From dyeing with soundwaves, via natural indigo and new fibres, head of product innovation Paul Dillinger explains how Wellthread collections operate as a type of R&D hub, laying the groundwork for successful main line interpretations, including the first Circular 501s.

Keeping “eyes and ears open” is part of the remit for Levi’s Wellthread team, and it was in Barcelona at the International Textile Machinery Exhibition (ITMA) that they encountered the technology company that has enabled recent collections to be dyed using sound waves. Used in collaboration with Stony Creek Colors’ natural indigo, the sonic dyeing process helps the dye penetrate the fibres without the need for the heavy-metal mordants often used to fix organic or mineral colours. “For lack of a better word, it ‘vibrates’ the colour into the into fibre, rather than having to score the surface of the fibre – so it's replacing the mordant with sound,” Paul Dillinger, Levi Strauss & Co.’s global head of product innovation, tells us. “It doesn’t use chemistry so there's no question about whether it's benign chemistry or toxic chemistry. It’s a really exciting new technology.”

Discovering new technologies, chemistry and fibres are the basis of the Wellthread collections, which offer a space for Levi’s designers and developers to test ideas and innovations with supply chain partners. Wellthread was initially set up as part of Levi’s brand Dockers more than 10 years ago, under the watchful eye of Mr Dillinger, and moved under the main company’s umbrella in 2015.

The Stony Creek Colors partnership was announced at the end of last year, with the companies working to scale up the indigo grown on farms in the US – a kind of homecoming for Levi’s, whose original jeans were dyed with plant-based indigo. A new pre-reduced form called IndiGold will enable the dye to work as a drop-in replacement for synthetic indigo – a “really exciting evolution”, says Mr Dillinger. “There's no special equipment required, no special processing; a dye house can acquire and drop it in, it’s a one-for-one replacement.”

Circular 501s

One of the most recent and significant evolutions has been the launch of the Circular 501s, a recyclable interpretation of its most iconic design, built on the Wellthread team’s work with Swedish textiles company Renewcell. Its Circulose pulp is made from dissolved denim and textiles waste and from this, new fibres are formed. Levi’s blended Circulose with wood pulp and organic cotton, made pocketing details, labels and threads from 100% organic cotton, and dyed and finished the line using its Water<Less programme to create a jean which has a reduced environmental impact and is designed to be remade.

Wellthread launched two Circulose-containing fits in 2020, to check the fibre would move through the supply chain system without disruption. “We can't introduce great new sustainable ideas that are going to break the looms or that are going to be unspinnable or make it harder to dye,” explains Mr Dillinger. “Sustainability is too important for us to allow it to be associated with disruptive production, so Wellthread is scaled small so that we don't make potentially big mistakes. But when we figure out something valuable like Circulose, we immediately ask, ‘How can we make this bigger?’ That's what you're seeing with the Circular 501, which are orders of magnitude larger in scale of production and distribution; it’s available globally and it's a dual gender offering with multiple finishes. It's becoming a real part of the assortment.”

The next challenge will be securing subsequent supplies of Circulose, as more companies become interested and begin to compete on price. The textile-to-textile recycling sector is growing rapidly (see article ‘Keeping cotton in the loop’), and these types of companies are scaling up nascent technology, creating partnerships and working on ways of securing decent feedstock. However, Levi’s is not putting all its eggs into this basket as a material source – “it’s a very full basket and we are interested in many of the technologies, but there is a maximum blend level of viscose we’re comfortable with to make it still feel like a jean”; that level is 40% for the Circular 501. The company has worked with Evrnu’s regenerated cellulosics and is testing the potential of others. “We’re excited to see their developments, but there’s also the need for a healthy natural cycle as well as the technical cycle – healthier fibres like cottonised hemp.”

Hemp’s natural appeal

Levi’s was one of the first brands to invest heavily in research and development in hemp. While some of the industry buzz around the fibre appears to have quietened over the past year or so, Levi’s is scaling up its use “considerably”. Hemp’s natural properties and favourable impact profile in terms of yield per acre, the minimal use of pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers, as well as rainfed opportunities, are added to a macroeconomic construct that means a hemp garment has a significantly lower import duty into the US than a similar cotton one, explains Mr Dillinger. “You can leverage these sorts of hiccups in trade policy and come up with a highly favourable cost of goods for using sustainable, natural fibres.”

The success Levi’s is having with hemp – from 12,000 garments to 1 million in less than two years – is a direct result of the lengthy testing process. When the first collection was released through Wellthread in spring 2019, there had already been five years of R&D behind it, working on hand feel, yarn elongation and spinning. “We finally launched a commercial proposition that felt like butter, it was so soft because we had spent so much time managing the enzymes for softening and making it a viable proposition. We don’t just have an idea and then six months later, it appears in store, it takes a lot of work to make sure we have something the consumer will really want. We also have a brand to protect, we have to protect the equity of that product franchise as much we're protecting the environment.”

Cultivating change

This is where the beauty of Wellthread comes in, he says: it isn’t tied into short development cycles, so ideas can be cultivated over years rather than months. “We don't hold ourselves to the expectation it is going to yield a new sustainability solution every season. When you start treating sustainability as ‘fast sustainability’ you can start valuing it is as much as you value fast fashion, which isn't very much.”

The company is also “not giving up on” cotton, researching regenerative agricultural techniques that will help restore biodiversity, sequester more carbon and work with natural cycles through crop rotation. And it is a fan of transitional organic cotton (it can take up to three years to convert conventional to organic) as an answer to tight supplies, and will be introducing it into more collections going forward.

For the consumer, at $128 in the US, the price point of the Circular 501 is slightly higher than the other lines, but Mr Dillinger points out that many customers in Europe are already acclimated to that level and there hasn’t been resistance, and this might just be what a jean should cost. “We are confident that each of the decisions that have gone into the production and the design are the right decisions. The slight pricing premium that the Circular 501 takes on might just give us a view of what the industry in the future needs to look like, which is fewer, better things.”

Data-driven decisions

This message was central to the recent marketing campaign ‘Buy better, wear longer’, which encouraged customers to be more mindful of their choices, to buy second-hand or extend the life of the garment through repairs. All these initiatives combine to create better products, and ones whose impact can be more quickly understood as a result of thanks to new technology and approaches to data management. Instead of a five-year lifecycle assessment calendar, it is now possible to receive targeted data at individual product level to enable a quicker understanding.

“It's exciting to see some of the behind-the-scenes work on impact evaluation coming online,” explains Mr Dillinger, on which evolutions he predicts next. “Rather than a hypothetical impact, we can quantify value or, conversely, if a product doesn’t have value, we know that quicker. Nothing is going to change the look and feel of a pair of jeans just yet and we’re still going to be making jeans for a while, but we're going to get better and faster about understanding our relative impact of making those jeans.”

The impact of the innovation and testing through the Wellthread collections starts to make a big difference when they launch into the main lines: hemp started in Wellthread in 2019 and was in the main collection by autumn-winter 2020; Circulose-containing products appeared in July 2020 and reached the shelves as the Circular 501 at the start of this year. Similarly, the intention with Stony Creek Colors is to apply the learnings around dye application and costing and bring those into the main collections eventually. “That’s just the inevitable process of the work that we do,” concludes Mr Dillinger. “If we’re trying to solve an important problem, solving it at the Wellthread scale means we learn a lot but we don't have a lot of impact. Impact comes from scaling up for the main line, for Red Tab, and that's always the goal: to create impact.” 

Photo credit: Levi Strauss & Co

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