The Silent Cost of Your $50 Cashmere Sweater
Bargain cashmere is fueling an unsustainable cycle, but a new wave of material science AI is turning textile waste into premium, biodegradable fibers without the environmental guilt.
If you’ve ever felt the irresistible softness of a cashmere sweater, you know it’s a luxury hard to give up. Lately, these coveted garments have flooded the market at astonishingly low prices. While the allure is undeniable, these bargain tags hide a grim reality: the race for cheap cashmere is degrading the environment and the animals that provide it.
Cashmere originates from the fine undercoat of specific goat breeds. Under sustainable conditions, a single goat is sheared just twice a year, yielding a modest four to six ounces of fiber. However, to meet the exploding demand for fast fashion, traditional herding practices are breaking down. “The producers of raw materials are actually under a lot of stress,” explains Sim Gulati, CEO of Everbloom. “What you’re seeing now, especially with the advent of $50 cashmere sweaters, is that they’re being sheared way more often. The quality of the fiber is not as good, and it’s creating unsustainable herding practices.”
Rather than urging consumers to buy expensive, high-quality cashmere or attempting to overhaul global herding practices overnight, Gulati’s startup, Everbloom, is taking a technological approach. Having raised over $8 million from investors like Hoxton Ventures and SOSV, the company is leveraging material science AI to create an upcycled alternative that rivals the real thing.
At the heart of this innovation is Braid.AI, a proprietary model that fine-tunes parameters to create fibers with specific qualities. While cashmere is a primary target, the technology can replicate other textiles too. The process begins by collecting waste from across the supply chain—scraps from cashmere and wool farms, mills, and even down bedding suppliers. In the future, they plan to incorporate feathers from the poultry industry. The common thread among these waste streams is keratin, the protein that forms the basis of Everbloom’s process.
Once collected, the waste is chopped and combined with proprietary compounds. This mixture is pressed through a plastic extrusion machine, forming pellets that are then fed into spinning machines typically used for polyester. “That equipment is used for 80% of the textile market,” Gulati notes. “You have to be a drop-in replacement.”
The genius of Everbloom’s method is that the necessary chemical reactions happen entirely within these two machines. By adjusting the formulation and machine processing via Braid.AI, they can replicate fibers ranging from polyester to high-end cashmere. Crucially, the startup claims every fiber it produces is biodegradable—even their polyester replacement. “All the components that we’re using are biodegradable,” Gulati states, noting the company is currently validating this through accelerated testing.
Beyond the environmental benefits, the economic implications are significant. By utilizing waste materials, the impact is dramatically lower, and the cost structure changes. Everbloom aims to dismantle the “sustainable premium”—the notion that eco-friendly products must cost more. “I don’t believe in a ‘sustainable premium,’” Gulati says. “In order for a material to be successful… you have to have both a product benefit and an economic benefit to everyone who touches the product.”
As the fashion industry grapples with its environmental footprint, solutions like Everbloom offer a path forward. They prove that we don’t have to choose between maintaining the tactile pleasures of luxury textiles and protecting the planet. By transforming waste into value, AI-driven material science is weaving a future where sustainability and affordability are no longer at odds.
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