Luke Henning has staked his career on confronting the elements of the apparel industry that he believes have made it increasingly wasteful and unsustainable. He says that as the industry has focused increasingly on producing more items in more colors and styles, it has centered quantity and consumer choice over quality and craftsmanship.
“We’ve been taught that clothes should be cheap, and so to keep the price down, we’ve got to turn to more and more synthetics,” he tells HGI. “And then we want to make them act like some of the materials that we’re used to. So we’ve got to find chemical treatments to make them work,” he explains. That has led the industry to increasingly rely on chemicals, often without thorough testing for human health or ecological impacts, while making the industry more reliant on the fossil fuel industry. For that to change, fashion must get behind new, sustainable fibers.
For over a decade, Henning has focused his career on solutions to these problems. As chief business officer at Circ, the textile recycling startup, he led external collaborations with brand and supply chain partners, and with investors. He stepped away from that role this summer to join BioFluff as its interim CEO. BioFluff is a nearly 4-year-old startup that is removing both animals and oil — and their associated ethical and environmental impacts — from fur production. BioFluff’s faux fur uses plants and bioscience to create product lines like Savian, a luxury product introduced with Stella McCarthy in 2023, as well as another bio-based faux fur aimed at mass-market adaptation.
Having worked both at the end and now the beginning of the apparel value chain, Henning has likely learned enough about introducing a new fiber product into the market to teach a master’s class on the topic. HGI sat down with the entrepreneur to hear about some of his key takeaways.
The following interview was edited for length and clarity.
HGI: What’s the value of working with brands when introducing a new fiber to the marketplace?
Luke Henning: So when you’re talking about introducing new fibers, the reason the brands play such a pivotal role is because they have historically had the majority of power in the supply chain. They pull things through the supply chain. If they’re insisting on a fiber, the supply chain will pull it through.
Your near customer — which is the supply chain — is actually who buys the product because often they’re buying it and then further down the line, the brand pays. That has been the predominant model for a lot of innovation and for new fiber development.
I think there [are] shifting power dynamics in the supply chain. I do see some of the suppliers starting to look at this more from their own ways of differentiating themselves and growing market share. So I think we’re going to see a bit more fiber development investing in new materials happening further back in the supply chain without necessarily having the brands involved.
Where the brands play a critical role is if there are premiums, then the supply chain wants that commitment from brands, and there are almost certainly going to be premiums in the beginning because these fibers have not yet optimized. They need time to climb down the cost curve, which can sometimes happen very rapidly. But polyester has had 80, 90, a hundred years to optimize. Nylon, or the manmade cellulosics like viscose, they’ve had decades to get more and more and more efficient. Polyester wasn’t made the way it’s made now 30 years ago.
HGI: What are the biggest time lags, and how can the industry get better at accelerating the introduction of new textiles to market?
LH: The biggest barrier to working with brands is that brands often don’t understand what drives startups, and startups don’t understand what drives brands, and so there’s a disconnect there in terms of expectations. For startups, time is the absolute enemy because you are burning cash. Brands naturally are more risk-averse and are going to take more time to implement things and consider them, so it depends.
And “brands” is a generic term, but there are radical differences between brands and how they work. So I think it’s difficult to lump them all into one category. There are brands that are much more aggressive, much more forward-leaning, much more tech-forward. There are ones who are much more cautious. So it is not quite as simple as “brands.”
HGI: Have you seen any strategies that work in terms of helping these two very different animals — brands and startups — understand each other better?
LH: It’s about finding the brands for which you as a startup are a strategic imperative. Are you supplying something that’s strategic to them, or are you a nice-to-have? Because if you can find people who are aligned from that perspective, then both sides will commit resources, energy, and effort to a partnership.
HGI: What about pilots? Are there any examples of a pilot where you saw the elements of introducing a new fiber come together quickly? Or very slowly? What lessons could one take from those examples in terms of product introduction?
LH: Different brands move at very different speeds, and that goes to both their products that they offer and their risk appetite and what the brand itself is known for. So I’ve been involved in pilots where the speed is incredibly fast, radically fast, where it’s go, go, go, and they can turn things around really quickly. I’ve had other partnerships that have taken years to go from concept to product, and often that’s because of very strict rigor around testing or building the buy-in internally or technical tweaks and challenges that you didn’t know were going to be there.
[Challenges] may come from a supply chain partner where it’s like, “Okay, you can produce this, but I need to be able to do X. Can you make it do X? Otherwise this product won’t work ….”
So I think there’s no hard and fast rule when it comes to pilots. For startups, it’s always ideal for it to go faster. For brands, they need to protect their brand value. So how does it align well enough that they’re willing to put additional risk on there?
“A lot of early-stage startups see the top-line revenue of big brands and think they’re made of money. But remember these get broken down into highly segregated budgets. So understanding how money flows or how companies work with budgets is pretty key.” —Luke Henning, BioFluff
HGI: Would you say a brand might be somewhat incentivized by just staking claim to an innovation that they see as promising, and that their competitors also see as promising?
LH: There is a bit of that. There are brands that are very well known for jumping in and trialing things and doing innovative things like Stella McCartney, who’s trialed a lot of [new fibers]. Ganni trialed a lot of these things, but there’s also—you’d be surprised groups like Inditex and Zara are doing a lot of [trials]. Even H&M. So I mean different brands have a reputation for being more or less aggressive in rolling out things.
HGI: How would you advise a startup on how to approach brands for pilots?
LH: A lot of startups that I deal with, early-stage ones, see the top-line revenue of big brands and think they’re made of money, and so they’re always like, “Oh, they should just pay for X.” But remember these get broken down into highly segregated budgets. So understanding how money flows or how companies work with budgets is pretty key.
The number one thing, though, that I tend to talk to startups about is: find an aligned brand that’s interested in what you do and [who] you could be strategic for.
HGI: How about the process of finding investment partners to support the introduction of new fibers?
LH: There is an entire ecosystem of investment funds out there. There are ones that specialize in foundational science. A lot of that [money is in the form of] grant funding.
Then there are Pre-Seed [investment] companies, and then there are ones who invest in Seed-stage, and there are ones who invest in Series A, Series B, Series C. So you’ve got to understand who plays in your space.
- Who has capital to deploy? Because remember they have a life cycle as well and a deployment of capital cycle.
- Who fits your stage of investment? And whose investment thesis do you fit in?
- Who has raised money from investors themselves to invest in the space that you’re in?
If you don’t sit in [an investor’s] thesis by geography, by industry, by whatever, they can’t invest in you. It’s outside of their mandate. If you are a Series B company going to a Seed-stage company, they don’t write checks that big. If you’re a Seed-stage company and you’re going to a Series B company, they don’t write checks that small.
I had a conversation today with a firm. I realized we were unlikely to be a fit. Their minimum check size is 10 times what BioFluff is looking for. So we’re never going to get them to invest 10% of their normal investment size in BioFluff. But it’s good to have conversations because often investors know other investors. So you’ve got to understand the ecosystem and where people play.
HGI: The types of outcomes that investors are seeking … they differ across that spectrum of investors as well, right?
LH: Correct. Because at each stage, people are looking for different proof points. People are looking at different risk appetites. The further along you go, the more certainty you need to have.
HGI: When it comes to new fibers, lowering greenhouse gas emissions, relative to incumbent fibers, is a core objective. That’s clearly the case for BioFluff, which introduced Savion at the COP 28 in Dubai, two years ago. But 2025 has seen the US re-withdraw from the Paris Agreement, and federal support for decarbonization has declined significantly. So what role is climate playing right now, both for BioFluff, specifically, and across the industry?
LH: It’s people understanding that climate and sustainability are an opportunity, that these industries are transforming, and there’s actually value to be gained in transforming these industries and these initiatives. The cost is not free. I’m based in Florida. Ask anyone who’s based in Florida what their insurance is doing at the moment.
And you can argue causes, but the fact is we are seeing more damage and more risk, and that’s coming with a direct financial cost.
For BioFluff specifically, climate is part of the story, but it’s a much broader story, about trying to remove some of the harmful things around animal farming for fur.
A lot of these things that we look at from a sustainability perspective, we think about the climate aspects, but we’ve got to also think about the human health aspects. If you are constantly around a chemical soup, you absorb those chemicals, and the largest organ in your body is your skin. And so we clothe ourselves in chemicals. Often [these chemicals] are not quality-tested. Maybe they’re sample-tested, but do the samples match the production run? I don’t know. When you have people run tests like this, then you sometimes find that there are loads of chemicals that are supposedly banned and shouldn’t be in there. It’s what you see in Alden Wicker’s book To Dye For. What you’re seeing in Susan Cameron’s documentary Let Them Be Naked. We’re starting to realize the human health concerns that go with a lot of the things that we previously looked at from a climate lens, and so the narrative and the conversation is changing, but these are kind of interlinked.
There is a huge movement from a lot of the people who are not necessarily focused on sustainability or climate change in the US. There are a lot of people who are focused on the health aspects of this, and you’ve got to find good ways of crossing the aisle effectively and talking to both sides about why this is generally a good thing.
For BioFluff, there’s a clear value proposition. Climate is part of it, and we see that as very positively being supported in Europe where a lot of our clients are.
