Amongst her long list of accomplishments, Stacy Flynn is the Co-Founder and CEO of Seattle based textile innovation company Evrnu whose primary focus is eliminating textile waste at scale. To do this, Evrnu, armed with textile innovations and patents developed by Co-Founder and President Christopher Stanev, have approached some of the world’s largest fashion manufacturers with plug-and-play solutions that fit within their existing manufacturing frameworks, processes, and supply chains. The goal, according to Stacy, is to design garment waste entirely out of the equation—which takes incredible vision, and even greater tenacity, to redirect our Titanic industry.

“I was working for a startup in Seattle that made clothes out of recycled PET plastic waste and they sent me to China to find sources of manufacturing.  I’d been to China many times working for DuPont, Target, and Eddie Bauer, but I had never been to the subcontracted area.  My colleague and I got to this one facility.  We were standing right next to each other and we couldn’t see each other.  There was so much air pollution.  We took an elevator up to our meeting room, and from the floor to the ceiling, there was this cloud hovering over the heads of their corporate team.  And we sat there under this cloud talking about how we could do business.  And it was just shocking to me that we were having a conversation in this environment.”

Stacy had previously been the North American Fabric Sourcing & Testing Manager for DuPont—one of four people managing a global team—as well as a global fabric specialist for Target.  She graduated from FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) joining such illustrious alumni as Nina Garcia, Calvin Klein, and Michael Kors.  Yet nothing up to that point—sitting across a negotiation table, straining to see through the cloud of ash and fog of doubt—prepared her to witness the consequences of fashion’s contributions to one of the greatest problems of our time.

“For a month, we were traveling around the country looking for sources of manufacturing.  And the conditions did not improve.  I began adding up how many millions of yards of fabric I had made up to that point in my career, and I became linked to the cause of this problem.  That’s when I decided that I wanted to take what I had learned, and use the second half of my career to address some of these things that I felt I was contributing to.” 

Stacy Flynn

BORN : United States
RAISED : New York

EDUCATION :
MBA, Sustainable Systems, Pinchot |
BS, Textile development & Marketing, FASHION INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

EXPERIENCE :
CEO & Co-Founder, Evrnu (Current) |
Fabric Specialist, Target |
Fabric Sourcing & Testing Manager, Dupont

COMPANIES Active : 1
FOCUS : Textile design | Systems design

LOCATION : Seattle, WASHINGTON

FIRST PRINCIPLES

Stacy’s journey into fashion began at the age of 12 when she moved to Texas to live with her father.  Her stepmother was a master seamstress, and by the time Stacy was 14, she had learned how to cross-stitch, embroider, and cut-and-sew her own clothing.

“I like to push the boundaries of what I can do with my embroidery in my spare time.  I still do that on long flights, things like that.  I like to embroider print copy from magazines—people’s faces, interesting positions.  Just an artistic representation of different things I see.”

Stacy’s desire to push boundaries and explore new horizons would serve her well throughout her life.  But it was her ability to see the big picture and not take no for an answer that would most distinctly shape her early career.

“I’d always wanted to go to FIT.  A babysitter that watched us when we were really young—she went to FIT.  And I was like, my God, that’s like a dream.  I worked for three years full-time between high school and college for a credit union and a fabric store in upstate New York.  FIT was the only school I applied to.  And I got denied.  So I took a bus down to New York City, met with the head of admissions, and told him he had made a mistake.  And he said, ‘Miss Flynn, I’ve been doing this a long time.  If you have the audacity to come into my office and tell me I made a mistake—perhaps you’re worth a second look.’  So he accepted me on academic probation, and I had to prove myself.  But that was the first time I ever fought for myself.  And I haven’t stopped.”

PHANTOM THREADS

Stacy had a lot to prove and wasted no time finding opportunities.  She had surrounded herself with the right people and the right environment at the right time for the right reasons.  But more important, she committed herself to becoming the kind of person for whom success would naturally follow.

“FIT does a good job of doing two things—they teach you a language, and they teach you how to leverage connections.  But what you do with your art or your energy is completely up to you.  When I started, I was working for a luxury home furnishings startup down in Tribeca.  I remember I spoke to my boss, and she was paying $45 a pound for this one type of yarn that she was knitting.  And I asked her if I could resource it for her.  So I found a yarn maker in North Carolina, and a package dyer in Philadelphia, and I got her the same yarn for about $11.50 per pound.  So of course, she asked me to resource all of her raw materials.  And I had a lot of fun.  And she started making real money as a result of dropping her cost of goods sold, and she was able to start selling more product.  So that was a really cool, early-stage experience for me.”

Throughout Stacy’s college experience, the buzz was about local economies.  It was a time just after LVMH and Kering (then Gucci Group) were architecting the largest consolidations the fashion world had ever seen.  Now, it’s commonplace. And while conglomerates were busy creating opportunities oversees, local artisans and designers were calling attention to problems arising at home.

“When we had this massive consolidation of production in the ‘90s and early 2000s, our industry was decimated in the United States. And as a result, a lot of localized designers lost their supply and a lot of them went out of business because of it.”

See also NAFTA and USMCA trade agreement’s impact on the United States fashion industry.

Yet Stacy was always a big-picture thinker and small-batch production wasn’t a financially viable option for her at the time.  The opportunity was in economies of scale and mass production was in her DNA.

“I’ve always been on the meta level.  I’m interested in how you move large systems around.  And certainly after I left DuPont and went to Target, I was able to really work in that capacity.  I never really understood the dire importance of a localized model.  It wasn’t until I went to graduate school and started studying sustainable systems that I realized it requires both—it requires the meta and the micro working in harmony to create our reality.”

The problems looked painfully clear from her side of the negotiation table back in 2010.  The biggest contributors to the fashion industrial complex were large-scale producers and corporations.  That meant they were also most responsible for our current state of affairs.

“I see two really big problems on a meta level.  The first is natural resource extraction.  The second is living wages—the impact on the people who actually make the things we wear against our skin.  But I see over the next 25 years, we’re going to see a complete redesign of the way we buy, wear, and dispose of our clothing.  And really, it’s about showing the market that innovation is possible.”

Stacy Flynn appearing at TEDxOlympia, published September 2015.

A STITCH IN TIME

Stacy headed back to school, this time receiving an MBA in Sustainable Systems from Pinchot University (now Presidio Graduate School) in Seattle.  She knew she had the right technical experience to address the issue at scale.  But she gained a new perspective on the intersection of small and big systems.  And she could leverage her years of experience and connections to repair some of the damage unique to large-scale production by forging a new path forward.

“I began studying the problem.  And I knew that fiber was the first ingredient in any garment, and 90% of all clothing is either made from polyester or cotton. And we put all of this value into our clothing.  But I discovered that we’re still throwing away over 15 million tons of garment waste every year.”

Generally speaking, the existing product lifecycle looks something like this.  Brands stimulate consumer desire.  Consumers demand products.  Companies all over the world harvest natural resources, turning the raw materials into retail-ready items.  Consumers purchase the items, use them a handful of times, and discard them when they’re done.  Those items either recirculate in secondhand markets or make their way to landfills.  And those that don’t make it to landfills litter our world in previously unimaginable ways.  The cycle of fashion isn’t a loop—it’s a straight line that begins with resource extraction and ends with waste.

“When it comes to brands and retailers, they want products that perform on par or better than products that are currently available to their customers.  And they want their customers to have resonance with them.  They like stability, consistency, replicability.  So in the art of creating consumer textiles, we want to give the consumer reason to buy something because it improves performance in their life in some way.” 

In other words, most of us don’t buy a garment because we approve of its material.  We buy a garment because we want to solve a problem—comfort, utility, aesthetic, and yes, textile selection.  And the one we pick has the right balance of cost-to-benefit for us based upon a criteria that outperforms the competition in either the form, the function, or both.  And for businesses selling us apparel and accessories, it’s generally about maximizing profit, not minimizing environmental impact.

“We took all the impact-reduction, put it aside and asked, if we were going to create something incredible, what would it be? If I were redesigning the system, all of our technologies would be based on leveraging garment waste and turning that into new fiber.  I would say if we have local waste, we should also have local small-batch production to process that waste to service back the local community with what they need.  Then we could really start to intersect localized models into these larger industrial complexes to give both options the best shot.  It’s not about either-or—it’s about both-and solutions working in harmony to really service the consumer demand and minimize waste at the same time.”

Christopher Stanev (left), Stacy Flynn (middle) and Stella McCartney (right) posing beside their adidas prototype made from Nucycl. Image courtesy Evrnu.

A NEW BEGINNING

In 2014, Stacy co-founded Evrnu with CTO Christopher Stanev.  They took a huge risk, leaving their employment and emptying their savings accounts.  But for Stacy and Christopher, there was only one way this story would end.

“We were looking for a win-win-win.  Win for the consumer.  Win for the business.  Win for the environment.  So we went into our lab and started playing around with the deconstruction of post-consumer textiles.  We’d take cotton waste, clean it, turn it into a liquid, and extrude it back into a solid fiber for the creation of new premium textile.”

In a few years time, they produced what they now call NuCycl—a fully recyclable material which retains its integrity for up to 4 generations and exceeds the tensile strength requirements for many large-scale applications.

“We took the fiber and spun it into yarn, which was either knit or woven by our brand partner. Then we got our initial proof-of-concept an environmental impact assessment, showing them the impact of their current product versus the impact-reduction of their NuCycl blended garment.”

Evrnu’s brand partners included Levi’s and adidas x Stella McCartney.  In October 2019, Evrnu successfully raised $9 million in Series A funding.  In 2021, they raised a total of $24 million to further develop their vision for circular fashion. The gamble paid off.  The industry responded.  But even more important, they’ve shown the world that a better future is entirely possible.

“Today, we have six technologies all under development, and they’re all garment-to-garment recycle technologies.  Whatever products we create in the world, we want to guarantee that they can come back into the system, can be broken down into their highest value components, and find their best use in their second or third incarnation.  And everybody gets really excited when you multiply that impact by the number of units, and that’s how much a company would be reducing in just that one style.  These numbers get very big very quickly once we turn the system around.”

Evrnu plans to license their technologies later this year, and they’re not slow- ing down. Stacy’s eyes are always on the horizon, and the future she sees for the cycle of fashion is hopeful.

“I see a world in which people don’t even own their own clothing—they’re leasing it or renting it.  And then when they’re done with it, it goes into a resale situation, and when that’s done, it goes into a down-cycle situation, and when that’s done, it goes into a polymer regeneration cycle, and we break it down and turn it into the next thing that the designer wants to create.  I actually think this is one of the greatest design challenges of our century—taking something from one form and convert it into another form with no loss in value.  To me, that’s just cool that our world has gotten to that point.  And I definitely think that in the next 20-25 years, the world is going to design waste out of the equation because we now know that it’s not necessary.” 

In October 2021, Evrnu shared delightful news on their Instagram account of their inclusion by History of Parliament Trust in their publication 300 Years of Leadership and Innovation. The publication highlighted Evrnu’s strategic collaboration with Stella McCartney and marks a high honor for Evrnu, now having been official recognized by the UK Parliament for their efforts in addressing climate change. Evrnu’s next step is to bring on new talent, create commercial-ready technology, and have a full garment-to-garment recycling solution in place as soon as possible. For Stacy, the skies are looking quite clear indeed.