PARIS – Biomaterial company Gozen, which is behind the Lunaform material, has opened the doors to its new 40,000-square-foot production facility in Turkey.
The company collaborated with Balenciaga on its sellout Lunaform Maxi Bathrobe Coat for the spring 2024 collection. The company also has a new yet-to-be-revealed collaboration with another luxury brand, which will debut in March.
Located in central Istanbul, the facility can produce 150,000 square feet of its grown-cellulose material, and will scale up to a capacity of 1 million square feet in 2026. That capacity can translate into about 40,000 garments when it hits full speed.
Gozen doesn’t use the term “alternative leather,” and is careful to distinguish Lunaform from other products coming to market.
“We are not mimicking leather. This is stand-alone material,” said founder and chief executive officer Ece Gozen. “From one single source, we can create infinite possibilities.”
Lunaform is grown from micronutrients and takes about a week to produce each sheet. It can be grown in different thicknesses and colors, depending on brand needs, and does not need third-party tanning.
Through Gozen’s trademarked BioCraft fermentation process, the material grows in a lattice-like structure that has a tensile strength greater than that of animal skin, but still supple enough to be draped in the design process.
Lunaform’s new Indigo version.
At Première Vision, Gozen officially launched three new versions of the Lunaform range: Origins, which has a unique fibrous pattern developed during the growing process, similar to grain in animal leather; Transparent, the first see-through nanocellulose in a variety of colors including bright pink; and Indigo, which uses natural indigo dye to create a denim look in dark and light range. It continues to produce the matte black made famous by the Balenciaga coat.
The Indigo range can be used in place of traditional denim, and each piece has its own “wash.” A pant version was on display at Première Vision.
Gozen said the short growth time can speed production times for brands. She also noted that the factory’s position in Istanbul’s textile and leather district makes it uniquely accessible to European brands, providing a more reactive supply chain.
Scaling up will help in cost reduction, to bring the material down to a more affordable price point and make it accessible to a wider range of brands, particularly those that already work with suppliers in Turkey.
“Even if they like the material, price will be always a red flag [for brands]. So we developed with that strategy in mind. We are really close to the supply chain in Turkey, and we are making great cost reductions [and will] work hard on cost reductions in our facility based on customer demands,” she said. The company also has an office in San Francisco.
“The facility in Turkey provides a great advantage,” she said. “It gives customers more confidence. They are already visiting Turkey where they have a lot of their supply chain and work with local factories.”
Ece Gozen
Courtesy Gozen
Gozen trained as a designer and received Vogue Italia’s “Most Visionary Designer” award under her own womenswear label in 2012, before founding the eponymous biomaterials company in an effort to find a solution to polluting textiles and waste.
She approaches the material from a design perspective.
“We do not want to create only the material, but to create a real solution for the brands to work with. They can also create their own solutions. It’s a blank canvas that they can change — texture, thickness — according to their own perspective of what they want to create,” she said.
She has brought on a team ranging from scientists to designers.
Gozen believes the next-gen material space is currently being limited by language. “The industry problem right now is that we’re trying to categorize [materials] to replace the animal,” she said, citing “vegan leather” as one example of linguistic folly.
Instead it should be a “hopeful futurism” communicated to the consumer. “It’s not just about brands’ responsibility,” she said. “We should also communicate to the end user to really create desire.”
The properties of next-gen materials are an opportunity to create a new aesthetic, and the Istanbul facility also has its own in-house creative studio dedicated to working with design teams at the luxury and premium brand level from a product development perspective.
Inside the new production facility in Istanbul.
Hong Kong-based investor Happiness Capital is helping the company break into the Asian market, organizing introductions, particularly in Japan, Gozen said. Happiness Capital also hosted its annual “Family Day” event in Bhutan last September, and gifted one of the Balenciaga coats to the country’s King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck at a private dinner dinner, which Gozen attended. She was able to talk to the king about the material.
“It was really a game-changing moment for me,” she said, of realizing the potential scope and impact of a new material.
Happiness Capital led a $3.3 million seed funding round in 2023 joined by Accelr8, Astor Management and climate tech focused fund SOSV to open the new facility and scale the material.
“We are not working based on dreams,” she said. “We are working based on the real data to have a strategy that is perfectly aligned, because we cannot miss this train.”
Gozen will also attend Lineapelle in Milan from Feb. 25 to 27, where Lunaform will be on display among the leather section.
