Latest / The Manufacturing Podcast with Fexingo: Factories, Supply Chains, and Industrial Business / How a US Factory Is Making Leather from Mushroom Roots
Transcript
- Lucas: If you've bought a luxury handbag in the last two years, there's a decent chance it's made from mushrooms. Not the cap and stem — the roots. Luna: The roots? You mean mycelium? Lucas: Exactly. Mycelium is the underground network of fungal threads. A company called MycoWorks has figured out how to grow it into sheets that feel, stretch, and wear like cowhide. They've built their first full-scale factory in Union, South Carolina, and it can produce up to ten million square feet of this stuff per year. Luna: That is a lot of handbags. How does it actually work — do you just let mushrooms grow in a tray? Lucas: Not exactly. The process starts with a strain of fungi — a specific one that grows dense, interwoven mycelium. They feed it a substrate of sawdust and agricultural waste inside sterile trays. The mycelium grows for about two weeks, and the key is controlling the environment so the threads grow vertically and horizontally, creating a tightly packed mat. Luna: So it's like a textile that grows itself. Then what? Do you tan it like animal hide? Lucas: That's the clever part. After growth, they compress and heat the mat, which fuses the mycelium into a solid sheet. Then they apply a tanning process — not chromium like traditional leather, but a vegetable-based tan that's much less toxic. The result is a material that has grain, texture, and even the same tensile strength as cowhide. Luna: And luxury brands have actually started using it? I remember Hermès did a bag a few years ago. Lucas: They were an early partner. Hermès worked with MycoWorks to create a version of their classic Victoria bag using mycelium leather. That was in 2021. Since then, a dozen other high-end fashion houses have placed small orders. But the real challenge isn't the quality — it's the scale and the cost. Lucas: MycoWorks' factory is designed to bring the price down to compete with premium cowhide, which runs about four to six dollars per square foot. Right now, mycelium leather is closer to fifteen dollars per square foot. But as they ramp up, that should drop. And their process uses a fraction of the water and land compared to raising cattle. Luna: Fifteen dollars is still a big premium. But I guess if you're selling a two-thousand-dollar bag, the material cost is a small piece. Lucas: Exactly. The economics work for luxury. The harder bet is downmarket — can mycelium leather ever replace the synthetic stuff in car seats or fast fashion? That's where the volume is, but the margin is thin.