I arrived at Ambercycle’s HQ in the fashion district of Los Angeles in a Polestar EV, it was the cheapest car Hertz had, my mind was already thinking about carbon emissions as a result. As I grabbed my camera bag the sun beat down on a long stretch of historic textile manufacturing buildings that used to lead production of the world’s garments in the fashion district’s heyday. In one of these nondescript buildings lies the future of material production, garment design, and the fashion industry at large.

I learned a lot about the fashion industry when I was applying to a job awhile back that worked in sustainable fashion (maybe we’ll feature that company soon…) and if you’re unaware of the problem it is SHOCKING how pollutive and harmful the fashion industry is for something as benign as fashion.

Yes, obviously we all wear clothes and have lots of them, but for the most part they aren’t as technically complex as semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and smartphones are. In my mind, the insane pollution that the industry produces comes from (a) fast fashion (b) a lack of consumer reusability in old apparel and (c) that there’s no way to truly, on a molecular level, recycling clothing.

Until now.

Let’s talk about polyester

Ambercycle, cofounded by Shay Sethi and Moby Ahmed 8 years ago, has invented a novel way to take end-of-life garments, break them down on a molecular level, and create a net-new material that can be used for garment design.

Okay, big whoop?

Well, the first material they’ve successfully done this for is polyester, an advanced material that is the most commonly used material in fashion which 52% of all garments in the world are made of.

Polyester also, just maybe, isn’t super great for the environment.

Polyester is made from petroleum, oil. It is one of the biggest polluting materials in the fashion industry and it’s completely, impossibly, un-recyclable.

Until now.

Now, you can take end-of-life polyester, throw it in the “Ambercycler,” and less than an hour later get back fully recycled, color agnostic “Cycora,” which is Ambercycle’s super cool name for their fully circular polyester material.

To understand just how big of an impact swapping out new polyester production with Cycora might be for the environment, I’m going to give you some numbers to let you do some math.

• There are 8 billion people in the world who for the most part all have multiple sets of clothes

• Over 52% of all clothes use polyester

• 2 square meters of polyester fabric leaves a carbon footprint of 6.4kg CO2e or is equivalent to 32.5km of driving

Global polyester production contributes 282 billion kg of CO2 per year, yikes.

So, by recycling this material and no longer needing to manufacture it form petroleum, Ambercycle might become one of the most effective climate change companies in the world.

Starting from no idea to a industry revolutionizing product

Shay and Moby were roommates at UC Davis, funny enough I was born in Davis and lived there until very recently! Therein Shay, Moby, and I have all experienced the same heavenly bliss of an Alibaba burrito in the beautiful college town that is Davis, CA. Anyways, they were both biology & chemistry “nerds” as described by Moby in the episode, they had some great professors that were urging them to go and change the world but they didn’t know how they should do so.

So, in their senior year of college, they sat down with their laptops and dove deep into technology that could change the world. That’s when they realized how horrible the fashion recycling loop, or lack thereof, was.

With small amounts of grant money they locked themselves in a lab for a few months to try and create a way to recycle polyester from a molecular level. They did it, duh, and now they’re making ~15,000 T-shirt’s worth of Cycora per day, all from their R&D machine!

It’s all about the brand

Beyond the bio and chemistry science, Shay and Moby believe that the success of Ambercycle lies within the brand and it’s positioning to consumers.

“The technology only takes you so far, you have to tell a story,” Shay explained on a prewriting call to me. Also in that call were Manasi Dev S. and Nava Esmailizadeh, Head of Communications and Head of Brand for Ambercycle, who throughout the production of this episode were laser focused on ensuring Ambercycle’s story was properly represented through the lens of a third party, in this case a dude with his camera.

Beyond the episode, the Ambercycle team has been doing a pretty bang up job of branding and storytelling. They’ve done collaborations with massive brands like Saucony and H&M and their Cycora material has graced the runways of Paris fashion week across various collections. On a nerdy content level too, their Instagram is fantastic. A mix of beautiful images, humane connection pieces with the Ambercycle team, and features of designers that are using Cycora.

The Ambercycle team’s passion for changing the world and dedication to building a future were our clothing is as circular as other natural processes is clear and motivating, they’re a force of nature.

As they scale from their current manufacturing abilities to producing over ~250,000 T-shirt’s worth of garment a day it’s clear that the world is beginning to notice Ambercycle right as their exponential curve is beginning to lead away from 0.

A big thank you to Shay and Moby for doing this episode and to Nava and Manasi for working with me to tell the story of Ambercycle.

Keep on building the future,

— Jason