The company that pours fabric instead of sewing it - molding soft goods from a plant-based liquid.
Nearly every garment, shoe, or bag you own passed through the same century-old gauntlet: fibers are spun into yarn, yarn is woven or knit into cloth, cloth is cut into pieces, and pieces are sewn back together. Simplifyber, a biomaterials company in Morrisville, North Carolina, asked a blunt question about that sequence - why do any of it?
Its answer is Fybron, a proprietary natural-fiber liquid that starts as a cellulose-based fluid drawn from wood, paper, and recycled textiles. Instead of being spun and woven, Fybron is injected into a 3D mold, where it sets into finished fabric in the exact shape required. Spinning, weaving, cutting, and sewing collapse into a single step. In many applications the result is fully bio-based and biodegradable.
The company calls the output "the soft goods of the future." The description is literal: a shoe upper, a bag panel, or a piece of upholstery emerges from the mold as one continuous molded piece rather than an assembly of cut-and-stitched parts.
Founded in 2021 by fashion designer Maria Intscher-Owrang and co-founder Phil Cohen, Simplifyber sits at the intersection of materials science, additive manufacturing, and sustainable fashion. In April 2025 it closed a $12 million Series A led by Suzano Ventures - the venture arm of one of the world's largest wood-pulp suppliers - a signal that the material's feedstock and the material's maker are now strategically linked.
Simplifyber is small on headcount but broad on ambition. Its material platform is pitched not only at fashion and footwear, but at bags, upholstery, automotive and aviation interiors, and consumer packaging - anywhere a soft good is currently cut and sewn from fossil-derived or resource-heavy materials.
Cellulose feedstock - wood, paper, recycled textiles - is turned into a natural-fiber liquid.
The liquid is engineered into Fybron, tuned for the target product's feel and performance.
Fybron is injected into a 3D mold shaped like the finished part - a shoe upper, a panel, a bag.
The molded soft good is removed as one piece. No offcuts, no seams, no sewing line.
The proprietary natural-fiber liquid at the core of the company. Cellulose-derived, injectable into molds, and in many uses fully bio-based and biodegradable.
A single-step molding process that replaces spinning, weaving, cutting, and sewing - and enables complex 3D shapes that stitched fabric can't easily make.
The company's inaugural product, a cellulose-derived shoe upper molded from Fybron, unveiled with fashion label Ganni at Paris Fashion Week.
The near-term targets are fashion, footwear, and accessories. The longer horizon is broader: the same platform is aimed at upholstery, automotive and aviation interiors, and consumer packaging - a portfolio of markets that share one trait, a dependence on soft materials that are expensive to make sustainably.
Simplifyber is a business-to-business materials and manufacturing company. Its customers are not shoppers but brands and manufacturers - the companies that decide what a product is made of and how it's produced. That places it upstream, in the part of the supply chain most consumers never see but that carries much of an industry's environmental cost.
The company's wedge into the market is the collaboration with Ganni, the Danish fashion label known for pushing lower-impact materials. Ganni lists Simplifyber Fybron in its materials index and put the molded shoe upper on a Paris Fashion Week runway - a public proof point that the material can meet a design-led brand's standards.
In the broader landscape of next-generation materials, Simplifyber shares a neighborhood with companies like Spinnova and Natural Fiber Welding, which also chase alternatives to conventional and fossil-based textiles. What distinguishes Simplifyber is the manufacturing angle: rather than making a better fiber to feed the existing spin-weave-cut-sew line, it tries to remove the line. The competitor set therefore includes not just other bio-material startups but the incumbent process itself.
The clearest strategic signal came from an investor. When Suzano - a company whose core product is wood pulp - led the Series A through its venture arm, it tied a major cellulose supplier to a company that turns cellulose directly into finished goods. It shortens the distance between raw material and market.
A fashion designer with a 20-plus-year career at houses including Vera Wang, Calvin Klein, Alexander McQueen, Dirk Bikkembergs, and Edun. She left the runway to attack the industry's manufacturing problem at its source.
Co-founded Simplifyber in 2021 alongside Intscher-Owrang, helping shape the company's additive-manufacturing approach to bio-based soft goods.
TOTAL RAISED SINCE 2021 · ~$15.5M
Maria Intscher-Owrang and Phil Cohen launch the company to reinvent soft-goods manufacturing with bio-based materials.
Raises seed funding led by At One Ventures to develop its additive manufacturing process.
Debuts a molded cellulose shoe upper in partnership with Ganni.
Closes a Series A led by Suzano Ventures to scale across fashion, car interiors, and consumer goods.
Looking for demos and interviews? Search "Simplifyber" on YouTube for product walkthroughs and founder talks, or watch the Ganni x Simplifyber Paris Fashion Week reveal on the brand's channels.