L.A. designer desires to shake up the leather seat business

Vicki von Holzhausen has been making a title for herself internet marketing a vegan leather-based substitute for women’s purses, shoes and household furniture.

Now, she’s getting her substance to the vehicle company.

Late previous 12 months, von Holzhausen, the name of her Los Angeles product lab and design and style residence, manufactured vegan seat addresses for a specifically made variation of the Tesla Model S Plaid on display at the Petersen Automotive Museum.

The designer can make very clear — she is not a provider to Tesla. But the undertaking served as discover to automakers and to Tier 1 interior suppliers that von Holzhausen is in the dwelling.

“There’s unquestionably a need from buyers for this,” she advised Automotive Information.

“We are a material innovation corporation,” von Holzhausen said, giving her elevator explanation of the organization she started to assemble in 2015. “We create subsequent-era products that switch the two leather-based and plastic. We generate points out of our resources in order to assist persons fully grasp how to swap these incumbent products.”

Why would automakers be intrigued in replacing these supplies?

Von Holzhausen, whose profession took her by way of style and design roles at Audi, Mercedes-Benz and Normal Motors, reported a change has started in international automotive supplies. And it just so occurs that this shift aligns with her have worldview.

“This has been a lifelong issue for me, because I’ve been a vegetarian considering that 19, and I have been vegan all by means of the system of commencing and setting up this company,” von Holzhausen stated. “I have always been pretty concerned about sustainability and the ethical cure of animals. So producing new components that seriously go over and above that has been a personalized journey.”

The development of vegetarian diet plans amongst consumers has fueled the change, whilst automakers are issuing new marching orders to their offer chains to embrace pieces and materials that are environmentally benign, sustainable and recyclable.

“The marketplace wishes to move absent from petroleum plastics,” claimed von Holzhausen. “You can’t place untreated leather-based in a motor vehicle inside. It has no functionality. So you’re actually speaking about leather layered with petroleum plastics.”

Von Holzhausen’s innovation can be summed up in a person phrase — bamboo, the woody, rapid-growing plant solid more than enough to provide as creating product and, in some Asian cities, as multistory scaffolding for function on skyscrapers.

By the miracles of chemistry and content engineering, the von Holzhausen crew converts “banbu,” as they contact it, into supple applications that are as soft as lambskin.

Bamboo leather-based is not 100 per cent plant, but extra like 83 %. The vital for von Holzhausen is that its banbu is now competent for automotive applications.