Material redefined: Are mushrooms the future of alternative leather?

In 2007, Philip Ross, an artist based in the Bay Area, was preparing for an exhibit. It demonstrated his work with “mycotecture,” the creation of materials from the manipulation of mycelium, which is the substance comprising the root structure of mushrooms. Ross bought mushroom spores from local farmers and coaxed them to grow into a substance he describes as akin to medium-density fiberboard. Preparing for the exhibit, he met Sophia Wang, then a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped him produce the show.

Ross continued to experiment with mycelium, and by 2012, after receiving requests from multiple companies interested in the technology, Ross asked Wang to join him in starting MycoWorks to commercialize his mycotecture technique. They co-founded the company the following year, while Wang was finishing her dissertation. At the outset “there were three of us in a basement with plywood and plastic sheeting,” said Wang, who is now the company’s chief of culture. “We were a start-up biotech company, but we were created by artists.”

MycoWorks eventually focused on creating a material that had the look and feel of leather but was free of animal parts. Called Reishi, after the Japanese name for the genus of mushrooms Ross first used, it can currently be produced in sheets of six square feet. (MycoWorks declined to disclose pricing except to say that it is currently comparable with exotic hides. As the company continues to grow, they added, MycoWorks will be able to offer some at lower prices.)

The company, whose headquarters are in Emeryville, Calif., has obtained more than 75 patents and now has over 160 employees in the United States, France and Spain. It has also secured collaborations with high-end companies like Hermès and, most recently, the furniture maker Ligne Roset and GM Ventures, the investment arm of General Motors.

If it continues to scale up, MycoWorks has enormous potential: The leather goods market exceeded $400 billion in 2021 and is expected to surpass $720 billion by 2030.

Then there’s the global market for synthetic leather materials, which is expected to reach almost $67 billion by 2030, according to Research and Markets, a source for data and analysis. The so-called bio-based leather market, which includes only naturally occurring material, was estimated at roughly $650 million in 2021 by Polaris Market Research. But that number may be too low, according to Frank Zambrelli, the executive director of the Responsible Business Coalition at Fordham University in New York, as well as a managing director at the consulting firm Accenture. “I sincerely believe they are not accurately reflecting market and consumer interest in the category, nor the advances in the technology and quality of the products emerging,” he said. To date, many of the leather alternatives are made from the plastics, polyurethane or polyvinyl chloride (better known as PVC), sometimes resulting in the derisive term “pleather.” But the more substantial issue is that those using plastic are generally environmentally unfriendly and don’t provide a sustainable option.

In contrast, MycoWorks “can achieve the same quality and performance as animal leathers without the need for any sort of plastics,” Matthew Scullin, MycoWorks’ chief executive, said at a temporary exhibition showroom in New York in the spring. Now too large to rely solely on local farmers for its supply of mycelium, the company has its own strains which “we basically keep in cold storage,” Scullin said.