Visionaries of
Fibers
With their revolutionary seaweed-based biosynthetic, Keel Labs is poised to transform the textile ecosystem
Keel Labs
“We’re sourcing from the ocean, something that’s abundant.”
What is your vision for the future?
Brands are trying to move away from harmful materials, and we want Kelsun to be the option they turn to.
– Keel Labs
By Kim Masibay
The lives of Fashion Design alums Aleks Gosiewski ’17 and Tessa Callaghan ’16 have undergone a sea change since their winning the inaugural Biodesign Challenge in 2016. At the time, their student team won the international competition, which envisions the future of biotechnology, with a sustainability project—a yarn derived from seaweed. Now, less than a decade later, Gosiewski and Callaghan sit at the helm of Keel Labs, a growing sustainable materials start-up headquartered in the heart of North Carolina’s Research Triangle. It is here that the seaweed-based fiber they prototyped back at FIT gets spun into spools of Kelsun yarn.
Keel Labs wet-spins Kelsun from a solution made of seaweed extract, water, and a proprietary blend of a few other non-toxic natural ingredients. It is hard to fathom that this seaweed slurry can morph into cream-colored fluff, but such is the wonder of biotechnology. Cottony-soft and eco-friendly, Kelsun debuted on the world stage in 2023, when Stella McCartney featured it in runway pieces during Paris Fashion Week. More recently, it has been used in apparel by the brand Outerknown and the designer Mr. Bailey, as well as in a second Stella McCartney collection. “This is no longer just a concept,” Gosiewski says. “This is something people are actually able to purchase and experience.”
After the Biodesign win—achieved with the help of faculty advisors Theanne Schiros, associate professor of Science, and Asta Skocir, professor of Fashion Design—the student team formed a business named AlgiKnit, raised enough money to hire scientists, and set up a lab in Brooklyn. Those advancements allowed them to push the tech forward and start producing consistent fiber at the lab scale. In 2022, the business rebranded as Keel Labs, relocated to Morrisville, North Carolina, and began the work of scaling up the production of Kelsun. They are now closing in on their goal of producing at the commercial scale. “When we started, we were measuring our fiber in grams. Now we’re measuring in tons,” Gosiewski says.
As brands seek to lessen their planetary harm, they urgently need eco-friendly replacements for the polluting materials they use in their products. With Kelsun, the textile industry has a viable new alternative that is low-impact, sustainable, and—most important—easy for mainstream manufacturers to adopt. Many novel, next-gen materials remain niche products because they require new production equipment and facilities, Gosiewski explains, but Kelsun was engineered to fit into the existing supply and manufacturing systems. Mills need no special technology to use it. “From the outset, we have been intentional about using the existing infrastructure,” she says, explaining that Kelsun is a “drop-in replacement” for widely used non-sustainable materials: Simply remove the spools of toxic fibers from the machinery. Swap in Kelsun.
Keel Labs is gradually scaling up their manufacturing capacity, so it will be a while before we see Kelsun in the mass market, but long-term, Gosiewski envisions even the industry’s largest brands using it. “Getting them on your side. Working with them. It’s the only way of tipping the scale.”
