Blue Cast: Sarah Bellos on Growing Plant-Based Indigo Accessibility
Indigo dyeing may have originated with plants, but often the blue hue used for jeans is far from natural. Sarah Bellos is on a mission to bring indigo dyeing back to its plant-based roots.
Based in Tennessee, Sarah is the founder and CEO of Stony Creek Colors, a creator of natural colorant solutions. She has an agricultural background via a degree in Natural Resources Management from Cornell University, and she also worked in food and agriculture. Before founding Stony Creek, Sarah worked at a textile dye house, which gave her a firsthand view of the challenges of scaling natural dyeing and making it accessible—from a lack of consistency to price points that fit clients’ budgets.
“Starting [Stony Creek] was really informed by my experience as a farmer but also in appreciating that small batch dye work wasn’t going to get us where we needed to go,” said Sarah.
In the most recent episode of our Blue Cast podcast, Sarah explained that much of Stony Creek’s work is focused on removing these barriers by innovating in areas like plant genetics, agronomy and engineering. For instance, a mechanical harvesting system and year-round extractions removed one hurdle.
“Indigo has been a crazy seasonal crop that always had to be processed very close to where it was grown,” said Sarah. “And so removing that barrier is such a huge opportunity to drive down the cost of production and really make it more and more accessible to brands.”
One of the company’s recent innovations is the first plant-based pre-reduced indigo, including a collaboration with Levi Strauss to scale it up.
Yet another part of Stony Creek’s accessibility push is a home dyeing kit, allowing consumers and denim enthusiasts to DIY their own indigo creations.
Currently, Sarah says 99.9 percent of indigo used in the industry is synthetic. But to replace all the synthetic indigo in the world, it would take merely 1 percent of the current acreage used for rotating cotton crops. However, she estimates that it will take at least a decade to scale crops to be able to supplant half of synthetic indigo.
“Now that we know more about synthetic Indigo and some of the potential dangers of carcinogens like aniline in our clothing that end up in both the finished goods as well as finished indigo, it is important to be looking for alternatives that are regenerative and are going to be positive and profitable for the brand as well as for the workers in the supply chain,” Sarah said.
Listen to the episode here.
BLUE CAST by TENCEL™, a podcast series created on Carved in Blue by the TENCEL™ denim team sharing in-depth talks to the denim community at large, and the Fashion Impact Fund, a charitable fund supporting women entrepreneurs to accelerate the fashion industry’s transition to an ecosystem that values people and planet, have collaborated on a special edition five-part podcast series named ‘Solutionist’ in honor of Women’s History Month.