Cover of The Fabric of Value with Carl Warkentin

The Fabric of Value with Carl Warkentin

The Fabric of Value with Carl Warkentin

By: Carl Warkentin
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The FOV Podcast is a series of deep dive conversations with investors, entrepreneurs and experts in the field of circular textiles and consumer climate tech. We talk about how to invest in the next innovation, how to evaluate a company and its market opportunity and what it takes to build a company in the circular economy.

Host Carl Warkentin has spent over a decade building companies, successfully exiting them and creating ecosystems that allow regenerative business models to scale.

The Fabric of Value Podcast was previously called LOOPED IN with Carl Warkentin.

© 2026 The Fabric of Value with Carl Warkentin Earth Sciences Economics Leadership Management & Leadership Personal Finance Science
Episodes
  • Who Will Be Fashion’s Netflix? How Microfactories Could Rewrite the Supply Chain. With RefashionD Ventures Founder Lisa Morales-Hellebo

    Who Will Be Fashion’s Netflix? How Microfactories Could Rewrite the Supply Chain. With RefashionD Ventures Founder Lisa Morales-Hellebo
    18 Oct 2026
    Who Will Be Fashion’s Netflix? How Microfactories Could Rewrite the Supply ChainWhat happens when fashion no longer needs months of lead time, giant production runs or even a traditional brand to bring a product to market? Refashiond Ventures founder Lisa Morales-Hellebo believes the answer will be built around microfactories, distributed production and a new generation of creators.The fashion industry talks endlessly about transformation. New materials. Recycling technologies. AI-powered design. Digital product passports. Nearshoring. On-demand manufacturing.Yet beneath all of this innovation sits a much harder question: who is actually willing to change the system?For Lisa Morales-Hellebo, founder of Refashiond Ventures, expecting the answer to come from incumbent brands misses the point.“You’re asking a legacy industry to disrupt itself, which has never in history happened,” she says.It is a statement that gets to the heart of one of fashion’s biggest innovation problems. The technologies needed to build a faster, more resilient and potentially much less wasteful supply chain are increasingly available. The harder task is creating a market around them before the existing industry is ready to fundamentally change how it operates.That is where microfactories become interesting.From sewing to supply-chain investingMorales-Hellebo’s interest in manufacturing predates her career as an investor.She grew up around sewing and making things herself, before spending decades in technology and experiencing Silicon Valley during the first dot-com boom. Around 1999 and 2000, she worked on mass customization, personalization and on-demand micromanufacturing across beauty and consumer products.Long before on-demand production became a fashionable investment thesis, she saw what happened when production could move closer to the customer and respond directly to demand.That experience eventually led her into fashion technology, the New York Fashion Tech Lab and, later, Refashiond Ventures.Today, Refashiond invests across data and AI, advanced materials, advanced manufacturing and next-generation logistics and supply chains. Its first fund deliberately used small checks — typically $25,000 — to build a broad portfolio and learn where the firm could create the most value. It now includes 76 companies.But one category has increasingly captured Morales-Hellebo’s attention: microfactories.Refashiond now has five of them in its portfolio.That is not an accident.The microfactory as a different industrial modelA microfactory is often described simply as a smaller factory. That undersells the idea.The more interesting versions combine automation, software, localized manufacturing and flexible production into systems that can produce economically at much smaller volumes.Guildform, one of Refashiond’s portfolio companies, applies the model to fine jewelry. Its Detroit facility combines 3D printing, digital manufacturing tools, hand finishing and an operating system designed around on-demand production.The significance is not simply that jewelry can be produced locally.The company connects the creative process directly to manufacturing. A creator can develop a concept, translate it into production-ready data and move toward manufacturing without navigating the conventional chain of designers, sourcing teams, factories, minimum order quantities and months of inventory planning.That compression of the supply chain is appearing elsewhere in the portfolio.Mothership Materials is developing modular technology capable of separating plant waste into multiple usable feedstocks. Simplifyber is developing a manufacturing process that can turn cellulose-based material into finished soft-good forms while eliminating several conventional textile-production steps.Morales-Hellebo’s long-term vision is modular: production systems that can sit close to the available feedstock and close to the point of demand.Instead of a supply chain extending across continents and dependent on numerous specialized facilities, she imagines systems in which a limited number of modular technologies can produce raw materials and convert them into finished products locally.The underlying investment thesis is not merely sustainability.It is resilience.“The only certainty is risk,” Morales-Hellebo says.Pandemics, wars, tariffs, climate disruption, migration and geopolitical instability have made the fragility of global supply chains impossible to ignore. A business can have strong demand and excellent technology, but if a critical input disappears, none of that matters.The most valuable production technology may therefore be the one that eliminates dependencies altogether.Start with the creator, not the incumbentThis is also where the conversation around market size needs to change.New manufacturing technologies are frequently evaluated by asking how quickly Nike, Inditex, H&M or another major global brand will adopt them.For investors, the ...
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    45 min
  • The Unexpected Role of China in Scaling Climate Tech - with BioFluff CEO Luke Henning

    The Unexpected Role of China in Scaling Climate Tech - with BioFluff CEO Luke Henning
    5 Oct 2026
    The textile industry has spent the past decade producing an extraordinary number of new materials, recycling technologies and manufacturing concepts. The challenge is increasingly no longer whether these technologies can work, but whether they can reach industrial scale at a price the market can absorb.That was one of the central themes of Carl Warkentin’s conversation with Luke Henning, CEO of BioFluff and former Chief Business Officer of textile recycler Circ. Henning has worked on both sides of the scaling equation: first with a recycling company requiring large industrial plants and significant project financing, and now with a material company deliberately designed to use much of the manufacturing infrastructure that already exists.Replacing animals without replacing them with oilBioFluff is developing alternatives to animal fur and fossil-based synthetic materials using natural fibers such as hemp, flax and nettle, alongside a PLA-based material made from plant sugars. The company’s proposition goes beyond replacing fur. As Henning puts it, many products described as “vegan” have simply replaced animal materials with polyester, shifting the problem toward a material derived from petrochemicals.“Polyester is oil, people.”This becomes particularly relevant in categories far beyond fashion. BioFluff is also working in toys, interiors and home goods, where synthetic fibers are used in products that people touch every day. Henning described how becoming a parent changed the way he thought about plush toys and blankets made from highly shedding synthetic fibers. Concerns around microplastics are therefore beginning to move the conversation away from sustainability as an abstract environmental issue and toward the materials people surround themselves with in their homes.“I just surrounded and swaddled my kids in super shedders of microplastics.”At the same time, replacing polyester is not as simple as finding something that biodegrades as quickly as possible. Materials still have to perform. A toy, blanket or garment needs to remain stable and durable throughout its useful life while offering a better end-of-life pathway afterwards. That balance between performance during use and degradation after use remains one of the harder material-science questions behind many supposedly simple sustainability claims.What makes BioFluff particularly interesting from a scaling perspective, however, is that it does not require an entirely new industrial system. Its materials can largely be produced using existing machinery and established manufacturing partners. That significantly reduces the capital required to commercialize the technology and allows customers to buy through procurement systems they already understand. Henning argues that many sustainable technologies make adoption unnecessarily difficult because they try to change the material, the manufacturing process and the customer’s business model at the same time.Why CapEx changes the path to marketThis creates a very different risk profile from industrial textile recycling. A recycling company building its first commercial facility may need hundreds of millions of dollars before meaningful volumes can be produced. Because the factory does not yet exist, future demand often has to be secured through off-take agreements that help convince investors and lenders that the eventual capacity will have a market. BioFluff can instead work toward ordinary purchase orders because its production capacity already exists within its manufacturing network. Over the past two years, the company says it has reduced costs by more than 60 percent and reached pricing comparable with premium polyester in some applications.The difference goes further than the amount of money that has to be raised. A capital-intensive recycler may spend years engineering, financing and constructing its first commercial plant before discovering exactly how customers respond to the final product, price and quality at scale. A business built around existing production assets can move through that feedback loop much earlier, using commercial samples and purchase orders rather than trying to predict demand several years before production begins.The comparison highlights a wider issue for climate technology: capital intensity determines how many assumptions need to be proven before commercial sales can begin. Companies that can use existing factories, suppliers and customer relationships can learn from the market much earlier than companies that first need to finance and construct an industrial plant.The same need for realism applies to new recycling technologies. Henning regularly speaks with founders who believe they have developed a novel process without fully considering how much competing technology already exists or how long the journey from laboratory scale to commercial production will take. Textile recycling has moved well beyond a blank-sheet technology problem. New entrants ...
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    57 min
  • Making Sustainability Human: Storytelling, Systems Change and Nature with Breitling CSO Aurelia Figueroa

    Making Sustainability Human: Storytelling, Systems Change and Nature with Breitling CSO Aurelia Figueroa
    10 Aug 2026

    Security is the word everyone is using right now, but the surprising truth is that it keeps pointing straight back to sustainability. Carl sits down with Aurelia, a chief sustainability officer and systems thinker, to map where sustainability stands in 2026 after the hype cycle and the hard reality check that followed. We talk about what’s actually progressing (the energy transition and renewables scaling faster than most headlines suggest) and what’s still dangerously behind (nature regeneration, valuing ecosystems, and the widening gap of wealth inequality).

    We get specific about why inequality can derail climate policy and why “just transition” can’t be a slogan. Aurelia shares a vivid on-the-ground lesson from the Yellow Vest movement era in France and explains why the success or failure of sustainability often comes down to trust, coalitions, and whether people feel they’re being asked to sacrifice without a believable payoff. That leads to a core idea: science-based evidence is essential, but leading with data alone won’t move society. Stories will. We dig into what a useful sustainability narrative sounds like, including real scenarios that show what life can look like on the other side of change.

    You’ll also hear an inside look at corporate sustainability in global luxury brands, from high-risk upstream supply chains to responsible sourcing shifts like artisanal small-scale gold and lab-grown diamonds. We cover why startups are a non-negotiable ingredient for circular economy progress, how communities like Imagine and Villars help leaders stay brave, and how reconnecting to nature can reshape the way we lead. If this conversation sharpens your thinking, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find it.

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    41 min
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