Futures 100 Innovators : September

Futures 100 Innovators Awards

This month, we uncover the next 10 names to watch as part of our Futures 100 Innovators Awards, highlighting the brands, businesses and people innovating for change – and a better, more resilient future.

In the final longlist of our 2023 Futures 100 Innovators, we reveal The Future Laboratory’s chosen innovators and change-makers who are set to disrupt the lifestyle categories in 2023 and beyond.

Each month, we profile 10 brands, businesses and people that our team of researchers and analysts have identified as driving forward innovation across multiple industries, ranging from beauty and wellness to luxury, design, retail and travel.

In October 2023, our complete Futures 100 Innovators list will be presented to a panel of industry judges who will select and award their 10 leading innovators.

September’s future-shapers include a luxury material innovator, a start-up that may revolutionise reproductive treatments and an e-commerce tech platform using authentic consumer-generated videos for brands.

Published by:

29 September 2023

Author: The Future Laboratory

Image: The Future Laboratory

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Left: Bite Studios, Sweden Right: Sablos magazine, UK

Fashion: Veronika Kant and William Lundgren, Bite

Bite was founded in Stockholm in 2016 by business partners William Lundgren and Veronika Kant. Its collections are made from 99.5% organic and low-impact material, making it a leader in material sustainability in luxury fashion. This is the kind of clothing we believe will exemplify a new era of Recrafted Luxury.

Bite sits at the crossroads of uncompromising sustainability and expressive minimalistic designs. ‘We aren’t aiming to produce green products; we are dedicated to creating the world’s finest products,’ the founders tell LS:N Global. Recognising the responsibility fashion must bear in the fight against climate change, Bite’s founders don’t want consumers to feel at fault. ‘We want to be a brand that inspires consumers to change instead of blaming them.’

Bite now has its sights set on progressing in material innovations and is also looking at developing digital tech solutions to track every item it produces.

Travel & Hospitality: Saul Taylor, Sablos

Having worked as a writer at Wallpaper magazine and later as one of the founding editors of Monocle magazine, Saul Taylor has been immersed in travel, hospitality and leisure for nearly 25 years. Despite his work experience and personal travels around the globe, he found that no travel magazine gave good, authentic insights by locals into their cities, which is why he launched Sablos.

Sablos tells the stories of places around the world through the people that know them best – interesting and creative characters, including musicians, architects, artists and more. Positioning the travel resource as the anti-TripAdvisor, Taylor hopes that through Sablos’s editorial content, which will all be framed as Q&As, people will explore cities away from tourist traps, instead eating, drinking and living like real locals.

Its three media streams – print, website and an app – will offer a 360-degree media environment, and the app will offer integrated booking services and queue-jumping options for paid subscribers at restaurants, venues and more.

BioPuff by Saltyco. Winner of Global Change Award 2022, Sweden

Design: Julian Ellis-Brown, Neloufar Taheri, Antonia Jara Contreras and Finlay Duncan, Saltyco

Despite the name of its signature product, BioPuff, this is one sustainability-focused fashion brand that isn’t full of hot air. Saltyco is a Bristol, UK-based materials science company that makes planet-positive textiles, co-founded by Julian Ellis-Brown, Neloufar Taheri, Antonia Jara Contreras and Finlay Duncan. Its production methods include actively healing damaged eco-systems and farmland through innovative processes.

Saltyco’s BioPuff was officially launched in August 2023 and is a registered plant-based fibre fill material made from bulrush that is light, warm and biodegradable. It offers a viable alternative to goose and duck down feather fillings as well as polyester and nylon. The environmental impact of manufacturing clothing from bulrush is a fraction of that of conventional fibres and Saltyco’s BioPuff has already won H&M Foundation’s Global Change Award 2022 and previously created an exclusive collection with e-tailer Yoox’s private label in 2021, making it an exciting brand to keep an eye on.

Health & Wellness: Matt Krisiloff, Conception

Conception is the brainchild of Matt Krisiloff, a Silicon Valley-based tech-entrepreneur, whose start-up is studying how to transform stem cells into human eggs, offering a new solution in the world of fertility. Conception is working on a new technology named in-vitro gametogenesis (IVG) that could give women the opportunity to have children well into their 40s and 50s, while also mitigating the obstacles preventing couples suffering from infertility from having children in the future. If successful, it could also allow male couples to have biological children.

The team at Conception have already found this reproductive treatment to successfully work on mice eggs – producing healthy, live mice – and are now translating this technology to humans. Conception also believes that this technology can be used in the long run for genetic screening of embryos, potentially eliminating or reducing the risk of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, heart disease and types of cancer.

‘We want to be a brand that inspires consumers to change instead of blaming them.’

Veronika Kant and William Lundgren, Bite

Left: Sage Lenier, US. Right: Louis Poulsen and Home in Heven, US.

Retail: Brian Beitler, Sune

Sune is a new experiential shopping platform that combines entertaining videos, engaging live-streams and exciting product drops. Designed to integrate video, traditional online and in-app shopping, Sune aims to transform the world of retail, especially for digitally native Gen Z consumers who seek exhilaration at every touchpoint of their shopping journey.

Sune’s founder Brian Beitler is also the general manager of Live Shop Ventures (part of Qurate Retail Group) and has previously served as chief marketing officer for QVC US. With more than 20 years of experience across marketing, business development and strategy, Beitler is well placed to provide consumers with ever-more engaging ways to shop – the kind of EQ-Commerce experience we outline in our retail macrotrend.

Youth: Sage Lenier

At age 19, Sage Lenier was so fed up with climate doomerism that she decided to take action herself. In autumn 2018, she launched a UC Berkeley course focused on the feelings of guilt and hopelessness surrounding climate change. The student-led course, Solutions for a Sustainable and Just Future, was so popular that it grew from 25 enrolled students to a 300-person lecture hall. Eventually it catered for 1,800 students.

Since then, Lenier’s programme has been launched by Zero Waste USA as a one-time course that participants can access virtually, and in February 2023, Lenier further expanded its focus and launched the programme as a non-profit organisation delivering her solutions-focused curriculum to universities, high schools, businesses and communities. Now, she plans to launch a podcast and a YouTube series, ensuring her courses are accessible to a larger audience.

Co-founders of Hue Beauty, Janvi Shah, Nicole Clay and Sylvan Guo, US.

Luxury: Peter Dupont and Breanna Box, Heven

Peter Dupont and Breanna Box are a Brooklyn, New York-based couple and the co-founders of Heven, a mix of object design inspired by theatrical prop styling. They view the world as a series of props and therefore decided to add their own humour, originality and functionality to objects.

With Heven, the pair aim to create works that make the home a happy domain to return to. From goth-inspired drip wine glasses to asymmetrical coffee tables, Heven plays with everyday items, giving them a surrealist, luxury makeover.

Danish brand Coperni already invited Dupont and Box to recreate its signature Swipe bag for its autumn/winter 2022 show, which was given the Heven makeover, including a set of devilish horns sitting atop a glass iteration of the bag – carried on the runway by supermodel Gigi Hadid. While the price point makes these items strictly a luxury affair, Dupont and Box’s creativity is worth the price tag, while their aesthetic will no doubt prove to be influential.

Beauty: Janvi Shah, Nicole Clay and Sylvan Guo, Hue

Janvi Shah is the co-founder and CEO of Hue, an e-commerce technology platform on a mission to help all shoppers feel represented in their online shopping journeys. She co-founded Hue with two of her classmates, Nicole Clay and Sylvan Guo, while studying for her MBA at Harvard Business School.

Hue helps brands use authentic, customer-generated video reviews across all commerce channels. It is a response to the plethora of expert influencers, especially on platforms like TikTok. ‘Hue’s platform makes it easy for brands to create the people-first shopping experience that customers want to see,.’ Shah tells LS:N Global. Hue was launched in August 2022 with Credo Beauty, a leading clean beauty retailer, and has been growing rapidly since.

Hue’s community has grown to 2,000 highly engaged creators, proudly representing a diversity of gender, sexuality, age and ethnicity. Shah, who led the venture capital funding process, pitched to 70 investors before receiving her first yes. Now, she’s focused on expanding Hue to other categories including apparel and accessories.

Left: Claire Ratinon. Photography by Christian Cassiel, UK. Right: Steward, US.

Food & Drink: Claire Ratinon

Claire Ratinon is an East Sussex, UK-based organic food grower and writer. She has grown organic vegetables for renowned chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s London restaurant as well as his other London eatery, Rovi. She has also previously shared her growing journey in talks at organisations including The Barbican, Tate Liverpool and more.

In June 2022, she wrote Unearthed: On Race and Roots, and How the Soil Taught Me I Belong, a powerful memoir that builds a connection between Ratinon’s diasporic identity and the power of the natural world. It also looks at how food-growing intersects with environmentalism, colonialism and the climate crisis. The book helped Ratinon find a sense of homecoming, defiant ancestry and deep purpose in the company of the roots, leaves and fruit she grows.

Media & Technology: Lydia Pang, Maria li and Sophia Li, Steward

Steward is a global digital art collective that connects eight global artists with eight major eco-systems of the natural world in order to fund eight climate non-profit organisations – with a focus on conservation and Indigenous communities. It was co-founded by New York-based multimedia journalist Sophia Li, Singapore-based start-up leader Maria Li and Lydia Pang, who lives in Wales and is a co-founder of creative strategy studio Morning.

Steward lives at the intersection between climate solutions and decentralised Web3, a position it has called Climate 3.0. It looks at Web3 as a response to centralised capitalism, monopolised hyper-consumerism and extractive colonialism. ‘Web3 and blockchain technology are tools to further climate solutions by infusing the principles of transparency and decentralisation,’ the co-founders tell LS:N Global. It uses on-chain digital art to close the funding gap. The founders also prioritise bringing marginalised communities and artists on board.

Steward follows the belief that the convergence of physical and digital worlds is the biggest transition of the 21st century. According to Li, Li and Pang, the current digital landscapes is at odds with nature, and they hope Steward can bridge this gap. They believe humanity should be at the centre of engineering algorithms and turn to their own identities as women of colour to guide their future endeavours.

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