Mycelium ears

Last month, Francis Zierer and I interviewed Lauryn Menard for Tasteland. Lauryn is the CEO and co-founder of Gob, a compostable, plastic-free, mycelium-based earplug company. 

We talked about designing with a product’s end-of-life in mind, supply and demand in mycelium production and the future of sustainable products. We’re re-sharing the episode and a condensed version of the interview below. Keep scrolling for some great links we’re reading this week! — Daisy Alioto

Francis Zierer: I want to start with this idea that you worked with at PROWL, your design agency, of starting the design process with the end-of-life plan for a product. It's the opposite of planned obsolescence, like eco-compassionate planned obsolescence. 

Lauryn Menard: Eco-compassionate. I love that. 

FZ: Tell us about what that means and how long you've been thinking like that. 

LM: I've worked in furniture and footwear kind of simultaneously for a lot of my career. I was at a factory in China, just watching something that I had designed that had a lot of plastics in it and I had an existential crisis thinking about what would happen at the end of that product’s life. 

I had these alarms go off and thought to myself, okay, I really need to consider the end of the thing at the beginning or else I will feel this heavy feeling for the rest of my life. And the planet will be feeling that heavy feeling too. I don't want to become an eco-warrior or anything like that, but I believe in taking the industrial design discipline and flipping it on its head. The reality is, things don't last forever. 

I had a trip to New York City where I went to a spin class. They're blasting Vanessa Carlton the whole class. I'm a heavy user of earplugs, especially because my mom is legally deaf. I don't know what it was, but that one use of earplugs, I was like, my God, no one has disrupted this yet. I did some research, and found out that a healthier product with a good end-of-life didn’t exist. So I figured I could do it.

FZ: I imagine there's a dream of all 40 billion earplugs produced every year being produced with mycelium foam. Is it easy to scale the production of this material? 

LM: Absolutely. In order to scale the production, all we need to do is have more farms growing it. Our partner, Ecovative, has these massive vertical farms that grow mycelium in a specific environment. The more farms we have, the more material we have. You can do that infinitely, and our material grows to its full thickness in seven days. And whatever isn't used in production is sold to farms as fertilizer. Contrast that to what your plugs are currently made of: PVC, PFAS, chemicals derived from oil. We can't do that forever. 

When you look at volume, B2B is the place to be right now at scale. However, in the B2B space, if we were to try and compete directly with the PVC earplugs given behind the bar, we wouldn't have a business, right? Because people are just used to these being free and trash. Whether it be a music venue or a racetrack, we're looking at those fan-facing spaces to build up our brand awareness. We're going to be rolling out bright green vending machines so that the bar staff can just be like, yeah, go to the green machine. It's over there. 

Daisy Alioto: When you're dealing with a huge market like that, the goal is not to get every consumer to switch overnight. It's to pick off a significant percentage of those consumers. I think the advantage of building at the material level is that value is locked in. Somebody can't just go out and replicate it. 

LM: Exactly. To figure out how to manufacture what we manufacture, it takes a lot of time, 10 years in fact. So we feel protected. And people are willing to pay for higher quality, healthy products. I don't like labeling people based on generation, but for lack of a better way to say this, Gen Z wants to live forever. That must be the goal because they're buying serums at age 12. And so there's a demand for it. I find it really interesting as a startup to be able to say, all right, new material company, let's try and make a super functional, practical, not-so-sexy product out of this because this is what it's really good at. And let's make millions of them. 

FZ: You’ve said that in the 20th century, people always talked about the 21st century, but in the 21st century, nobody talks about the 22nd century. If Gen Z wants to live forever, obviously that means into the 22nd century. When you were talking about this cohort of regenerative physical products, it seemed to me this is kind of 22nd-century science fiction. 

LM: People are fatigued with the now and that's why a lot of folks don't want to acknowledge climate change. I'm an optimist through and through; even though I do have my pessimistic moments, I do believe in building something that looks better than what we have now. And life has become pretty goddamn cozy, right? I don't think our lives in the next century need to get more comfortable or convenient. I think the next century looks like systems that employ nature rather than destroying it. 🍄

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• Leash by Sky Ferreira (Spotify)

• Pressin’ My Bunk by Boldy James, Harry Fraud (Spotify)

• Will Wiesenfeld aka Baths tells Paper, “Carnal is a normal mode”

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• The emotional stories of Syria’s freed prisoners (The Guardian)

• Talmon Joseph Smith is writing a book on CLOUT AND CAPITAL

• Gen Z loves Rainforest Cafe (Slate)

• On Peter Schjeldahl: “Schjeldahl’s death was not just the death of a person but of a whole approach to writing about art.” (The Nation)

• An epic piece by Maxwell Neely-Cohen on the next century of digital storage 

• “What do I think about my man’s work? Are you kidding me? I’d never let you all see if I didn’t love it.” Paul McAdory takes in the scene at Art Basel––including Rihanna and ASAP Rocky. (NYT)

• “Like snorting lines of makeup powder off the grave of Charles Baudelaire, your first breath of Après l'Ondé captures everything invigorating and life-affirming about the scents of springtime, and of your late grandmother’s bathroom.” Dirt’s favorite perfume critic in Angel Food.