By 2030, apparel consumption is projected to rise by 63 percent to 102 million tonnes, according to The Business of Fashion’s (BoF) and McKinsey & Co’s The State of Fashion 2025 report — an ongoing threat to the mounting climate crisis.
An increasing number of environmental regulations are attempting to offset the damaging impact of consumer industries’ overproduction and wasteful practices, moving corporate sustainability action and responsible manufacturing practices away from a voluntary value-add to a business-critical and legal requirement.
For instance, under the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, all textiles must be durable, repairable and recyclable by 2030. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — signed by 100 fashion brands and supplies — has a key deadline of net-zero emissions by 2050, and an interim 50 percent cut by 2030. California’s Fashion Act bill would also push for decreased supply chain emissions and stricter chemical controls.
However, retroactively implementing more sustainable manufacturing processes and products into the supply chain is a challenging and timely exercise — something bio-design firm Modern Meadow has made central in its approach to responsible manufacturing.
Since its inception by father-and-son pair Gabor and Andras Forgacs in 2012, Modern Meadow has honed its ability to produce a viable bio-engineered leather alternative. Through an iterative design cycle, the company has grown from producing a yeast-derived, leather-like collagen end-product in 2017 to its current future-ready canvas known as Innovera. Its circular life cycle, low carbon footprint and easy scalability qualifies it as an advanced, next-generation leather alternative.
Critically, the material can journey through the traditional tannery processes to produce an end-product that looks, feels, acts and smells like real leather. Its purpose is to function as a supplement to traditional leather manufacturing processes.
Applications for Innovera are vast and diverse — and it provides insight into the future of bioalternatives. An upcoming use for the material will be in a series of travel products and accessories with Australian carry brand Bellroy, while Innovera was also used recently in the design of an avant-garde jumpsuit by Hong Kong-based fashion designer Karmuel Young.
To unpack Modern Meadow’s new chapter, BoF sits down with its recently appointed CEO, David Williamson, to understand its strategy for seizing the rapidly emerging, responsibly sourced market.
Why should brands adapt their supply chains to adhere to incoming sustainability regulations?
Regulations are largely about rebuilding consumer trust. Whether it’s the Regulation on Deforestation-free Products (EUDR), California’s SB 253 and 261 or SEC’s climate rules, regulations are about elevating the bar in terms of a brand’s requirements from a reporting perspective — particularly as consumers look for more low-carbon alternatives.
In 2025, what should fashion executives keep top-of-mind when reassessing their manufacturing and supply chain?
Transparency, resilience and risk-reduction.
In relation to transparency, this means building supply chains that are not opaque — as was the case before. There should be total traceability across the board — like where the feedstocks [the raw materials or primary inputs used to produce goods] are, how the product is produced and where it is coming from.
Regulations are about elevating the bar in terms of a brand’s requirements from a reporting perspective — particularly as consumers are looking for more low-carbon alternatives.
— David Williamson, CEO of Modern Meadow.
From a resilience perspective, it’s becoming increasingly important that businesses build supply chains in support of local models — especially as regional needs and demands continue to drive consumers’ decision making.
From a risk-reduction perspective, fashion executives must go beyond price when determining the suppliers they work with. We believe it’s about selecting suppliers that offer goods that meet or exceed regulatory requirements and provide future-forward alternatives to current offerings. Optimal goods are low-carbon in nature and drop into existing supply chains so there are no additional manufacturing expenses.
What does Modern Meadow’s next-generation material, Innovera, offer to corporations turning towards more sustainable products?
Innovera is made of 80 percent renewable carbon content, and we are completely transparent in all raw materials that we use — whether that’s the raw material we upcycle in partnerships, or combine with Modern Meadow’s own Bio-Alloy material. It’s a high-performance material that not only has a low carbon footprint, but is also visually pleasing and sturdy — two attributes that sustainable materials can lack. This means that products can be long-lasting in consumers’ hands.
Innovera also makes it possible for tanneries to produce a sustainable leather alternative without needing to build new, costly infrastructure. When the company was started by Gabor and Andras Forgacs, the goal was to create a material that would fit into the existing supply chain and leather tannery process. The creation of Innovera as a dry, white material — which is more or less a semi-finished alternative to an [animal] hide — allows us to drop it into tannery processes and embrace the science and art that tanners already practie today.
How does Modern Meadow enable clients greater commercial scalability?
Innovera was built for scalability from the start. We work with readily available, highly sustainable raw materials to go into the production process.
We also chose to build a manufacturing process leveraging materials already present throughout the world today. So whether it’s in American, Asian or European production, equipment is already on the ground to convert our raw materials into the semi-finished dry, white article.
Innovera was built for scalability from the start. We work with raw materials that are readily available and highly sustainable to go into the production process.
— David Williamson, CEO of Modern Meadow.
Then, it works seamlessly with pre-existing supply chains and drops into tannery processes, allowing brands to scale a highly sustainable new material using the supply chain partners they already have today.
How do you work with your partners to optimise the production process?
We liaise directly with brands to specifically understand end-user requirements, and we work with tanneries to achieve the final look and feel of the article that the brand is looking for.
In the fashion segment, brands may want a material that’s lighter, but in automotive interiors, furniture or footwear markets, brands may want a material that is more abrasion-resistant. Modern Meadow can engineer these features into the materials by working in partnership with the tannery to fulfil the brand’s requirements. Because the tanneries are often familiar with the brands, it makes it much easier to introduce new features and functionalities.
Each category we support — such as fashion, automotive interiors, performance footwear and furniture — has specific testing requirements. We also collaborate with brands to understand how durable the end-product needs to be, to withstand the specific uses of each application. For example, in a footwear application, it might be thinking through how many thousands of pirouettes a ballet shoe needs to withstand and making sure to meet that threshold — and exceed it.
What excites you most about Modern Meadow over the medium to long-term?
Innovera is a future-ready material — and is unbound in terms of its applications. It is designed as a new, sustainable canvas for the tanning industries already in existence.
We are leveraging what we have learned in the past about materials and combining it with unique biological functionality, allowing it to act, feel, and smell like a natural material. It’s an engineering story that equips brands with materials that can take them into the future — and we get to do that with a supply chain already on the ground.
This is a sponsored feature paid for by Modern Meadow as part of a BoF partnership.