Blue Cast: Gozen’s Sedef Uncu Aki on Growing a ‘New Material Reality’
Blue Cast is a podcast series from the TENCEL™ Denim team. Each episode features a conversation with a special guest from within the industry or the fringes of the denim community. The following is a recap of Episode 515.
Usually when new material innovations are introduced, they are touted as a substitute for a conventional material—for instance, a faux leather. But rather than being a replacement for traditional textile fibers, Gozen’s Lunaform is going a step further with the goal of building a “new material reality,” explained the startup’s CEO Dr. Sedef Uncu Aki on the latest episode of our Blue Cast podcast.
Lunaform may have a cellulosic structure, but it does not resemble the plant-based cellulosic materials that designers are more used to working with, like TENCEL™ Lyocell, cotton or hemp. The creation of Lunaform leverages “BioCraft technology.” Using advanced fermentation, Gozen places microorganisms in 13-square-foot trays of water, and the living creatures create a lattice structure. The resulting bio-based jelly-like sheet is then dried and finished with dyes, embossing or prints. This process takes a mere seven days, compared to the much longer growing cycles for plant fibers.
“Lunaform is not just a new material,” Sedef told host Tuncay Kilickan. “It represents a fundamentally different way of making, or, I should say, growing materials. It reshapes how we think about sourcing, manufacturing and sustainability. So shifting legacy systems to embrace this kind of change takes time, and we need collaboration and a shared vision,”
Gozen’s 40,000-square-foot production facility in Türkiye can currently create 150,000 square feet of Lunaform per year, and the company is looking to scale capacity to 1 million square feet annually by 2028.
At the helm of the quickly scaling startup is Sedef, who joined as chief product officer in 2024 and took on the CEO role in May. She came to Gozen with about a quarter century’s worth of experience in textiles, including stints at Turkish denim mills Bossa and Orta.
Although still a young company, Lunaform has already hit the market via big-name collaborations like Balenciaga’s maxi bathrobe coat introduced last year. A whopping 200 customers are in the pipeline.
As Sedef noted, any efforts to change consumption patterns are stalling, so companies should focus on making lower impact products. Materials are a great place to start, since they at minimum account for 45 percent of a product’s impact. Green gains alone don’t sell, so the aesthetic needs to speak to buyers. “The product needs to be beautiful [and appealing] first…and then comes the sustainability story,” she said.
Lunaform has a number of design benefits that help make this case. It has a nice drape, but it also holds its shape. Much like wood, each sheet of Lunaform has its own grain, making them unique. Although lightweight at 0.2 millimeters thickness, Lunaform’s strength rivals leather. For use cases where a thicker textile is needed, such as leathergoods, Lunaform can be laminated onto a backing textile made of fibers like cotton or TENCEL™ Lyocell to give it more heft and a thickness of up to 1.2 millimeters. Inherently transparent, the material can take dyes such as natural indigo.
Not everyone is working with Balenciaga-level budgets or margins. Although Lunaform’s price point is currently more of a fit for premium brands, the goal is to widen the audience as volumes grow.
“As we scale up production, we are seeing a near future where we can offer comparable prices. Our aim is not just to produce a niche product that only one segment of the industries can buy,” said Sedef. “We need to really create a big impact, so we know that we need to reach that price point that the mass market can use.”
Listen to the full episode here.