Danish fashion retailer Bestseller invests in sustainable start-ups

Danish fashion group Bestseller has announced its investment plans into three start-up companies, all of which, according to the company, have “huge potential to revolutionize the fashion sector.” These start-ups include Circular Systems, Nature Coatings, and Evrnu.

It comes a month after the company supported Infinited Fiber Company‘s most recent investment round, in which the company secured €30 million (US$35.6 million) to help scale its fiber technology.

Circular Systems is a material science company. Their circular and regenerative technologies offer comprehensive solutions for converting trash into useful fiber, yarn, and textiles for the fashion sector. Agraloop BioFibre (leftovers from food & medicine crops made into fibers), Texloop Recycling (made from textile waste), and Orbital Hybrid Yarn (natural-fiber-rich performance with organic and recycled fibers) are some of the fibers and materials that the company has manufactured.

Nature Coatings transforms wood waste into high-performance black pigments. Nature Coatings claims that by utilizing their pigment, millions of tonnes of CO2 are avoided from entering the atmosphere each year. The wood waste is supplied from FSC-certified sustainable forests. The production process at Nature Coatings is a closed-loop and circular system.

Evrnu is a textile innovation firm that has developed NuCycl, a new type of engineered fabric. Evrnu’s technology allows for the creation of completely new items from waste garments, not just once, but numerous times. NuCycl can transform even the hardest sort of textile waste – 100% post-consumer – into new materials.

Camilla Skjønning Jørgensen, the sustainable materials and innovation manager at Bestseller, said that major brands should invest in startups like Circular Systems, Evrnu, and Nature Coatings. The three start-ups have each sparked the curiosity of key industry stakeholders, but mainstreaming their respective ‘sustainable’ technologies will need considerable investment. Brands and innovators are inherently interdependent. Bestseller is still looking at making investments in this area.

This investment is made by Bestseller’s investment arm for sustainable fashion, Invest FWD, which is linked to Bestseller’s innovation platform Fashion FWD Lab, which was launched at the end of 2020.

Jeppe Bredahl, investment manager at Invest FWD, said that all of these technologies have the potential to create transformation in the fashion sector. They think that the changes required in the fashion sector necessitate strategic assistance in order for ideas to survive and grow commercially. With Invest FWD, they can combine access to money with a brand perspective, speeding good outcomes for innovators and the larger industry on the most pressing sustainability challenges that affect the whole fashion life cycle.