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How a Nylon Recycling Upstart Won Over Etam and Victoria’s Secret With ‘Powder in a Test Tube’
Jasmin Malik Chua
5 min read
There are perhaps few things more unsexy than a powder-filled test tube. Nevertheless, a single glance at the piece of lab equipment was more or less enough to sway two of the world’s largest lingerie firms into deciding that this was where the future of their undergarments lay.
Syntetica was a mere four months old at the time. Another four months later, the Paris-based nylon recycling startup has clinched 4.2 million euros ($4.6 million) in a seed round led by EQT Ventures, with participation from the family foundations of Peugeot and Etam, Volta Circle, Better Angle, Pareto Holdings, Athletico Ventures, Bear Flag Capital, Formula-E racer Jean-Éric Vergne, IDEC Group CEO Patrice Lafargue and tennis champ Paul-Henri Mathieu.
The aforementioned Etam, France’s No. 1 maker of unmentionables, along with its American counterpart Victoria’s Secret, have inked commercial agreements to help Syntetica finesse its material and ensure that it’s up to snuff before the company transitions from its current lab-scale to a planned “pre-industrial” demonstration plant in early 2026, likely also in France, which is in the midst of reindustrialization efforts. Other brands and retailers have expressed equally exuberant levels of interest, including a major fast fashion player that is within a hair’s inch of officially signing on. All of this has been a ringing endorsement for a business strategist and a scientist who only recently found each other at a “Love Island” for co-founders, as CEO Marco Bertone put it, referring to the popular British dating reality show.
Staggering under a pile of PhDs and post-doctorates, Louis Monsigny, now Syntetica’s chief technology officer, had engineered a chemical catalyst that could break down plastic. After bonding over their mutual desire to create impact, Bertone and Monsigny cycled through several industries before landing on fashion as one that could benefit the most.
Nylon, as it turned out, is a “killer pain point,” Bertone said. While most of the lingerie and sportswear firms that the duo spoke to had paths forward with reducing polyester and cotton waste, nylon kept coming up as a material with few obvious solutions, particularly since it’s usually blended with elastane—the bane of textile recyclers everywhere—for extra stretch or adjustability, say in a pair of leggings or a bra. Most recycling processes seek to melt everything down into a bunch of inseparable goop. Syntetica’s technology, on the other hand, promises to selectively recover the nylon through a combination of low-temperature depolymerization and green chemistry.
When Etam and Victoria’s Secret saw that the company was able to “recycle an entire bra” by extracting all of the nylon monomers, leaving behind cotton and elastane, they were “pretty struck,” Bertone said. Those monomers, once divested of dyestuffs, can go on to generate new nylon, he added. Etam is now planning to create a capsule collection made with nylon derived from lingerie castoffs that it will collect through a takeback scheme and make commercially available in 2026. For Synetica, recouping the elastane, which is “exactly the same quality as it was before,” is a possible next step, though it’s more focused on hitting industrial scale with its recycled nylon by 2029, preferably with at least one plant in Asia, where the bulk of lingerie production takes place.
Bertone said that what Syntetica does is in a league of its own. Most nylon recyclers require high-purity feedstocks, which is why so many focus on abandoned fishing nets and used carpeting. Others might turn to enzymes that nosh away at plastic, though such bespoke biological processes can be difficult to scale because “you need a plant to grow the enzyme and a plant to recycle,” he said. Syntetica, on the other hand, “takes the best of both worlds” by having the selectivity of an enzymatic recycler but with the “scalability of chemistry” because it employs off-the-shelf ingredients, Bertone said.
There might even be a David-versus-Goliath story to tell as chemical juggernauts like BASF slowly pivot into the space. Syntetica’s goal is to have zero premium on its offering—that is, after taking into account extended producer responsibility fees, carbon taxes and such—by minimizing waste collection and sortation costs and leaning into the technology’s low energy use. “We know brands won’t pay a premium,” Bertone said. And what nylon is is a “volume game” because it’s effectively a commodity.
Its potential for addressing the textile waste problem aside, Syntetica has other things going for it, Bertone said.
“One thing that’s been quite unique about our overall commercial approach is to have a very clear idea of where to go and what we wanted to propose in the long term very early on,” he said. “And I think that was something that was able to, with a scientist and a commercial person holding powder in a test tube, convince the two biggest lingerie companies in the world to invest.”
The relationship goes both ways, too. Bertone and Monsigny have no interest in helping brands create short-term green halos. Indeed, Syntetica has turned down several brands that appeared to only want to do a “bit of marketing,” rather than create long-term, systemic change. This will continue its tack as it looks to diversify in sectors such as automotive, where EPR rules are already locked in.
“Both Victoria’s Secret and Etam are typical examples of companies that are genuinely engaged in switching their entire consumption to recycled, with the innovation contracts and the capsule collection being a step toward getting there,” Bertone said. “It’s a step that can bring about a nice story, a nice marketing opportunity, but a step, nevertheless, toward significant quantities of material.”
