Eureka 445: The shape-shifting polymer that rethinks what’s possible in materials

0:15You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio, brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. I'm Tom Edwards. Stephen Bates is the co-founder and CEO of Rion Labs, a London-based materials company developing energy-absorbing technology to better support and protect the body. At the heart of their work is a patented superpolymer that's soft and flexible in motion but stiffens under impact to absorb energy. It's clever and elegant science with a wide range of applications. Rion's technology is found in everything from running gear to gridiron helmets to body armour for elite motorcyclists and mountain bikers.

0:56Stephen stopped by Midori House to discuss how they're rethinking what's possible for materials, the challenges and opportunities of collaborating with big-name partners, and the fine art of knowing when and where to compromise. He began by telling me about their multiple Eureka moments. You know, businesses like ours are often formed from Eureka moments, and we've had quite a few of them along the way. But the one you refer to is, in a sense, it's the Eureka moment that was the bringing together of two people, myself and the technology founder, Dan Plant. Now, we hadn't met until the beginning of the business, but about 15 years earlier, we'd both had very different Eureka moments, actually very, very different, as you'll hear in a moment, but at roughly about the same time, surprisingly.

1:39Dan was off-road motorcycle racing in the south of France. he had taken a decision to wear some uncomfortable body armor it was very hot and he was in two minds as to whether he was going to wear it well thank goodness he did because he had what could have been a life-changing experience when a motorcycle landed on him in the race and he survived because he was wearing a back protector now what then happened i suppose was a much better life-changing moment was he started to think if i hadn't worn this that would have been a disaster but the reason why I was thinking of not wearing it was because it wasn't comfortable, it wasn't breathable.

2:17How could I make something that was soft and breathable, but still protect me? And he then went off on a void of discovery, mixing polymers together with a bunch of people that he was working with in the States. And fast forward, and I'm a material scientist, and it hurts me not to give you all the details. But the reality is, he came up with a formulation that can behave in a very different way depending on what you do with it. Now at the same time but miles away in London in Baker Street I was tasked with looking at the game-changing solution to the growing category that is sports bra and actually therein lies an interesting issue the fact that we call that garment a sports bra is itself inherent in the problem.

2:58The only reason we call it a sports bra is because the female athlete has to change the garment in order for it to work for the activity because what you really want is clothes that change rather than having to change your clothes. And so we've called this garment sports bra because we compromise on comfort in order to deliver support. So we went off as a technology strategy function within M &S, which was what I was running, and asked ourselves, how do you deliver those two things which are inherently linked? The answer is, simply speaking, you need a dynamic textile. You need a textile that stretches slowly, doesn't stretch fast.

3:34So it's comfortable stretching slowly, but when you need support, it resists that and effectively holds soft tissue movement. And that's support. Now, it wasn't available. We had a good look around. There was nothing around. But it never left my mind that that was a game-changing technology if you could ever come up with it. So fast forward in our 15 years ahead, Dan and I have been introduced to each other, which was interesting in its own right, a story for another day. And I realized that even though his technology was very good for head and body protection, and to be clear, our business now still acts in those markets, still delivers probably the best body armor around.

4:11What I realized is if we could take that technology and somehow integrate it into textiles, we could make a dynamic textile. And so we set off to create a business to do that. Now, one of the things that I did straight away was realize that ingredient branding was the way to build this organization. I took Dan to meet a friend of mine who worked at Gore-Tex in Munich. Lewis told us the story of their business, how less than 15 % of their revenues are branded. The vast majority of their revenues are unbranded, and I could see that opportunity for us. But, of course, they succeed in those unbranded markets because everybody knows the name.

4:50So it's like the ultimate calling card. So we needed a name. So we spent a lot of time, drank a lot of coffee, came up with the name Rion, which we chose for lots of reasons, not least of which that it's not used for anything else anywhere else in the world. And we started off exploiting the technology in the sports industry. And in doing so, sought other companies with very strong brands that we could partner with that would take us into all the various different areas of the technology. I love this. As you said, it's not just one. There's probably two or three light bulb moments. and it has the kind of mad professor component.

5:25And just to interrogate that, you've already alluded to it, but a reactive, dynamic constituent parts. It's formulated from superpolymers. Now, I know you can't sort of give us the entire, you can't reveal all the trade secrets, but a little bit on process and what this is. What is the tech that enables those functions you've described? Just briefly give us, because we've probably got some material scientists listening in, Stephen, chances are. Humor them with giving them a bit of the insider skinny. The simplest way of thinking about our material, it's like the plastic version of an alloy. Now, an alloy is a mixture of metals.

5:57You mix two metals, you get a property that is unlike the property of any of the individual ones. We all understand brass. It's nice and strong. You can make bells out of it. It's a mixture of copper and tin, both of which are soft. How does that happen? Well, let's not explain how that happens, but the point is you can do it with plastics. And that's what Dan did. He mixed polymers and he created a polymer that's soft when you move it slowly, but stiffens very dramatically when you move it fast. And that characteristic, we call it strain rate sensitivity. We've all seen it. We've all experienced it, even if we don't realize it.

6:30And one experience you can have of this is running on the beach. If you run just where water and sand meet, it's hard. And if you run on that, it can run like running on the road. you move up into the soft sand and it's very hard to run you run into the water and the same effect but what you've got is a perfect mixture of water and sand and you get that stiffness but if you stand on it then your feet will sink into it because it's not then being hit quickly and it just settles and moves away now that strain rate sensitivity is physical in sand and water we do it chemically within our material do you know what that's very good because i understood that generally scientifically i'm absolutely nowhere talk to me then about that conviction it's interesting i think the comparison with cortex is interesting how do you ensure that you are building on those sort of foundational brand values when as you say you are already aware that in terms of use cases you're subjugating the brand strength into other brands or non-branded apparel or whatever it might be you need a particular kind of confidence i guess about your product maybe to do that i don't know tell me a bit about that because it's not the most common entrepreneurial experience that i heard it's interesting if we can take the gore-tex example again it wasn't just where we sort of went to think about strategy it's also about the advantage that gore-tex brings prior to it you couldn't have breathability and waterproofness because in effect what it's doing is it stopped water getting through one direction but it's letting water get through in the other direction so previously that was impossible and therefore there was a compromise you either needed a waterproof thing that was sweaty or you wanted something that was going to be breathable but that's because that was just going to leak so the idea that something that wasn't possible is now possible is exactly what we're all about and so we have written down the walls of our reception area rethink possible so everyone sees that as they walk in and out of the office every morning because that's what we do and we have to encourage our partner customers to recognize that the compromises in their current products can become a thing of the past.

8:37They no longer have to trade one property with another. Go back to the sports bra. You don't have to trade comfort and support. You can have both. And that's the same in all the categories that we operate in. We look to see where is compromise making the end product less good than it could be. and then we offer our partner customers a solution that allows them to deliver a product that actually far better meets the needs of their customer. And that's the ingredient technology and we publicize it via the ingredient brand. So our name appears on the product and carries that benefit. Let's talk about some of those partners because there's obvious lines of fit with, I don't know, an Adidas.

9:22But then there's others, if we look at Harley-Davidson or whoever it might be, Rafa, it sort of makes sense almost intuitively. Is there an example where, though, it's been a surprisingly effective collaboration, even by your own expectations, Stephen, I wonder where you kind of thought this is the use case that demonstrates this thing can be even bigger than we were hoping, perhaps? Our partners have always been chosen to be significant brands in their own right, obviously, but innovation led and in a category where they not only would recognize and deliver that benefit, but also shine, as it were, a light on us as their partner.

10:01so we started off because it was where the business originated with a brand called fly racing in the states very much the premier motocross brand they're still a big customer of ours we moved into skiing with a brand called rurock who make a very innovative ski helmet we helped them to expand their business we then stepped into the world of cycling and the obvious brand in cycle clothing was rafa we helped take rafa from the road onto gravel into mountain biking with some body protection products. And then our big step into garments with Adidas. Interestingly, although sports bras has always been the holy grail of the business, we actually started with Adidas in muscle control.

10:41And anybody who was watching the Paris Olympics would have seen numerous nations, not least to which our own GB team, wearing these zebra-striped shorts, which were the Rion technology delivering a level of muscle control that optimizes exercise so with adidas it was surprising we went in there to talk to them about sports bra and we ended up doing muscle control garments with them which has been quite significant for us because the reputational benefit of partnering with adidas has helped open up an enormous number of doors and so the customers we're now developing product with are many and varied have you had because i'm always interested in these sort of validatory moments for entrepreneurs and often with especially if it's apparel or garments you have this lovely moment where you run into somebody hopefully not literally who's wearing one or you overhear them advocating for it and it must be so exciting you must have all sorts of moments like that but tell me about some of them because it's always just so wonderful to hear entrepreneurs talk about that sort of moment of is it a validation or approval or i don't know how you look at it when people comment on one of our products it is absolutely why we do what we do and actually they're many many and varied and i could give you hundreds potentially certainly tens off the top of my head i think the first one that sticks in my mind was one of the international athletes that tried our products straight off the european championships in munich and ran around in a pair of rion shorts and said this makes me feel like a superhero which was just the most he'd not put his pants on over the outside it was a beginning of a realization that it doesn't just actually make you perform better.

12:21It makes you feel better. And actually feeling better makes you perform better, which is absolutely true. So that was the first thing I think that really sticks in my mind. But then the other thing perhaps actually really appeals more to me as a father of daughters, and a very much a lifelong athlete myself and very keen on sport as an activity. The idea that a sports bra is not about making an athlete run faster, who's already pretty quick. It's about participation. If we could get girls and women into sport who wouldn't otherwise want to play because it's painful or it's embarrassing or it's uncomfortable or something, if we could actually improve participation, wouldn't that be great?

13:03And so when we get feedback from women who are wearing a product that we've enhanced with our technology, who say, hang on, surely this is medium support rather than low support. And it's because they're feeling the comfort of what they would normally associate with low support. And yet it seems to be giving them support. That, for me, is actually almost more significant than the elite athlete telling them that it makes them feel as if they could go even quicker. I'll bet a real game changer. Maybe just finally, Stephen, tell me about what would be the fantasy? Well, do you know, it's like those, who would you invite from history to a dinner party?

13:38That kind of question. What about an athlete or an adventurer? Anybody, you can go back in time. Would you like to clad? I don't know, who would it be? You know, Evel Knievel or Eddie Merckx or David Wilkie? Through the whole annals of sporting and active and adventure history, who would you like to clad in some Rion shaped garments? Oh, that's a really good question. You must have thought about this. There are many people I'd like to see benefiting from our technology. But I think right now, because I think it's quite current for me, I would like to see female tennis players benefit from our technology.

14:14Because not only is women's sport generally getting the prestige and the recognition that it has always deserved, and tennis is probably a little bit ahead of football, but it's kind of moving in the right direction. But the thing about those sports where there is a lot of sudden violent movements side to side a properly performing sports bra can really improve the experience for the athlete in those kind of sports so in tennis i'd really like to see and again let's be current rather than go back too much and show my age i think somebody like coco goff would be great to see benefiting from our technology and since the next step for rion is taking it right down to the fibre level and actually making effectively dynamic lycra.

14:58And we're not that far away from doing it, in fact. It's already working in the lab. I'd love to see garments made of our material at the fibre level delivering performance to somebody like Coca-Goth. OK, well, we've got Wimbledon in a couple of weeks. Maybe Wimbledon 26, the dream, could be a reality. Stephen, you have to keep us posted. We might not be far off, actually, 26. If the guys sort of have a couple of breakthroughs, 26 is on the cards. That was Stephen Bates, the co-founder and CEO of Rion Labs. And you can learn more about the business by heading to rionlabs.com. And that's all for this episode of Eureka.

15:30We'll be back at the same time next week. The program is produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing this week by David Stevens. Listen again and find out more at monocle.com or follow us wherever you get your audio. If you'd like to contact the team, email Laura on lrk at monocle.com. I'm Tom Edwards, goodbye and thanks for listening to Eureka.