HyperNatural: A revolution in material science

Fashion is a dirty industry.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme, the industry is the second largest consumer of water and creates 20 percent of the world’s plastic pollution annually. Fashion is responsible for about 10 percent of global carbon emissions. To put that into perspective, that is more emissions than all international flights and maritime shipping combined.

Native Wisconsinite and longtime fashion industry veteran Chris Kolbe is working to change that.

Kolbe, along with co-founder Christian Arkins, launched the fashion brand HyperNatural in 2022. The pair worked to develop a new cotton-based fabric that contains both jade stones and crab shells. The material is breathable, cooling, naturally antimicrobial, odor-resistant, reduces inflammation and increases circulation. Best of all, it is sustainable.

“Whether you want a sustainable product or not, you’re going to want this product and that’s how we set out to build HyperNatural,” Kolbe said.

“We’re really a material science company that’s creating a platform for innovative natural materials.”

Kolbe explained how the company developed the fabric.

“Before it’s fabric, it’s a yarn, and before it’s a yarn, it’s a raw material,” Kolbe said.

“We started at the raw material stage, and we created this yarn using regenerative waste like jade stone and chitin, which is crab shells, and waste scrap-yarns from the spinning mills of China to make this viscose yarn that has these properties in it,” he continued.

“That’s the thing we developed, and it took us a couple years to do it and we turned that yarn into a fabric,” he said.

The creation of the fabric was an international effort.

“I worked with some people who are much smarter than I am in China who have a lot of experience in these sorts of advanced materials that are being developed. There was another person we worked with in Los Angeles who is a material scientist, and we came together in 2021 during COVID,” he explained.

“We’ve all been in the industry a long time… We spent our whole career making and selling things to people that they don’t need. We’re part of the problem. We created a lot of the pollution that we have today. The world doesn’t need another brand, that’s for sure,” he said.

“But what it does need is more sustainable materials that people actually want to pay for, and they want to wear because they’re awesome, versus sustainable materials that you should just buy to do the right thing,” he said. “That has not proven to be very commercially viable, unfortunately, and so we set out on a mission to discover what we could do.”

“It turns out there are amazing things happening in material science right now. There is a revolution going on and a lot of people wouldn’t know it because it never makes it out of a laboratory into a commercial vehicle that you could sell. Some of the things we’re doing have existed for a while, over a decade, they’ve just never been applied this way,” he said.

“We decided to make the best of something, and it turns out we made this yarn. And then we put it with the best, most responsible cotton in the world, which is Supima, and we made what we think is the best shirt in the world. Not only is it sustainable, but it actually performs in a way that conventional fabrics do not. That’s why it’s special, not because it’s sustainable, but because it actually is a better fabric that you can feel the tangible benefits of when you wear it,” he said.

The bootstrapped company’s first products hit the market in March 2023. It launched the HyperNatural brand with a line of men’s shirts that include tees, polos, and a button-down shirt. Since then, it has developed an impressive roster of retail partners, including Nordstrom and Fred Segal.

The company is eager to expand its line beyond men’s casualwear.

“I am self-funding this to this point because I wanted to validate what we think is the opportunity. Now we feel really good about that and we’re going to start taking some investment. We’re looking for early-stage investors that are interested in this space,” he said. “We’re going to take some investments so we can take that next step and do more. In the next two to three years, there’s a real window of opportunity that we don’t want to miss.”

To learn more about HyperNatural, connect with the company here.