What is the 'secret' ingredient that makes you an exceptional leader?
20 successful women answer
The women who fight against the threat of empty Spain: "We must end the myth that we have to go full of mud"
Machi Martín, the discreet businesswoman who takes the jet in her luxury planes
Tell me that the layette is one hundred percent sustainable."
Regina Polanco
(Vienna, 1992) comes to our interview by the hair, about to leave accounts of what she will be her first daughter, Eugenia.
And of course, Eugenia's layette, reacts Polanco, is going to be full of garments made with
Pyratex fabrics,
the company that she herself founded eight years ago, when no one in Spain (and almost in the world) had gone through the head to bet everything on the card of the elaboration of
fabrics of natural origin,
beyond cotton and leather, and that were «on the one hand sustainable and on the other functional: beneficial fabrics for
blood circulation,
with
antibacterial
properties , to
sensitive skin, sunscreens...».
Like the one they are presenting this month, made with
citrus
peels discarded after the production of industrial juices, and whose appearance and touch -I attest- is that of a fine knitted fabric.
Or the one made
with algae.
Or that of
Flor de Kapok.
Or the
nettle.
Up to 60 fabrics designed, manufactured and patented in four years, each one with an average of three years of R&D behind it.
Of all the projects they undertake, of all the potential new fabrics, "70% remain on the way", explains the CEO of Pyratex, "because the sustainable element has been lost, or because it cannot be scalable, or because it cannot be it has durability, or it is not easy to take care of...".
clothes to live better
Today Pyratex bills several million euros a year and works for brands all over the world:
Fiorucci, Mara Hoffman, Adolfo Dominguez, Agatha Ruiz de la Prada, Zero + Maria Cornejo, Ganni, Scotch & Soda...
«What we want to convey to the consumer is that, just as we no longer eat to eat, but to live better and longer, textiles can also help us in the same sense, because in the end we spend
almost 24 hours a day covered by fabrics;
and the largest organ in our body is the skin, which
breathes
textiles”, says Polanco.
A Fiorucci dress made with Pyratex fabric.
That textile that needs, at the sector level, a good wiggle, given the embarrassing data it produces in terms of
pollution
(the second most polluting industry on the planet, responsible for 20% of the toxic spills into the water) and
exaggerated consumption of resources.
You may not know that 'above all' is written separately unless it is a piece of clothing, but it is not lost on anyone by now that
between 2,130 and 3,078 liters of water
are involved in the manufacture of
a single pair of jeans .
Whoever finds a substitute for the guilty cotton with which jeans are made is crowned.
But it is not easy.
"It's much easier not to wear denim," says the Pyratex CEO, who in fact abstains.
From the law degree to manufacturing threads
By pulling the thread to find the center of this ball, we discover that before Pyratex it was
Pyrates, a fashion brand
that Regina Polanco, a Law graduate, daughter of diplomats, founded before finishing her studies in Madrid, where she landed after a divided childhood between Morocco and Mauritania.
"I'm a
millennial,
and I've always fantasized about creating a clothing brand for
pirates
of my generation, the Y," she says.
The fact is that what began with a modest
entrepreneurship
project in the fashion sector ended, thanks to a providential trip to the largest
fabric fair in
the world, the Parisian
Première Vision,
in an adventure into unknown territory, almost almost the embarking on a new economic activity.
There Regina Polanco discovered that there was
life beyond polyester,
cotton and wool.
And she also perceived that these modern, functional fabrics, with beneficial properties, would be the future, her future.
After dedicating four years to pure and hard R&D, immersed in three international business incubation programs, Pyratex hit the market.
And then came the hard part.
«My
biggest challenge,
by far, was
convincing the industry.
No weaver in the world wanted to test these new threads that I offered on their machines».
But it was not only about selling a new product without a single final customer consuming it..., "it was also testing a
new business model,
because I sell fabric, but I don't have my own factories,
I produce
them in collaboration with
industrial partners.
And also I enter a world, that of fashion, which although it seems very modern, in its industrial part is very traditional, very masculine ».
An Adolfo Dominguez sweatshirt made with recycled Pyratex fibers.
After traveling halfway around the world with his fabric samples, Polanco finally managed to get a small Italian company to trust his proposal - "when he was about to throw in the towel, honestly" - and everything began to roll.
And there it continues, with increasing strength, especially outside of Spain.
«Although I have had interesting collaborations with companies such as
Mirto, Camper...
, Spanish companies represent
less than 5% of my annual sales.
At
partner level
production, where I manufacture the most is in Italy and Portugal, although I would like to produce more here.
What is the problem?
The price.
On average, garments made from Pyratex fabrics cost 20% more.
difficult challenge.
Although seen what has been seen... "I always say that Pyratex is a process very much based on making the impossible possible," Polanco confides.
Well that.
How to get a sweatshirt from a nettle
Have you ever wondered why most of the clothes we wear are made from cotton or animal fabrics?
"Because its transformation into a fabric is very simple, explains Regina Polanco. So the first thing they do at Pyratex when developing a new fabric is to identify fibers that can be easily turned into a textile. "
Nettle,
for example.
Nettle is a
very dry fiber, and very long.
Making thread with it is relatively simple". What you probably did not know is that nettle was widely used in textiles until the discovery of cotton, a plant that, by investing a lot of water in it, becomes a very soft and joyous fabric And so, the nettle practically fell into disuse Now Pyratex wants to make it fashionable again, with its other 59 fabrics.
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