This year’s winner of the H&M and ELLE Conscious Award is Vividye, a new technology that makes it possible to dye off and on clothes to give them new life. Gustav Larsson-Utas, Johanna Nissén Karlsson and Eric Henriksson Martí are the trio behind the newly started company that wants to change the textile industry.
Vividye technology has now been under development for around 4 years. The concept behind it was conceived by Anna-Karin Hellström and Romain Bordes, two researchers working at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. They wanted to come up with a dyeing method that was suitable for the circularity goals the textile industry is so much in need for. With that in mind, they started working on creating a resource-efficient and safe pigment-based dyeing technology that could be used to apply all sorts of colors and designs to textiles. Unlike other dyeing methods used in the industry today, Vividye is designed to facilitate the removal of the applied color when it is no longer wanted without harming the material. In other words, it makes it possible to decolor and recolor old textiles, giving them a new life.
Vividye technology has so far been successfully applied via wet dyeing and digital printing on cellulose-based fabric in a laboratory setting, and is performing really well. Vividye now plans on focusing our development efforts on making our inkjet inks compatible with certain commercial digital printers, as well as making it possible for our products to be used on additional textile materials.
