Team:Berkeley/HumanPractice/DyeingIndustry

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To look into the challenges and feasibility of scaling this project up into industry, we talked to an expert involved in the dyeing field. We contacted Jesse Genet, the CEO of Lumi®, to seek advice on the challenges on scaling up our project and possibly taking our product to the market .

Lumi is a Los Angeles-based company founded by Jesse Genet and Stéphan Angoulvant producing a photographic printing process for textiles. The process is based on a photo-reactive vat dye manufactured by Lumi called Inkodye that develops its color through exposure to UV or sunlight. The process was designed to provide a simple do it yourself alternative to screen printing.

During our interview with the CEO of Lumi®, we asked several questions about general consumer trends and manufacturing considerations to take into account when bringing a dyeing process to market. Some of these topics included:

   How aware are consumers and the clothing industry about the non-ecological methods used for dyeing today?

There is growing awareness within the clothing industry that it is very dirty and contains a huge ecological footprint. While there is awareness, most decisions in industry are made according to financial reasons. Additionally, more and more aware of the ecological footprint of the clothing industry.

   How much do consumers value an economically pair of jeans? Would consumers be willing to pay more for them?

The issue of whether consumers would pay more for economically friendly pair of jeans compared to a standard one ultimately comes down to price. People like green products, but only a certain select group of people would actually pay much more for a pair of jeans that is economically friendly.

   What are the challenges of incorporating a new biological dyeing process when an industrial one already exists?

The denim dyeing industry is already well established, and companies are very averse to making drastic changes unless there are compelling reasons to do so. Thus, in order to successfully integrate a new method into industry, we need to not only sell our point of being more economically friendly, but also be able to compete financially with the existing process of dyeing denim.

   What are some of the ways we can incorporate our process into an already well-established one?

One method to increase the popularity of our method and for industry to take interest in our biological method is to have a pilot test of people, say around 10,000, try our entire biological dyeing method from home. This adds legitimacy to our method, since it not only creates awareness of the method, but also has been tried with real possible consumers. In addition, the biological method does not have to go to an industrial setting. Rather, it can possibly be treated as a DIY project, and funding for the process commercially viable can be done through crowd funding.

To summarize our interview with Jesse, we learned that while consumers like green products, most consumers won't pay much more for green products. This is also a similar case in industry, in which decisions are made financially. Thus, in order to make our biological dyeing method successful in industry, we will need to look into further ways to optimize our method and lower costs.

Check out our plan to do this in the next section!