Among their many achievements, they’ve been keynote speakers at MAGIC, invited to exhibit at The Clinton Global Initiative, are winners of the National Geographic “Chasing Genius” award and are grant recipients from the London-based RebelBio Accelerator program.

Wendy Friedman sat down with co-founder and F.I.T Professor Asta Skocir to learn more about AlgiKnit’s plans for becoming leaders in sustainable manufacturing.

Tell us a little bit about your initial research and development.  What were some of your frustrations and successes?

The product evolved quite a bit from our initial trials. We started by experimenting with a range of biopolymers like chitin, microbial cellulose and agar. We then tried working with sheets of microbial leather. Being a knitwear designer, I tried different techniques like embossing it with a knit pattern to create a more interesting material and cutting it into continuous strips so it could be knit but we discovered that the sheets didn’t perform well as a textile so we had to rethink what we were doing...

Read the full interview on our Knitting Industry Creative website