Confession time: My household owns two cars, one with leather and one with “leather.” The former feels amazing, the latter … well, let’s just say it’s not fooling anyone.
Based on the samples currently sitting on my desk, leather alternatives don’t have to feel so artificial or be so harsh on the environment.
Most fake leathers are made using plastics derived from fossil fuels. The samples from Uncaged Innovations, though, are made mostly using grains including wheat, soy, and corn. The results feels remarkably like a variety of real animal leathers. One even smelled like it.
“Leather is not just leather,” co-founder and CEO Stephanie Downs told TechCrunch. “There’s literally a thousand types of leather: different animals, different thicknesses, different ways that they tan it. We had to develop something that could be really easily customizable.”
Uncaged exclusively told TechCrunch that it’s now working with Hyundai’s Cradle division to refine its material for automotive use. The goal is to create a durable, animal- and climate-friendly material that can replace leather in cars and trucks. Uncaged says its material’s carbon footprint is 95% lower than that of leather.
Last month, the startup also announced a partnership with Jaguar Land Rover.
Leather alternatives are almost as old as the automotive industry itself, with early Ford Model T cars using primitive faux leather as early as 1913. The quality has improved over the years, but many alternatives still don’t have the same feel as the genuine article.
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The startup’s materials are currently used in vegan-friendly handbags and watch straps, and while fashion companies might be high-profile customers, automakers are arguably bigger targets. Each leather interior can consume anywhere from two to 14 cowhides, depending on how much of the interior is covered in leather and how picky the automaker is about quality. Since cows live outside, their skin is often scarred from things like bug bites or encounters with barbed wire fences. Those blemishes mean that a significant portion of leather is often wasted.
Because Uncaged’s material is made in a factory, it’s consistent in a way that cowhides are not.
Compared with traditional leather, Uncaged’s product sits mid-market. Small orders sell for less than $10 per square foot, and large orders might cost half as much, Downs said. “There’s not only a savings for the environment, but also a savings for the bottom line.”
Uncaged is currently running tests for a range of automakers, Downs said. Heat resistance is the biggest hurdle, though she said her company is making progress.
“One of the automotive companies wants us to be at 95 [degrees] C for 500 hours. And we’ve already, in our first round of experiments, we achieved 85 C and made it through that for 500 hours,” she said.
Downs said Uncaged was able to more closely simulate real leather by mimicking the chemical structure of leather itself.
Leather results from the process of tanning an animal hide, which stabilizes its fibrous collagen proteins.
“We started diving into testing literally hundreds of different plant ingredients and different combinations to see if we could get them create fibril structures,” Downs said. “And what [co-founder Xiaokun Wang] ultimately developed was a way to turn plant proteins into those types of structures.”
The material is then laid down onto a plant fiber-based cloth backing. The cloth base and the plant-based leather material are both biodegradable, Downs said. For many applications, it also adds a 0.01 mm layer of bio-based polyurethane, a plastic, which “enables us to just change the appearance a lot. It also enables us to change the hand feel. We can make it have a little more grip, or we can make it super smooth,” she said.
Uncaged also adds mineral pigments to give it the desired color, and it can emboss various textures. It can add a range of different scents using flower extracts, too. One sample sitting on my desk gives off a sort of sweet, floral fragrance.
“Automotive companies have talked to us about developing their signature scent that’ll be exclusive to them. We’ve had handbag manufacturers ask, ‘Can you make it smell like our signature fragrances?’” Downs said. “That’s been so much more popular than I had imagined.”
