Maria Intscher-Owrang spent 24 years designing for Vera Wang, Calvin Klein, and Alexander McQueen while Phil Cohen sold companies in China and deployed to Afghanistan. Neither expected to end up at the forefront of revolutionizing how things get made. On National Small Business Month, we talked to the co-founders of Simplifyber about how they’re replacing our outdated manufacturing system.
360: Maria, you spent more than two decades at the highest levels of luxury fashion before founding a manufacturing company. What finally pushed you to act?
Maria Intscher-Owrang: Well, it’s not really a secret that the fashion industry has problems. There’s environmental damage, conditions in factories are notoriously less than great, and you also have the chronic financial strain the industry is always under. But what bothered me most was that the industry is so subdivided that nobody was looking at the greater picture. People work in one part of the supply chain and they do not really deviate from it. Some try to make their corner more sustainable, but it’s very hard to feel like you can change the whole thing when you’re only working on a small piece of it.
I waited for years for someone to come along and solve it properly. Then I just got tired of waiting and realized I had to stick my neck out.
360: Phil, you come from a completely different world: military, MIT, building companies in China. How did that background lead you here?
Phil Cohen: The last company I sold was in China, and it put me on factory floors in the south where I saw overwhelming pollution, these long assembly lines, and the conditions the workers were in. We still have factories with literal nets around them so that people aren’t jumping out of windows, and it kind of stayed with me. There had to be a better way to manufacture, not just in terms of the material, but the way the whole system works.
Simplifyber’s my fourth company. I’ve started companies, built them, and sold them. After doing that a few times, you get very clear on what kind of problem is worth your time. This was it.
360: Walk us through what Simplifyber does differently.
Maria Intscher-Owrang: Our products begin as natural fibers in a liquid made of wood pulp, recycled paper, recycled textiles and agricultural fiber. Then, we use that liquid to create 3D shapes directly in a mold, after which the finished parts are bonded together at the molecular level, formed all at once rather than pieced together from flat fabric. That way, we manage t bypass about 60 percent of traditional manufacturing steps and 88 percent of the labor, and because there are no offcuts or intermediate stages, there is essentially no manufacturing waste.
360: That sounds like a difficult sell to industries that got used to doing things the same way for centuries.
Phil Cohen: It is until you tell them about performance and cost. Our materials are lighter than conventional alternatives, with acoustic dampening properties that automotive manufacturers genuinely care about and tunable thermal and electrical conductivity. We are also approaching cost parity with conventional plastics. By making a better-performing material at the same price point as the conventional stuff, we shift the conversation away from ethics and towards practicality.
If you tell manufacturers they’re just getting a better material for the same price instead of some safeless sacrifice for the environment, things tend to go a lot smoother.
360: There has been a lot of conversation about automation displacing garment workers, particularly in developing countries. How do you think about that?
Maria Intscher-Owrang: We want to eliminate the most repetitive and labor-intensive parts of the process so that skilled workers can focus on their craftsmanship. Traditional manufacturing is not disappearing, because there are many products you simply cannot make this way. Where our process can take over a layer of the work, it should, and that frees people whose skills are genuinely irreplaceable to be recognized and compensated accordingly. Right now, those workers are too often positioned as the cheapest part of the chain.
360: What does success look like from here?
Maria Intscher-Owrang: Imagine a factory operator who can dial in a specific material, soft and flexible for a shoe upper or rigid and durable for an automotive interior component, press go, and receive a finished, shaped part from a single machine with no spinning, weaving, or cutting. The material and the geometry formed simultaneously, exactly as specified. That is what we are building toward: not a new material dropped into an old system, but a new system entirely.
Phil Cohen: The category we belong to does not really have a name yet. That is kind of the point.
Simplifyber is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina. The company has raised $20 million to date, operates a full-scale production line in-house, and has publicly announced partnerships with Kia for automotive applications and GANNI for footwear. Learn more at simplifyber.com. The U.S. Small Business Administration recognizes May as National Small Business Month.
