Syntetica

Syntetica sits between two industries that don't look anything alike. On one side, chemical majors like BASF, where the visual language is safety orange and stock photography. On the other, the fashion brands they need as partners. The brand had to work for both, and for the press, investors, and chemists they needed to recruit. Scaling climate tech is capital intensive and slow, so looking the part is essential to buy you time and get you buy-in. That was the brief.

Sustainability has a look, and it isn’t a good one. Ask anyone to picture something eco-conscious and they’ll land somewhere earnest and a little drab. That’s the choice most green brands hand people: look good, or do good. So we went the other way. Syntetica doesn’t ask anyone to give anything up. Change the planet, without changing habits. That became the platform, and Beautiful Chemistry became the endline that carries it, science and style treated as one thing rather than a compromise between two. The tagline does the same work on the material itself. Nylon’s problem is that it lasts forever. Said another way, that’s the whole appeal: we make nylon go on and on and on.

We flew to Reims with photographer Nicolas Kern to capture Marco and Louis in their lab. The lab was small, so we worked tight: flasks, beakers, the reactor where the process actually happens, shot close enough that the equipment stops reading as equipment. The instinct in deep tech is to photograph a lab like documentation. We lit it like a campaign instead, and the constraint became the look. For what a camera can’t reach, we built a set of 3D visuals. Glass forms that hold color like a solution, spheres that separate and recombine, all of it sitting on the brand gradients. Molecular behavior without a single diagram.

Nylon was introduced to the world as a miracle of modern science, so the film opens by borrowing that voice. Scratched black and white footage, a brassy period announcer, brush script title cards. The pitch runs exactly as it would have then. A little crude oil, a whole lot of energy. Lasts forever. Non-biodegradable. Then the reel hits the landfill and the tape rewinds, because the line that sold nylon is the reason it’s still sitting there. From that break the film moves into the present, into gradients, 3D, and the lab, and lands where the brand does. We make nylon go on and on and on.

The brand launched in two stages. Identity, photography, and a landing page went live with Syntetica's €4.2M seed announcement in July 2024, about four weeks after concept sign-off. The full website and the brand film followed a few months later. Two years on, Syntetica has raised a $30M Series A led by Bpifrance, with Lululemon, MAS Holdings, EQT Ventures, and SWEN Capital Partners participating. They’ve added Victoria’s Secret to a partner list that already included Etam, and signed a partnership with Michelin’s Center for Sustainable Materials to build a commercial demonstration facility in Clermont-Ferrand.