The colour black is everywhere. From our phones to our cars to the ink in our pens. But black has a dark side. Every black thing you own is likely to contain carbon black – a pigment derived from petroleum. The way carbon black is made isn’t sustainable. Vast tracts of land called tar sands are stripped of all life and vegetation to extract the heavy petroleum, while the production process creates significant greenhouse gases. So we’re on a mission to replace it with the world’s first black algae dye.

While we’ve garment dyed simple clothes like t shirts and henleys in big baths of black algae before, we hadn’t tried fully submerging anything as complex as a fully finished three-layered, thermobonded jacket, with a core built from eucalyptus. And it turns out that when you submerge pulped eucalyptus in a giant bath of black algae, it reacts by violently shrinking. This then causes the outer layers of the jacket to fold over and bubble. And while the jacket stays beautifully soft, it creates an organic texture that looks halfway between a tree trunk and elephant skin.