The Federal Trade Commission has approved "renoa" as a new generic textile fiber name, the first such approval in 25 years, clearing the way for the three-year-old startup Everbloom to market a cashmere-like material made from waste protein.
Renoa is produced by grinding scraps of cashmere and wool, along with feather and down fluff discarded by the bedding industry, into a powder, blending it with a biodegradable biopolymer, and extruding the mixture into fiber. Everbloom's first commercial products are likely to be blends of roughly 80 percent cashmere and 20 percent renoa, and chief executive Sim Gulati expects the first market-ready items by the second quarter of 2027. A hands-on test by a TechCrunch reporter, who wore a sweater, gloves and scarf made from the blend through months of washing and drying, found no pilling or shrinking, with a feel close to pure cashmere.
A boom colliding with its limits
The approval arrives amid a broader cashmere boom among both luxury houses like Brunello Cucinelli and Loro Piana and mass retailers such as Quince, a surge in demand that has intensified scrutiny of the environmental cost of goat grazing, which has been linked to degradation of rangeland across Central Asia. Renoa is pitched explicitly as a way to stretch a finite, environmentally costly fiber further without diluting its feel, by using material — scrap wool and down — that would otherwise be discarded.
The FTC's generic fiber names are the legal basis for how a garment's content can be labeled; without an approved name, a manufacturer cannot describe a new fiber accurately on a care tag, which has effectively kept novel textiles out of mainstream retail. Everbloom's approval gives it a labeling path that none of its materials-science competitors currently have, though the company still needs to scale production well beyond its current pilot capacity before its claims about cost and feel are tested at commercial volume.
