Ep. 122: ‘New-era’ of sportswear

This transcription has been AI generated and therefore may have some inaccuracies.

Ep. 122: ‘New-era’ of sportswear

The Textile Innovation Podcast speaks with Stephen Bates, CEO of Rheon Labs.

WTiN: Hello and welcome to textile innovation hosted by WTiN My name is Abi, and I'm the Features Editor and your podcast host. Each month, we will be joined by a special guest to join me and my colleagues as we deep dive into what's new, what's interesting, and what admissible innovations have hit the market recently, we cover everything on the podcast, from sustainability to start ups and the latest research and development, plus we quiz the experts in the field about their products and ideas across the huge spectrum that is the textile industry. So no matter what your interest is. WTiN have you covered, and we can connect you to everything you need to know right here from our central hub in the UK.

In this episode, I am joined by Stephen Bates, CEO of Rheon Labs, based in London. Rheon Labs was born out of NASA and developed for over 15 years at Imperial College, the company has created Rheon, an energy absorbing super material that is naturally soft and flexible. Throughout our conversation, Stephen explains how the super polymer, super material has been developed its impact, and how it has been integrated into the textile and apparel industry with a particular focus on sportswear.

Hi Steven. Thank you for joining me today on WTiN's textile innovation podcast, please. Could you tell me a bit more about real labs, background, what prompted its initiation, and how you and the technology invented Anne came together to further your development.

Bates: Sure. Abi, yeah, it's a story starts about seven years ago I was introduced to Dan. He'd set up a really, very, very successful research group embedded within Imperial College in London. He'd worked for many years on a very interesting range of materials that have unusual properties. We'll talk more about those, I'm sure, in a moment. But all of his research had focused on their practical application in impact, particularly head and body protection, and it has a huge set of benefits in that area. My background, although similar to Dan's originally, had moved into the world of technology strategy. I'd worked at a big garment retailer, and one of the things that I'd become aware of was the shortcomings in the category of sports bras, because ultimately, it's a garment category that would really benefit from, let's call it dynamic textiles, so textiles that have dynamic properties. Now for me, it was a light bulb moment, because I'd appreciated that opportunity in a years previously, I was introduced to Dan. We got talking, we have a mutual background in material science, and I realised that if what he'd done could be converted into the world of textiles, are you working in tension rather than compression, because all of his work had been an impact, and there was a huge game changing opportunity there. So compressing a lot of activity into a short period of time, I formed the view that this was something that I should get involved in. I teamed up with Dan. I rapidly realized that the right way to commercialize this was an ingredient technology brand. I went out visited an old friend of mine who worked in Gore in Munich, to ask him about the history of how gore-tex was created within the gore organization, came back from Munich, formed the business, created the brand, and, you know, to some extent, the rest is history, but that was how it started, was the meeting of two, two different worlds, as it were, that made that opportunity suddenly come to light.

WTiN: That's fantastic. That's really interesting. And you mentioned about being like an ingredient technology brand I've seen on real labs that you have something you speak about an energy absorbing super polymer. Could you please tell us a bit more about what that is and what it does?

Bates: Yeah, sure. I mean, the super polymer is a kind of a description that I suppose the market has used for us, so we kind of play it back. But this was, in a sense, Dan's original innovation, and the best way of explaining it is, you know, as I said, I have a background in material science, one of the most extraordinary things that happens when you take pure materials is that they behave strangely when you mix them. And we're surrounded by this all the time, and probably don't even appreciate it, because we probably have an awareness of the word alloy, for example, within the world of metals, if you mix two metals, and let's take copper and tin, they're both quite soft. You mix them, you end up with brass, which is really hard and really strong. And it's just because you've mixed them, because what happens when you mix things is sometimes they interact with each other in a way that. Creates really interesting and very useful properties. If you take that idea into the world of polymers, you can mix soft things and they interact with each other in a way that makes them able to behave in a very unusual way. And in the case of the real material, the reason why they call it a super polymer is that softness exists when you move it slowly, but it doesn't remain soft when you try to change its shape quickly, try to change it so quickly, and it behaves like something that's much stronger, much stiffer, and that's the dynamic property that I was alluding to earlier. And it constantly changes. Just depends on how quickly you're changing its shape.

WTiN: And could you further explain, like, why is it flexible in that natural state, and how does it absorb the energy to stiffen when subjected to force?

Bates: Yeah, and again, it's a great question, so probably the best way of answering it is, I'll have to take you to the beach, quite literally, if you run along a beach, the right place to run is just where the water is lapping on the sand. And at that point, it's remarkably hard. And you can run almost as though you're running on a road. If you go up the beach into the soft sand, it's really hard work. If you go into the water, into the sloshy mixture of water and sand. Again, it's really soft and it's really hard work. So why is it that just at that point in the middle you've got something that's behaving like it's much harder? The reason is you've got a mixture. Again, we're back to the world of mixtures, a mixture of sand and water in just the right combination to behave in the way that our polymers behave, which means you try to squash it quickly when your foot lands on it as you're running, and it resists. It behaves like a hard surface. You move up or down the beach, you're into a different ratio. That mixture is different, and it no longer behaves in that sort of stiff way. Now that's a phenomenon which we probably have all experienced, although probably never even asked ourselves why it happens. But of course, it's not particularly useful, except when you're running on the beach. And it certainly can't be used in tension, because if you try to pull wet sand, it just falls apart. What makes our material do? What it does is, number one, that strange effect of it being a mixture. And secondly, that you can use it and you can use it intention, and that's why we can do, you know, actually valuable and useful things with it.

WTiN: I love this picture of the beach, but can you tell me why that makes it ideal for active wear apparel?

Bates: Yeah, all products, when you design them, you design them to a set of requirements. You know, we talk about requirement specifications. You sort of work out what you want to achieve, and then you design a product that meets those requirements. The problem with many products, and active wear or garments are definitely in this category is that you have to define that requirement in a very kind of simplistic way. It's not real world. So let's, for example, just focus on the issue of compression in a garment, so that the effect of an elastane fiber in a garment. There's a whole variety of benefits that you get from compression, but you don't just want one level of compression. You'd really like a garment that compressed more in a certain moment than it did in a different moment. But in in the world of specifying, you can't specify, at least you couldn't until today, but you couldn't specify a range of compressions. You had to specify some compromise. So you pick some middle sort of ranking level of compression. And that's not real world. The real world is constantly varying. So if you want adaptive compression, so this is now compression that varies depending on what you're doing, then you can specify a range, and now you can improve all situations. So in that position where you'd really like less compression, then you can have less, or you'd really like more, well you can have more. So you can add in comfort, which tends to be less compression, and add in support, which tends to be more compression, but you're not doing it in a kind of static fashion. So a garment is adapting in a way that allows that that range to be provided, and the benefits of that I've talked about comfort for sure, but also you can boost the benefits of compression without the discomfort of it. And the marginal gains that you get from some of the benefits of controlling body movement a particular muscle movement are really significant. When we talk about 1% gains in the benefits of controlling muscle movement, you got to appreciate. 1% improvement on a marathon is a minute and a half for the elite athletes, and a great deal more for the most of us who are running those distances. But also, if you step into the world of sports bra and you look at the difference between poor breast support versus effective breast support, you could be talking about four centimetres of Stride reduction. So in a female athlete who's not getting the benefits of good performance from a sports bra, reduces their stride length by four centimetres. That's adding a mile to the marathon. In effect.

WTiN: And how have you adapted for active wear? And what were the main challenges you had to overcome while developing the polymers and applying them to your commercial products?

Bates: Yeah, we talked earlier about real world. You know, when you take new technology into the real world, you know, it has to work, and it's and it's more than just doing what it does at a kind of a technology level. It has to work in the real world. So we had to ensure that the polymers we were going to take into this industry would be usable on the factory floor. They would integrate into a garment in a way that was understood and effective. They would they would survive a wash, wear cycle in all the practical issues that that surround so the garment industry, and the simplest way to do that in the first phase of our business development was to create a thin film that that film can be effectively heat laminated into the fiber, so we can press it under heat and pressure so it really blends and mixes with the with the fiber in the fabric, and it changes the way that that fiber, that fabric, behaves. And that's a relatively straightforward way to integrate the technology in the first instance, and that's what we're doing right now. We're part way through and actually making really good progress with taking that technology to a fiber level. Best way of thinking about that, if you imagine sort of like an active Lycra, so a Lycra that would stretch slowly but not stretch quickly, and by integrating it at the fiber level, we can combine it with conventional elastane fibres and get it into a fabric without that secondary lamination process.

WTiN: Amazing. And I've seen that Rion says energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be wasted. What? What does this mean to you, and how does it apply to your textiles?

Bates: Sure, it's a look. There's a very serious message in there, but there's a little bit of sort of flippancy on the top. If it's true that energy can't be created or destroyed, it's sort of, it's the first law of thermodynamics, but there's no doubt it can be wasted anyone we'll go back to the beach for a moment. If you like, anyone who's run on soft sand or tried to run up a sand dune, knows what it's like when you're when you're wasting energy, because you're all you're all you're doing is you're just moving the sand around. You're not making progress. And conversely, to work running on a on a firm surface, it feels, you know, incredibly different. So if there is energy to be wasted in the activity of sport, for example, we can reduce that now in the context of muscle movement, if you can imagine, every time you land, your muscles wobble as a result of the shock of that landing. No matter how good your shoes are, you're going to get that wobble effect, and your body has to correct that. It has to bring those muscles back to the position where they're going to be most effective for you to take the next stride. Now, if you can stop that wobble from being as severe by as it were, catching those muscles, holding them at the moment of impact, so that they don't wobble out a position they're more aligned with the skeleton at the point where you stride again, then you are going to conserve energy. You're going to avoid the body wasting energy, and that energy is there for the rest of the run or the rest of the game or whatever you're involved in. So as we say, we can't create energy, but we can definitely avoid it being wasted, and that will give the athlete a lower level fatigue, greater endurance. And ultimately, you know, the potential for greater speed.

WTiN: Amazing, and kind of going off that real lab said that effective energy control was previously impossible with conventional materials, and you just touch on it then, but in terms of how you flip this and what how you flip this book, could you tell me what opportunities you foresee in this category?

Bates: Yeah, look, it goes back to what I was saying earlier about this compromise in design. You know, when you are looking. Looking at specifying a product, and even if we just stay, for the moment, in the world of garments. But I mean, the applicability the technology is way wider than just the garment industry. But let's just stay with the world of garments for a moment. There's this compromise. You've got to choose Levels of support or comfort, and that's what you designed to but if you could be free of that constraint, then you can start to think about things in a very different way. When we've written in huge letters down our reception area, so that everybody walks past this as they come into the office in the morning in London, it says, Rethink possible, because you have to unlearn what you have previously thought to be the way the world works if you're going to embrace this idea of dynamic materials. I mean, for example, the mere fact that we use the term sports bra is indicative of what's wrong. The garment should just work. So why should there be a garment that we that we wear for sport, and a different garment that we're saying you wear when you're not playing sport. I mean, why doesn't it just not work? And I think that's the point. So we've created a category that is born out of this assumption that there is this compromise that can't be avoided. So what we're saying is that what you thought was impossible previously is now possible. It's just about designing in a different way. And the reason why it's now possible is that where you know, we've all played with that strange material, silly putty, which is kind of fun, but it's not very useful because you can't really do anything with it. It's just a child's toy, what we've done is we've brought that extraordinary behaviour into the real world, you can now use it. It is practical. It is something that you can specify and design into a product, and it delivers the sort of benefits that that we've described. And with the world moving more and more to activities with even greater stop, start movements than running has, I mean, I'm thinking about the sports of football, basketball, tennis, these are all becoming much, much more popular. There's a great deal more stop start movement which causes more of these unwanted movements that you know, that we can help control. So it is very much a material of its age,

WTiN: And delving further into that, into Leon's ranges and partnerships, obviously you've touched upon the sports bra. But please, could you tell me more about your recent saw marathon speed shots and the products created with Adidas?

Bates: Yeah, we started off the journey with a desire to really demonstrate the technology on the kind of world stage. And so the opportunity to partner with one of the largest sports brands in Adidas and create products that would ultimately win marathons and be on the on the bodies of athletes at the Paris Olympics was just a fantastic opportunity, and that's what happened. We ended up with, weeks after the launch of the technology, we were on the legs of the New York Marathon winner. We were then on the London Marathon winner. We ended up with, I think, 33 medal performances at the Paris Olympics on various athletes. And it continues. We think, very recently, anyone who's seen that extraordinary Australian athlete, gout, gout, break the Australian 200 meter record he did so in that pair of re on shorts. So we were loving the visibility that that's giving us, and on the back of that visibility, the credibility that the organization gained from that partnership, of course, we've had a whole load of interest, and we're working with a wide range of other other partners today. The first of those to come to market is a really interesting brand. Saw running. They've really honed in on the benefits of the technology in distance running. They've created a marathon short it's the next generation from a design point of view. So, you know, we're learning all the time. So it's a it's a more refined version of the technology, and it's a great product. The saw running team are all super athletes in their own right. They all went out the prototypes. All of them got personal best. So they came back at where, you know, we're convinced, and the product is selling incredibly well as a result.

WTiN: Oh, that's brilliant, and that's fantastic. All those winning, all those main athletes wearing your product. Amazing. You've probably sent in my necklace question, but I'm going to ask it anyways. What feedback have you had for the products? And can you tell me what demand has been like?

Bates: Yeah, sure. Look, I mean, we talked a lot about the benefits of having sort of pro athletes wearing this technology on the world stage. Of course, that's fantastic for us, for the for the team here, but also for the visibility of the business. But you know, the mainstream is what this is all about. And. And and being able to remove this compromise in product design is again the essence of what the business is all about. And the overwhelming reaction when people try the products that are benefiting from this technology is that sense of getting two things that were previously at odds or mutually exclusive, so getting comfort, but also getting support. I mean, it's we did some third party testing with one of the one of the world centres for bra Research at the University of Portsmouth, and it confirmed this view, that you can improve, I mean, significantly improve breast support. You can take a, you know, medium support bra to a high support category, but do so without any additional compression. So you're maintaining comfort, but you're delivering a higher level of support, and that is a variable quality. So the garment is is changing while you're while you're sort of placing different demands on it as you wear it. And the sports bra that we did as part of the range of products we've added us, and we're only starting really to deliver that technology in that garment category at the moment. But reviewers like I think Lily canter at running matters. She said, It's just game changing, and that's a term that we hear people use all the time, because it's, as he said, it's taking away this compromise and making people realize that actually garments have been under delivering historically, and now they can, now they can really step up and keep pace with the athlete.

WTiN: That's fantastic. Steven, could you tell me how you put that user data at the heart of your design?

Bates: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, it's a really interesting question, because it's, it's the hidden secret behind much of what we do, because it's we know we're not just a materials technology business. We don't just have an extraordinary technology. We've also got an extraordinary way of implementing it, because there is a technique called generative design, where you are taking a data set that defines the problem, and you're using that data set directly to drive an AI system that designs the solution. Then we talk about the body designing its own solution, because what we do is we in the case of sports bra, for example, but female athlete on the treadmill will ask her to run at different speeds, and we will measure using 3d motion capture, will measure body movement. We will then use that data that effectively defines the problem, because you want to reduce those movements, or reduce those accelerations of the body, and that data set is used to create the Rheon solution on a garment. So we only put material where it has a benefit. And therefore the designs, which are very eye catching, yes, they have an aesthetic. They have a very appealing aesthetic. But actually it's not an aesthetic that we seek to create. It is actually a highly functional design. And whether it's embedded in the sports bra, whether it's a pair of running shorts, every gram of material in there is doing something useful, and by definition, there's no material in there that's doing something that isn't useful. So it's a very efficient design process, and it's super quick, because once you've got the data, the design is literally created in in seconds.

WTiN: That's amazing. And How scalable is this design process? And how do you believe it could revolutionize sportswear sector moving forward?

Bates: Yeah, look, it's there's two sides to this. The design process, as you can tell from the from the sort of the automated nature of it is highly scalable, but the manufacturing piece is the really important question. And the way we set that up, our business allows to be highly scalable. We are entirely outsourced in terms of a manufacturing organization, so we benefit from established manufacturing capability, and indeed, that manufacturing capability can be anywhere in the world, is wherever our customers want it to be. Because one of the one of the reasons why this is such an interesting innovation is that whilst it's an extraordinary material, it's incredibly ordinary in a factory. So it uses existing equipment, existing processes. We use it in a slightly different way, but all of the equipment and all the capability is in place, so we can go to film factories or molding facilities or heat pressing facilities, and we're just using all of the capability and equipment that's already invested in and already in place, so It is highly scalable.

WTiN: What benefits does that brings to the sportswear category?

Bates: I think what it's doing for the sportswear category is giving them a way to almost admit to and address this inherent compromise that I spoke about you. Simply having a range of garments, for example, that give different levels of support feels like why should we have to choose? And if you could give a garment to somebody that says, Yeah, whatever you do, it's going to react to you and give you the level of comfort or support that's appropriate in the moment. It's a bit like saying you know, we're going to offer you clothes that change so you don't have to change your clothes. I mean, it's just, that's the point. You want the garment to work. You know, if I was, if I was giving out, saying that somebody and saying, right, yeah, you can wear that all day. You can run to the bus, you can go out and play badminton, and you then go dancing tonight, and it's going to feel like the right thing for you, whatever you're doing that feels like an opportunity for for an enlightened garment brand to be able to say one thing, does everything, and that's what we tend to want. To be able to offer.

WTiN: Amazing. And looking forward, do you have any other products or collaborations that Rion is working on at the moment, that's in the pipeline that you might be able to share with us today?

Bates: Yeah, we've certainly got a whole range of other partners that we're collaborating with, as you can imagine, on the back of the visibility that the business has had, I can't undermine the launch plans that those partners have, but please do watch this space, that there's going to be quite a lot of stuff that's going to that's going to be emerging in the coming, coming months. There's one area I can talk about because that has broken cover, the same almost the same material, has the benefit of being class leading in vibration damping. And we've got a partnership already with a brand of paddle rackets, which is an incredibly fast growing sport business called Macron, that have put our material into a into a paddle racket. And I think we're going to see that application of our technology used in sports equipment more widely. We still work in the world of head and body protection. We've got a significant business in that area as well, and you can expect to see a whole range of things emerging from the organization that are the interface between those two worlds. Because, for example, we can build armour into a pair of cycling shorts that make them highly flexible, so very thin, very flexible, body armour and cycling shorts. So you might be seeing that emerging in in the near future.

WTiN: That's very exciting. Lots of things to look forward to. And finally, Stephen, can I ask you, What is the vision for real labs as you move forward?

Bates: Yeah, well, it takes me right back to the beginning of this conversation. Abby, when I went out to speak to Gore in Munich, Gore Tex is the brand that we all know. WL, Gore is the business. Only 15% of WL Gore's income comes from Gore Tex. There's an enormous business that benefits from their know how their technology that is unbranded, but there is a real sense of best in class that comes from an awareness of that brand within consumers. So my vision is that the Reon brand synonymizes The new category that we're creating, this category of energy control materials, or dynamic materials, we become known for that category, and we're synonymous with it. There are so many applications for our technology in unbranded markets that we can grow into those in the future with the credibility that re on brand will give us so into the electronics industry, the automotive industry, aerospace, medical, these won't be branded products. I'm not expecting to see the re on hang tag on a on an iPhone, but I could well imagine our material inside that phone doing something very useful, and that's very much the vision for the business. So it's about building that brand and then growing the organization into all of those other applications in the future.

WTiN: That's brilliant. There's a lot to look forward to there. Thank you so much, Steven for joining me today in the WTiN podcast, and we kind of wait to see what else comes.

Bates: Thanks, Abi. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

WTiN: Thank you so much for listening. If you have any questions, you can reach out over x formally, Twitter at WTiN, comment or contact me directly at Abby underscore WTiN, if you are interested in sponsoring an episode of the podcast, please email sales at WTiN.com thank you for listening, and we'll see you next month.