Team:LINKS China/Entrepreneurship
Introduction of NeoLeather
Is there a solution for customers to enjoy leather products that fulfill their requirements without harming the environment? My answer to this question is yes! Here comes our product, bacterial cellulose membrane named NeoLeather, acting as a perfect substitution of natural and artificial leather. We engineer the cellulose membrane from a co-culture of brewer’s yeast and Kombucha while using spider silk to soften this membrane for better comfort. With E. Coli, we produce natural pigments that dye the membrane. Furthermore, through utilizing acetate during yeast fermentation, a fruit fragrance can be created. NeoLeather can then be further manufactured into clothes, bags, and other fashionable products.
Big Problem
Traditional leather is harvested through agonizing and disturbing methods from animals unethically: electrocuted, beaten, and some even skinned alive. Statistics show that more than 2.29 billion cows, calves, pigs, goats, and buffaloes are killed in the world each year for their skin. Yet, the dealing processes of animal leather release harmful chemicals that are irreversible to the environment. Formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde, phenols... And most obviously, carbon dioxide. The carbon footprint of finished leather is about 15,190 kg CO2, equivalent per 100 m2 for shoe uppers. Besides the pollution, these leather fail to meet some of the customers' needs. The animal skin prices rise year after year, making it incredibly unaffordable for an ordinary customer. Synthetic leather, made of PVC, is not breathable, leading to the customers' discomfort. Vegan leather tears easily, greatly dissatisfying the needs of a majority of buyers.
Traditional leather manufacturing method. In traditional leather, we use large animals such as cattle (A) to prepare animal leather (B). The artificial leather (C) is a mixture of fabric and plastic (D).
Our technologies
This is a flowchart of how the aromatic and colorful cellulose membrane is produced. Firstly, we have isolated the most effective strain of Komagataeibacter from commercially available kombucha and preserved it. We co-culture the Komagataeibacter with S. cerevisiae, a type of yeast, and put them into NeoLeathic Tanner, our self-developed cultivation and drying equipment. The bacterial cellulose membrane will then be formed in a controlled environment with optimum temperature and status. As a byproduct of yeast fermentation, scent molecules can be created, making the unique fragrance. After that, we mix the BCM with spider silk protein, made by E.coli BL21, and natural pigment dyes produced from E.coli DH5a. We will get a piece of colored and soft leather after four to six days. NeoLeathic Tanner then automatically dries the membrane and makes it into leather available for creating products. This process is integrated, and we can achieve mass production.
The characteristics of NeoLeather
We have conducted tests to see the performance of NeoLeather in softness and strength.
We compared the softness of BCM mixed with different amounts of 2Rep and CBM3-2Rep-CBM3 (0, 0.5, 1.5, and 3.4mg). Both comparisons showed around 40% increase between raw BCM and BCM with 3.4mg of protein.
For strength, like what we have done for softness, we compared the maximal force that can be applied on raw BCM, and BCM with different amount of protein. We noticed a significant increase in physical properties after adding 3.4mg or more of spider silk.When added 5mg spider silk protein in BCM, the maximal force showed a 100% increase.
Therefore, by adding spider silk protein, the physical characteristics of BCM can be greatly improved. This demonstrates the viability of a spider silk BCM composite material to be used as a leather substitute.
SWOT Analysis
S: Our products are environmentally friendly and will not harm nature compared to the traditional leather industry. Lower cost than animal leather, but in performance like leather When optimized production: by-products can achieve some properties such as fragrance High production efficiency: can realize the integration of fully automatic aseptic production and bacteria cultivation and drying Natural pigment dyeing, not easy to fade No peculiar smell, can even produce fragrance Degradable
W: Relatively higher cost than artificial leather (plastic) Using natural pigments, it has a special dyeing method compared with traditional leather There are many processes and high labor costs, and the purification of proteins requires special processes
O: Due to policy support and changes in consumer attitudes, we are at the best time to promote environmentally friendly materials
T: There will still be some consumers who do not accept genetically modified products. Exclusion from peers (strong competition exists). Because of the special process and production method, it is not compatible with the old system
Specific Reseach on Target Customers
Summary:
As we formed a detailed entrepreneurship plan, we started to evaluate the potential of our product in the leather market. We wondered whether consumers will show interest to our leather product or not, so we created a questionnaire to survey potential consumers of leather products online to better understand the association between different types of consumers and leather with different characteristics. We wrote questions about factors which might affect the choice of consumers on leather products and basic information of respondents, such as their age, income and gender etc. By sending out this questionnaire, we learned that the consumers of leather product could be at any age and any gender, which means that the size leather market could continually grow and we have a great opportunity to squeeze in the market. Additionally, the consumer’s income does affect their purchases on leather products since consumers with higher income have larger possibility to buy leather products. This motivated us to lower the cost production of our leather so that more people are able acquire high quality leathers. Hence, by co-culturing Komagataeibacter rhaeticus with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, we successfully lowered the cost of production as we only need to feed bacteria to produce leather for us.
Question analysis
1. What is your material preference? Respondents from different ages all show the highest percentage at the cotton and plant fibers choice as their favorite material, which is about 60% from each age group. The material that has the second highest percentage in preference is degradable biosynthetic leather, roughly 30% to 50%. Respondents with different ages prefer the least at the faux/artificial leather material.
2. What are the characteristics of leather products that you care most about? Over 200 respondents who chose cotton fiber as their favorite material also chose appearance and level of comfort as the characteristic they care most about when purchase leather products. About 61 respondents chose biodegradable material also chose appearance, and 30 respondents chose brands. Respondents chose animals products as their favorite material care the least about environmental harm and the service life of leather products.
3. To what extend do you know about the material wastes of traditional leather production? 28.81% rate their level of understanding the traditional leather production as 1, which is the highest percentage among all. Respondents who rated 2 and 3 are 12.88 and 18.64 respectively. Only 3.05% respondents self-evaluated as 9 or 10 which means that they almost completely know the process and wastes produced in the traditional leather production.
Analysis of data:
Gender is not associated with leather choice since there is not enough statistical evidence to prove that. Respondents in different age groups illustrate that age is not correlated with price they can accept, but the disposable income is more positively correlated with accepted price for leather product. Answers from respondents also demonstrate that age has nothing to do with material preference since no matter what age group they are in, material choice with the highest percentage in each group is still cotton fibers. Respondents who chose cotton and flax fibers/degradable biosynthesized leather care most about the appearance and comfort level of leather products. In contrast, respondents who chose animal leather and PVC leather emphasize most about the brand and appearance. Over 88% respondents consider sustainability and environ-mental harm as the most important characteristic of biosynthesized leather products, and 60.34% expect the biosynthesized leather has the same texture as traditional leather. Even though most respondents have limited knowledge in the harm caused by traditional leather production, they still choose leather material based on what environmental perspective.
What we learned:
Since over 50% respondents actually care about the environmental damage caused by leather production, our product marketing could be mainly about green marketing to attract consumers attention on our biodegradable leather. The most attractive characteristics of traditional leather is their texture, therefore we could improve the texture of our leather by adding spider silk protein to improve the softness of leather.
Some big brands have demand for vegan leather, and merchants will pay attention to environmental protection
Cost&Funding
Cost
The cost of raw materials
Leather production requirements: The tea cost is 50 yuan (20L), and the whole process is cultivated in self-developed equipment. Can produce a cellulose film the size of a sheepskin. Leather production time: 10-20 days.
Co-cultivate Cost
LINKS self-developed cultivation and drying processing equipment guarantees the automatic production of BCM. Input equipment cost: 5000 yuan. Training time cost: 10 days. Medium consumption: 10L YPS. Among them, YPS can be replaced by tea and sucrose. Cleaning reagents: glycerin, alcohol, defoamer, water, the cleaning cost is less than 5 yuan.
Spider silk Production Cost
Input equipment cost: RMB 400 ultrafiltration concentration tube (can be used repeatedly 5 times), RMB 2000 his-tag resin (can be used repeatedly 10 times). Time investment cost: 5 days. The medium consumes 20L LB. The cost of other purification reagents is less than RMB 50. Yield: 2500mg of spider silk protein, which can be mixed with 5000 cm2 of artificial leather. Leather post-processing requirements: manual cleaning or cleaning in self-developed equipment. The cost of cleaning materials is less than RMB 50.
Labor cost
Need to master the special process of protein purification, so the labor cost is relatively high at present
Funding
The money will be used for further research and development to improve performance and reduce the cost of spider silk production, and to form a complete production chain for the design and optimization of large-scale production.
At the beginning of the project, we need to raise 1 million US dollars in funding. These funds are used for research and development and market expansion. First, we will protect our ideas through patents. After that, we will use 500,000 funds to develop protein production and mixing processes, with the goal of reducing the cost of protein purification by 5-10 times. 300,000 are used for the recruitment of talents, and we need the support of talents in fermentation and protein engineering. 200,000 will be used for market operating expenses. We will first contact museums and art exhibitions, and find suitable fashion brand companies to cooperate.
Business Plan
Introduction
We decided to use business to business marketing strategy at first to let the market know our existence, to appreciate our value, and to convert them into common customers.
Potential constomer overview
We also talked with designers and CEOs of EEKA fashion (a fashion apparel group with brand culture concept, R&D and design center, marketing service system, logistics distribution and network management system), and they clearly said as long as the quality of the product passes the test, they are very interested in using our products.
BUSINESS PLAN IN DETAIL: PRODUCTS DEVELOP PLAN
1.The current product is still in the experimental phase, and the short-term strategy is as follows: Apply for related patents for our products and designs, trademark registration patents, and get legal protection.
2.Optimize products, increase production and sales
3.Give trial products to relevant companies that are interested in collaborating so that more input can be gathered and the product can be steadily updated.
Subsequently we plan to contact other experts and factories for technical support and contact other companies, organizations or investors for financial support so that we can study a complete large-scale production process. With a mature production model, we will continue to contract with the company to apply our products to different products, safeguarding the legal interests of both parties.
MARKETING PLAN
1.Produce short videos for distribution on major video and social networking sites to disseminate synthetic biology and information about our goods.
2.Find large domestic and foreign environmentally conscious manufacturers (appeals) to use patents and other resources to attract partners, and use their channels for production. Negotiate long term testing contracts with specific companies to improve and expand probable future product paths and new development trends. To widen consumers' scope and meet more consumer demand, conduct product use tests with a few upstream and downstream cooperative enterprises. Produce small amounts of products for customers who want product application and advertising. To reach the goal of long term, large scale profitability, achieve mass production of products, shift from staged profitability to continuous profitability, and finally form a standard industrial chain.
3.Different positioning design own brand In the third stage, we will strive to change from a supplier to a manufacturer, design some leather bags and apparel, make our own brand, and establish our own stable consumer group. We also hope that we can co-brand with well known brands in the future. As an emerging industry, we will use the reputation and influence of big brands to enhance our reputation.
Online and offline domestic and foreign marketing When there is a certain fixed consumer group, we will do a wide range of marketing. We will have our official website, official account, Tiktok account, and YouTube account. For offline promotion, we will hold a product exhibition, and the products will be the leather clothing we designed. The exhibition will emphasize the concept of combining environmental protection and fashion in an artistic form.
5.Deliver lectures, make online presentations and create enjoyable activities in order to draw more customers.
Challenges
In the future, our products may face consumers’ disapproval of genetically modified products and the denial of competitors in the leather industry. They will think that biologically produced cellulose membranes cannot replace traditional leather. Enterprises cooperate, then establish a brand, establish a stable consumer group that belongs to us, and actively communicate with leather companies, cooperate and coexist, and strive to become a member. Then this will be a "revolution" in the leather industry. It is also a "revolution" to protect the environment.
