How a 'Reluctant Entrepreneur' Is Driving a More Sustainable Fashion Industry

Posted on April 10th, 2023.

Stacy Flynn's trailblazing technology makes old textile fibers new again -- and even better than they were before. Brands like Levi's and Zara are already on board.

Imagine a world where all the clothes already in existence could be recycled and remade into something new -- in perpetuity. With Stacy Flynn's ambitions, that world may very well become a reality.

Flynn is the 49-year-old co-founder and CEO of Evrnu, a Seattle-based textile innovation company that aims to make top-performing fibers out of textile waste. The company's first engineered material is NuCycl lyocell, a regenerative fiber that is made entirely out of cotton waste.

Unlike recycled cotton, NuCycl lyocell does not require cotton waste to be blended with virgin cotton -- and the resulting material is actually stronger and more durable than virgin cotton or a recycled alternative. With a bit of molecular engineering, Flynn and her co-founder Christo Stanev have achieved what many in their field once considered impossible: They made something entirely new out of something entirely old. And with a commercial production facility set to open in 2024, $31 million in funding to date, and $330 million in purchase commitments, Evrnu is on the precipice of sparking an industry overhaul.

But this isn't the future Flynn planned. The founder considers herself a "reluctant entrepreneur" who happily spent most of her career innovating inside corporate giants. She started her career in fabric sourcing and testing at DuPont, and later went to Target and then the clothing brand Eddie Bauer. Then came a bit of burnout. "After a period of time, I wasn't working at my normal capacity," she says. "I really wanted to do something that was more aligned with my personality." So, in 2010, she took a role as the director of sustainable development at Rethink Fabrics, a material company developing apparel from plastic waste. And that's when things changed.

That year, Flynn traveled through China for a month, looking for small-run production facilities. For the first time, she visited factories as an employee of a startup, not a well-known company -- and that's when she saw the reality of her industry's impact on the environment.

At one facility, smog was so dense that she struggled to see around her; even inside a building, a cloud hung around employees' heads. "On that trip, I began adding up how many billions of yards of fabric I'd personally made up to that point in my career, and all of a sudden, I was linked to the cause of a problem," she says. "I thought, 'I'll be damned if this is how my story ends.' "

Changing the way the $1.53 trillion global apparel market operates, however, is easier said than done, and Flynn says she was "lucky to have naiveté" on her side. Still, she knew that there wasn't yet a solution that could effectively solve the problem she had seen. There was potential to turn recycled PET plastic -- derived from plastic bottles -- into textile fiber. But that approach has its drawbacks, namely that, when washed, the textile leads to the accumulation of microplastics in waterways. Flynn thought there had to be better alternatives, but felt like she had more to learn. So she enrolled in Pinochet University to get an MBA in sustainable systems.

That's where the puzzle pieces for a solution of Flynn's making came together -- and where professors urged Flynn to start thinking of herself as an entrepreneur, not an intrapreneur, owing to the scale of her idea. "Worldwide, we throw away about 50 million tons of garment waste each year. And 90 percent of all clothing is made from two fibers -- polyester and cotton," she says. "I thought if there was a way to take that waste and turn it into new fiber, we could grow our industry at a fraction of its existing environmental impact."

All the engineers she approached told her it couldn't be done -- those fibers could be recycled a finite number of times, but they couldn't be turned into something new. But when she met Stanev, a textile engineer, he disagreed. Maybe it was possible, he said.

Prototyping the technology had its challenges. Old clothes contain all kinds of contaminants, such as dyes and aluminum from deodorant. Some contain polyester, even when their labels say otherwise. Those contaminants have to be removed with the help of infrared scanning technology before engineers can get to the real process: depolymerizing the cotton cellulose and reforming those polymers into new fibers. Or, to put it simply: breaking it down and putting it all back together again as something new.

It was a complex process to figure out, but not an impossible one. Flynn took one of her old college T-shirts, and along with Stanev, turned it from a solid to a liquid and back to a solid. With the help of one of her grad school professors, they officially launched Evrnu in 2014. By 2016, they hit their first milestone: Creating the first prototype jeans made with regenerated post-consumer cotton waste, in partnership with Levi's. A research partnership with Target followed that same year.

"I think the biggest reason this hadn't been done before was that the world wasn't ready for it," Flynn says, noting that the increasing threat of global warming has sparked innovation in recent years. "I also didn't fully appreciate how set in its ways my industry is. [Apparel brands] have delicate business models, and disruption is not welcomed. So we realized early on that if we were going to gain support from brands and retailers, we had to find ways to make their business better or more predictable or easier or safer."

That was the key with NuCycl lyocell, Evrnu's first commercialized material made with its patented regenerative fiber technology. It is stronger than polyester, biodegradable, water-efficient to produce, and can be recycled again and again without losing its quality. "This is not downcycling," says Kyle Adkins, a partner at FullCycle, a climate change-focused investment firm, which has invested in Evrnu. "It's not just reusing what we already have. It's making a better product than what we started with."

Since 2019, retail brands Stella McCartney, Adidas, Carlos Campos, and Zara have released products made with NuCycl lyocell. Most recently, in February, the sustainability-focused apparel brand Pangaia -- whose founding team invested in Evrnu through the investment fund Future Tech Lab -- released a denim jacket made entirely from the material. For Flynn, it's a full-circle moment, as she reflects back on her first denim prototype for Levi's. For Amanda Parkes, chief innovation officer at Pangaia, it's a satisfying continuation of a growing partnership -- not to mention a potential tide shift for the apparel industry.

That's because Evrnu is positioned to scale, she says: The company's technology is well-suited to "piggyback" on existing manufacturing infrastructure, which means it can be integrated into a supply chain cost-effectively.

To that end, Evrnu is currently building out its first commercial production facility at the site of an old textile mill in Spartanburg, South Carolina, which will open in its first phase in 2024 and be fully operational by 2025. There, Evrnu will turn cotton waste into both fiber and pulp. Although Evrnu has some production partners overseas, the company's decision to open a domestic production facility was an intentional one. "The U.S. generates a significant amount of textile waste," says Adkins. "So why not have the production capacity in the U.S. that can handle that waste?"

As the company perfects its blend-separation technologies, which will enable it to recycle cotton-poly and stretch blends in addition to cotton waste, it will increase the types of garment waste it can turn into new fiber. Ultimately, Flynn says that NuCycl has the potential to replace 90 percent of fibers currently used in the textile industry, including cotton, nylon, polyester, and man-made cellulosic fibers such as rayon.

That's almost an incomprehensible prospect. But Flynn is eager to see how her business can chart new territory, especially as brands increasingly sign on for partnerships: The company currently has 15 active brands in its pipeline and is in conversation with 80 to 90 more. "You only need 15 to 18 percent of the market to tip the entire market," she says. "So we're looking for the early adopters -- those who are willing to take a chance."

The market has already shifted since Flynn first launched her company. "Back in 2015, there was very little conversation about garment recycling sustainability. When we started fundraising, everyone was like, 'What is fiber? Is it a women's issue?'" Now, she says, "it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when it gets scaled."

Today, that's her main goal: figuring out which levers have to be pulled and when, as the problem of textiles' environmental impact shows no sign of slowing down. Unchecked, annual carbon emissions from the apparel industry are expected to grow nearly 55 percent between 2019 and 2023, according to a 2021 report by the research nonprofit World Resources Institute.

"I'm really looking at, how do we scale this at a pace that's fast enough and fierce enough to go after the problem we have?" says Flynn. "Building something like this from scratch is not for the weak of heart. My business can only grow as much as I am willing to grow."

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