This webinar is a special celebration edition for Nico's 50 Birthday, so we are covering Nico's favorite subject: biotechnology for footwear. She also has some special gifts to share, so watch the video trailer to the end!

Our first guest in this webinar is Pete Lankford, former 3D lead of Timberland and independent footwear sustainability consultant. Together with Nico he is hosting our brand new course Circular Footwear: Business and Design Strategies, which will be launched this Saturday.   This course is meant for footwear companies - from big corporations to startups - that want to know how to build a realistic roadmap towards circularity.

How to make a shift towards business and design systems that are enabling biodegradation and composting, is one of the main subjects that we will be talking about in this course. That is why we have invited 3 guests that are truly reinventing the future of footwear through biotechnology:

Stephen Mayfield, PhD and Tom Cooke are leading Algenesis, a biotech company that is reinventing polymers for footwear, with the aim of making a 100% biobased polyurethane that is suitable for midsoles.

They are well on there way towards their goal and will talk about their achievements so far and their future plans.

Aniela Hotink is a highly experienced commercial apparel designer that has been pushing the boundaries of biotechnology for textile since 2008 and has received international recognition for her MycoTEX material, for which she won H&M's Global Change Award in 2018.

Since recently she has been focusing on developing an entirely new method of manufacturing that makes mycelium very suitable for the footwear industry and that could be used in an automated production process.

We are also introducing our new online digital design courses in this webinar and if you are eager to follow those - or any of our other courses - then be sure to join live this Saturday, because Nico is giving away some spectacular discount codes, but only in the live version!

Nico's Biotech Footwear Birthday Party!