue to stick to a rubber-based material, meaning the piping around the bag needs to be stitched rather than glued. NFW says the feedback from the testing that Marici has facilitated has been invaluable. “Whenever possible, we work with expert craftspeople to get their insights on how Mirum behaves and performs under certain treatments and conditions early in the process,” says NFW’s Baker. “This critical feedback as we go through these evaluations allows us to understand if in certain areas of a design we need a thinner quality, or if we need a fabric backing that offers more elongation to improve the performance.” Ease of production plays a large role in the scalability of next-gen leather alternatives. “The winners in the alternative materials space are going to be those brands who can work within the existing supply chain and whose core materials and innovations are not hampered by production methods,” says Baker. For Marici, the cost involved in testing these new materials is weighing. “Rendering and development is a big challenge and very costly for a small brand — if it’s going to take suppliers extra time, it can cost four or five times more to test [the materials], but after that they have the know-how,” Navaian says. A single sample can cost around £800, which adds up. More samples are required than usual for these materials, leaving the brand with a heap of samples in colourways that hadn’t worked out initially (the cognac colour took a while to perfect — it kept rubbing off the Piñatex), and piping around the bag stretched the material too much so the artisans had to find a way of constructing it without. Still, Navaian insists there’s a long-term benefit to investing in plant-based leathers. “I might make a bit less profit, but long-term, I know my customer is going to come back to me — and from a business point of view, every brand’s ideal situation is customer retention,” she says. “When I started my brand nobody wanted to pick it up because the [next-gen materials] were so new, but now it’s becoming so much more normalised. It’s exciting to be a small brand at the forefront of such a movement.” Key takeaway: Marici is ahead of many larger players with a fully plant-based product line. For a small brand, testing and sampling these new materials can be costly, but strong customer loyalty has led to consistent revenue growth. Next up, the brand is launching Mirum bags in the new year and seeking investors as it scales. Correction: Updated to reflect that Alante Capital has not closed its investment in Matereal yet. (15/12) Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com. More from this author: Are fashion’s buying practices really improving? Lanvin Group appoints new CEO How long should brands give a creative director to succeed?

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