Stony Creek Colors was started in 2012 to build a new future for natural colour, harnessing advancements in sustainable agriculture, crop development, and chemical and process engineering. Stony Creek Colors CEO Sarah Bellos speaks to Fibre2Fashion about dyeing with plant-based colour and how it can contribute to sustainable fashion.
From 2012 till date, what progress has Stony Creek Colors made in terms of business expansion and achievements?
Since our company's inception we have made strides in research and development that have led us to the launch of new product innovations, mechanised production systems, and significant gains in yield per indigo plant through breeding. We have completed successful capital raises to allow us to build out our owned and operated indigo extraction facility. We have developed a network of denim mill customers across the globe to bring Stony Creek’s plant-based indigo to pioneering denim brands.
Which brands & retailers are you currently associated with?
We have had a long-standing relationship with Levi’s and excitedly just announced a new pre-reduced natural indigo pilot with their team and Fashion for Good for the launch of our newest product innovation, IndiGold. Our dyes have also supported a number of recent and ongoing collections with Patagonia, Nudie, and Polo Ralph Lauren, to name a few.
How much are your natural colours sustainable compared to their chemical counterparts?
We know that the indigofera varieties that we plant have soil enriching properties that make them a naturally climate positive chemical. After completing a self-assessed life cycle assessment using GaBi Software by Sphera Solutions this year, we estimate that our natural indigo captures more than 10X the amount of CO2 eq that is emitted by synthetic indigo. We also know from a risk perspective that our plant-based indigo is completely, and naturally, free from aniline, a known carcinogenic compound present in synthetic indigo because it is an intermediate chemical required in the synthesis of indigo.
You have raised $9 million in Series B funding this year. How do you want to grow the company with this investment?
The Series B-1 and B-2 is allowing us to complete a geographic expansion that will transition our business operations to a year-round indigo production model. The funding allows us to double down on investments in plant-breeding and process improvement implementations that will ultimately decrease costs of production and increase yields per acre.
What difficulties do brands face when attempting to integrate plant-based dyes into their designs and how did Stony Creek solve this?
There are several topics to take into consideration for brands seeking to adopt natural colours.
First, adulteration in ‘natural’ dyes with a synthetic colour is prevalent. If brands are really seeking to adopt plant-based methods to reduce hazardous chemical risk, achieve an authentic colour, or promote renewable or regenerative supply chains, it’s important they find a lab to do testing. Stony Creek Colors chose to achieve the USDA (US Dept of Agriculture) BioPreferred certification. Their tests for bio-based carbon content validate the carbon was recently atmospheric CO2 and now has turned into the organic chemical. Any fossil fuel, petroleum derived carbon, for example, that is found in synthetic indigo, has a different isotopic carbon weight and this would be indicated in the test.
There is no single mode of action in dyeing with plant-based colour – a big change compared to the way synthetic dyes have broad categories like reactive, disperse or acid dyes that are comparably acting across the class and usable in a consistent way on similar fibre types. Our focus on plant-based indigo does allow us to replace synthetic indigo, but first we had to increase purity to become a drop-in replacement. Our newest product innovation ‘IndiGold’ will go even further to ease adoption of our plant-based indigo by offering the first commercial scale, pre-reduced liquid natural indigo dye.
Dye facilities starting to incorporate natural dyes may have to learn new processes, depending on the dye plant chosen. For Stony Creek Colors, we have focused on producing extracts that can be better standardised from batch to batch. We do this by blending from production lots to reach specific grades.
Tell us about your marketing strategies in current times when the world is gripped with the COVID-19 pandemic?
This past year we invested in updating many of our marketing channels, to include our company website, so that we could better communicate our story and demonstrate to potential partners how we can help them reach their sustainability goals. The COVID-19 pandemic has obviously impacted supply chains everywhere and we pride ourselves in offering a safe alternative for materials sourcing for brands. It has been fun this past year putting more emphasis on sharing the faces of our team members and farmers, and has allowed us to show how the plant-based colours of our future are good not just for the planet, but also for the workers involved in their production. The small handful of synthetic indigo manufacturing facilities globally would never be in a position to authentically share their production nor supply chain in this type of way and we believe it helps set us apart to welcome brands into our production world.
What do you see as some of the main problems regarding sustainable fashion today?
Access to sustainable innovations is scarce. As more and more fashion brands rightly try to improve their carbon footprint and decrease or eliminate use of hazardous chemistries, they are competing with one another to work with the same small group of renewable technologies. That’s why I think it’s so great to see forward-thinking brands investing in innovations they believe in, so they can help those companies grow to scale and be able to incorporate those advancements into their product assortments over the long term.
Where do you source the raw materials from? Is there any special cultivation technique followed for the natural dyes you make?
We run an in-house genetics and plant breeding programme with proprietary evaluations for screening plants to more rapidly improve crop populations. After plantings, our indigofera varieties are grown in partnership with family farms as a regenerative rotational crop. Our team harvests leaves from the fields and brings biomass to our factory for dye production.
Where does the manufacturing happen? What is the process involved in making the natural colours/dyes?
The manufacturing process takes place at our rural factory in Tennessee USA, near Nashville, TN. With water, dye is extracted from the leaves that have been harvested from partner farms. Once the dye has separated from the spent biomass (which is later composted), we move the liquid through our mechanised processes and add simply modifiers that adjust its pH balance. The dye ends at a filter press in a cake form and dried to create our paste or powder products.
Do you think there has been a rise in sustainable and conscious living post the pandemic?
The pandemic has helped shine a light on how interconnected everything and everyone really is. Perhaps that realisation has influenced peoples’ decision-making in how they spend their time or money in a more sustainable way. I hope it has!
What new inventions are you coming up with respect to your dyeing technology?
As a company we are focused on scaling plant-based indigo. We recently announced the upcoming commercial launch of our newest innovation, IndiGold, the world’s first pre-reduced natural indigo dye. IndiGold is the product of nearly two years of research and development. It will serve as a drop-in replacement for synthetic dyes at denim mills and will also be available as an easy-to-use dye kit for professional and at-home dyers. We have a few pilots we can’t wait to announce in the coming months. One recently announced project, organised by Fashion for Good, will be piloting this new technology in low water dyeing applications.
Which are your major markets application-wise and geographically?
Our primary market for dye application is denim. We have partnerships with denim mills and dye houses in Europe, South Asia, North America, and China, allowing us to support brands wherever their manufacturing needs are.
How do you see your market segment growing in the next 5-10 years?
We see the growth trends in plant-based and bio-based products, that have already penetrated cosmetics and food markets globally, increasing within the fashion industry, as the pioneering brands bringing these products to market gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. We see a viable path for plant-based indigo to lower costs of production and replace a sizable portion of the synthetic indigo with continued investment in innovation and scale up. Coaxing colour from plants, and doing so in an industrially relevant way, is such an incredible and beautiful process. We can’t wait to help conscious designers reach their colour targets and welcome more brands on this journey in the next decade.
Published on: 24/01/2022
DISCLAIMER: All views and opinions expressed in this column are solely of the interviewee, and they do not reflect in any way the opinion of Fibre2Fashion.com.
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