Vegea at 10: How a garage experiment became a pioneering bio-materials company
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A decade after its founding in Milan, Italy, Vegea, the bio-material company, has not only survived but thrived. Winner of the 2017 H&M Foundation Global Change Award, the company leveraged its grant and mentorship to industrialize the production of GrapeSkin, a grape-skin-based leather alternative derived from the by-products of winemaking (skins, seeds, and stalks). Matching traditional leather in aesthetic and technical properties, GrapeSkin is customizable in thickness, finish, and texture, making it usable for applications from handbags and footwear to car interiors and notebooks.
While other bio-materials projects from Bolt Threads' Mylo to MycoWorks' Reishi and Modern Meadow's Zoa have ceased operations or pivoted away from their original vision, Vegea's GrapeSkin has quietly gone from strength to strength. Earlier this year, the company completed a 1.5 million euro operational expansion, increasing GrapeSkin production capacity from 10,000 to 50,000 square meters per year, with installed equipment scalable to 500,000 square meters. With a broad client list, including names such as Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Ferragamo, Superga, Geox, Bentley, Diadora, and Ganni, it's evident Vegea's GrapeSkin remains in high demand. Ahead of the launch of a new, furniture-specific material at Lineapelle this coming September, FashionUnited spoke with Marco Valtolina, partner and head of R&D at Vegea, to learn more about its path to success, how it has grown over the past decade, and what bio-materials commercialisation actually looks like when it works.
Where it all began: A garage in Milan
A material scientist, Valtolina was recruited by Francesco Merlino, co-founder of Vegea and an industrial chemist, in 2021. Although he was not present during the early years of the company's founding, Merlino shared a lot of his stories with him. "It's true that the company started in a garage," Valtolina confirms over Zoom. Merlino spent two years between 2013 and 2015 experimenting with lignocellulosic biomass from marc, the main waste of the wine industry, in the hopes of creating a bio-based formulation that could substitute for the conventional polymers used in synthetic leather production.
The breakthrough that would go on to define Vegea was technical. The synthetic leather industry, together with sportswear and other coated textiles, relies on a specific industrial coating process with strict requirements on layering and curing. Rather than develop an entirely new production method, the duo designed a bio-compound whose chemistry behaves like the conventional polymers the process is built around. As Valtolina explains, the bio-material had to be "in line with the requirements of [the] coating process because that can't be changed." It was a deliberate constraint, and it turned out to be the right one. By ensuring the chemistry behind GrapeSkin directly fits into the industrial production, which Vegea oversees within its own production facility, the company was able to industrialise far faster than potential rivals attempting more radical departures.
The impact of winning the Global Change Award
The technology behind GrapeSkin was patented in 2016, the same year the company was founded, but to scale, financial backing was needed. As GrapeSkin was applicable to the fashion industry, Vegea entered the Global Change Award, a challenge for early-stage innovations that have the potential to accelerate the industry's shift to a circular, climate-positive, and net-zero future, founded by the non-profit H&M Foundation. In 2017, Vegea was named the first-place winner of the Global Change Award, receiving a grant of 300,000 euros and access to a one-year accelerator program with Accenture and KTH. The win gave Vegea significant editorial and market visibility, helping it land its first luxury customers and gain access to its target audience. Valtolina specifically credits the Global Change Award with funding the company's first production plant.
But when asked whether Vegea would be where it is today without the award, his answer was unexpectedly measured. "Probably, yes," he said. "I think that our position in the market today would be the same, because we have also won prizes from the European Commission. We innovate a lot, thanks in part to the patents on our technology, and we've been able to build on those patents thanks to the European Commission and public funding for sustainability." A nuanced take, his viewpoint does reframe the idea that H&M discovered Vegea and put it on the map, arguably a more useful viewpoint for the bio-materials industry as a whole. Considering the fact that Vegea has been carefully expanding, investing in its own production facilities and fine-tuning its formula over the last decade, it seems likely that the company could have found commercial success without the award. Its long-term, slow-burn approach also highlights why Vegea is still standing, while many of its bio-material peers are not.
Why Vegea is still expanding & going from strengthen to strengthen
The bio-leather field has not been an easy one over the past decade, and several of the most hyped projects have stalled or shut down. California-based Bolt Threads, known for its mycelium-based Mylo, paused production in 2023 after failing to reach commercial scale, despite high-profile backing from Stella McCartney, Adidas, and Lululemon. MycoWorks raised 125 million dollars in venture capital in 2022 to build a 136,000-square-foot Reishi (its mycelium-based leather alternative) production plant in South Carolina, but the facility never ran above 22 percent of capacity. In October 2025, the company shut the plant, moving away from manufacturing to processing, became insolvent within days, and was liquidated, despite previous partnerships with Hermès, Yume Yume, and GM Ventures. Piñatex, one of the earliest mainstream plant-based leathers, also lost ground; its petroleum-based PU coating undercut its sustainability story, durability lagged behind full-grain leather, and scale was capped by pineapple-fibre yield. Its parent company, Ananas Anam, filed for administration in August 2025.
When asked why Valtolina thinks Vegea has managed to stay the course, he attributes it to three main factors, the first being technical. Many competitors, he said, produce traditional synthetic leather with bio-based filler added in, enough to legally call the end product bio-based, but with the underlying chemistry still being conventional. GrapeSkin differs as its production process embeds the bio content in the coating chemistry itself, which is the part of the material that defines how it performs.
The second factor is industrial. Vegea is 100 percent made in Italy, with the company following every step of the production chain internally rather than outsourcing key processes. That gives the company much tighter quality control and a clear, traceable story for luxury clients, particularly those buying into the made-in-Italy positioning as a category of value. In addition, Vegea scaled its production incrementally, using EU public funding rather than venture capital, with technology designed to fit existing coating processes rather than requiring a dedicated manufacturing build-out.
The third factor is commercial. Vegea sells directly to its customers without intermediaries or third parties involved, including sample-volume orders to small designers and stylists, not just to luxury houses or automotive brands. As Vegea materials can be used across a wide range of applications, from fashion to furnishing, automotive and packaging, the company has built a broader, more resilient client base than competitors, created almost entirely around a handful of large brand contracts. This scoop has further cemented Vegea's decision to remain in the top end of the market, rather than chase volume or lower prices.
Vegea’s luxury positioning, by design
Vegea’s main product, GrapeSkin, sits firmly at the luxury end of the spectrum when it comes to bio-materials, costing roughly 50 to 100 euros per square metre. When questioned whether the increased production capabilities would potentially lead to a lower price, Valtolina was direct about why it would not. "It's not up to us. Our final price depends on the prices of additives and bio-based materials, which are not cheap." Raw material, the wine waste, is essentially free, but additive costs anchor pricing in the luxury tier. Valtolina does not see this as a restraint, and describes the luxury end of the market in the fashion, automotive, and interior sectors as having "a lot of potential," with enough headroom to grow production ten times with current plant capacity. With confidence that the demand for its products will only increase in the future, Vegea is planning ahead.
What's next for Vegea?
Its next move takes the company into a new category entirely. Vegea plans to reveal a new furniture-specific bio-material at Lineapelle, running from September 15 to 17, in Milan. Developed together with what Valtolina described only as "a big company that is well known in Italy," the material is entirely separate from GrapeSkin, with different flammability and mechanical resistance properties designed for sofas and design objects. R&D on the new product started immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic, and Vegea has not yet decided whether to launch it under its existing brand or a new one, adds Valtolina.
Looking further than its upcoming launch at Lineapelle, Vegea has set its longer-term goals on the automotive industry. Vegea has already produced concept-car capsules for Bentley and Maserati and is working toward a fully auto-industry-compliant material. In addition, Valtolina hopes the company will be able to consolidate all production lines into a single facility in the not-too-distant future, so they can eventually host customer visits. The company also plans to hire five to ten additional staff members per year, including building out a dedicated certification office to handle the volume of ISO and carbon-footprint certifications demanded by luxury clients.
A decade on, Vegea shows that lasting success in bio-materials isn't about a single breakthrough, but rather more about patents, public funding, disciplined production, and pricing the material at what it can realistically deliver.