Ponda co-founder Julian Ellis-Brown talks wetland regeneration, BioPuff growth and fashion industry adoption

As fashion continues to search for lower-impact material alternatives, scaling innovations beyond niche applications remains a significant challenge. For UK startup Ponda, the answer lies not only in developing a new insulation material, but in rethinking the agricultural systems behind them.

Founded around the concept of paludiculture, Ponda uses restored wetlands to grow fibre-rich crops for fashion while exploring how regenerative supply chains can operate at commercial scale. As co-founder Julian Ellis-Brown put it: “We have to face the facts: currently only around 0.1 percent of the global market is made up of next-gen materials. It’s growing, but we’re clearly not yet at massive market adoption.”

Ellis-Brown, whose background is in mechanical engineering, co-founded the company alongside Finlay Duncan, Neloufar Taheri, and Antonia Jara, all graduates of postgraduate design and innovation programmes at Imperial College and the Royal College of Art. The team was driven by the central question of whether a material supply chain could be created that is inherently restorative to the planet.

“That’s the question we posed right at the start of our journey, and it’s remained central to us throughout. It’s what we come back to as our values and our mission,” Ellis-Brown explained to FashionUnited.

Their initial research led them to wetlands, typically seen as ecosystems that are both underutilised and ecologically powerful. The founders began physically examining plants within these environments for fibrous potential before processing them in the lab. “That was the real genesis moment of connecting these environments to potential materials which might come from them as well,” Ellis-Brown said. “Eventually, that brought us to paludiculture and Ponda as it is today.”

So, what is paludiculture?

Paludiculture–a term coined by researchers at Germany’s University of Greifswald in 1998–refers to wet farming, the process of re-wetting land while continuing to cultivate crops on it. Though still niche in the UK, the practice is gaining attention as industries seek more ecologically responsible production systems.

The approach is closely tied to the preservation of peatlands, a type of wetland that “holds more carbon than all of the trees combined within a tenth of the area”, despite covering less than 3 percent of the Earth’s surface. “They’re our best land-based store of carbon,” Ellis-Brown said.

Draining these environments causes subsidence–the sinking of the Earth’s surface–leading to soil degradation and the release of around 1.9 gigatonnes of CO2 annually. According to Ellis-Brown, this is around twice fashion’s total emissions, “turning these amazing carbon sinks and biodiversity hubs into massive carbon emitters”. Rewetting wetlands halts this process while rebuilding soil carbon and improving resilience against flooding and drought by restoring natural water retention.

“The importance of wetland regeneration is about reversing the effects of climate change, reintroducing biodiversity–especially in the UK, which is one of the most biodiversity-damaged environments–but also building resilience into our farming systems,” he added.

“The other thing is resilience against climate change. As the UK faces wetter winters and hotter summers, we need ways to regulate water levels in agricultural environments. At the moment, on drained land, you get a huge amount of flooding because the ground can’t hold more water.”

BioPuff: An innovative insulation material from wetland farming

Ponda harvests bulrush–or Typha–from peatlands, a grass-like plant with brown flowering heads that bloom between April and August. The plant is used to create BioPuff, the company’s insulation material designed as an alternative to fossil-based synthetic fills and conventional down.

The material has undergone six years of testing and development, with industry partners assessing its commercial viability across various applications. One partner, Ellis-Brown said, tested BioPuff against 22 other non-wovens and found it “had the best thermal resistance and insulation”.

“One challenge plant-based insulations have struggled with historically is washability,” Ellis-Brown noted. “That’s something we now feel really confident in. We’ve gotten BioPuff to a level where it can be washed conventionally, which is a really big milestone. Product quality and longevity are critical if we want to build sustainable products for the future.”

Brands including Ahluwalia, Berghaus, Sheep Inc., and Stella McCartney, the latter of which embedded BioPuff in its AW24 Falabella bag, have all incorporated the material in varying ways. The final version of the product is also now being integrated into the systems of an increasing number of factories as Ponda moves from pilot production and early brand engagement towards commercial scalability.

Early interest in the material had initially come from material innovation or sustainability teams, and occasionally those in procurement. This is now shifting towards the general design process as sustainability becomes adopted more generally, instead of as a separate initiative.

Addressing misconceptions and tackling hesitant adoption

Like many material innovations, Ponda has faced challenges in the journey to commercialising a relatively unfamiliar system in the UK. One recurring misconception, Ellis-Brown said, is that the company was harvesting from healthy natural wetlands in a damaging way, which isn’t the case, he reaffirmed.

“What we’re trying to do is take a very damaging extractive supply chain and transform it into one that’s regenerative,” he explained. “We believe in a mosaic approach to farming and supply chains. We’re not campaigning for tens of thousands of hectares of pure wetlands growing one crop. It’s about balance; how wetlands work alongside other farming systems, products, and supply chains to create the best overall benefit for nature and for products.”

Farmers were initially hesitant to adopt a system proposed by founders outside the agriculture sector. Early acceptance ultimately came from those looking for creative solutions to flood-prone or difficult land areas. Word-of-mouth then accelerated the rollout, with farms across the UK, including in Cumbria and Lancashire, now onboarded as partners.

“What we found is that farmer networks are viral in themselves,” Ellis-Brown said. “Farmers talk to farmers and learn from each other. If you can offer something genuinely economically feasible and interesting, the adoption process starts to work on its own.”

Fashion’s fragmented supply chains have created additional barriers for new materials entering the market. In response, Ponda has begun moving further into product development, overseeing not only material production but also garment development in an effort to reduce friction to market. Under this merchandising model, a range of BioPuff hats and gilets are currently in the works, while Ponda is further seeking wholesale partnerships with mission-aligned apparel brands.

Measurable data in an industry increasingly defined by traceability

Despite the hurdles, Ellis-Brown said Ponda “100 percent” sees the potential for long-term scaling and broader adoption across the industry. Alongside biodiversity and carbon benefits, the company continues to invest in technologies designed to strengthen BioPuff’s value proposition.

One recent development is a technology that converts seeds into drone-sewable pellets, enabling wetlands to be restored more efficiently and affordably. “What we’re really trying to build is more of a wetland materials platform, rather than just a BioPuff or insulation company,” Ellis-Brown noted, pointing to a more wide-scoping mission.

As sustainability regulations and transparency requirements heighten across fashion, Ponda has focused heavily on data collection and traceability infrastructure. The company has built benchmarks and tracing infrastructure into its entire process, monitoring variables like water table levels, carbon absorption and emissions across its systems.

Ponda works with organisations including Lancashire Wildlife Trust and Liverpool John Moores University to measure environmental impact using tools such as carbon flux towers, eDNA samples measuring biodiversity impact, and dip wells to understand water table levels.

“We have these really rich data sources from our pilot sites, which feed into our own life cycle analysis,” Ellis-Brown said. “What’s really exciting is that there are so many potential benefits from these ecosystems and supply chains. Different companies may care most about biodiversity, water, or carbon, and there are many different narratives brands can build around products made from these systems.”

Global collaboration: Ponda's expansion in Europe

As Ponda approaches its next stage of growth, the venture capital-backed company is seeking further investment to support scaling and technology development through a newly launched crowdfunding campaign with Republic Europe.

The company has previously received recognition from organisations such as Parley for the Oceans and the H&M Foundation, which awarded Ponda the Global Change Award in 2022. A 2.4 million dollar funding round completed in November brought total funding to 6.6 million dollars.

Now, however, in a mission to move towards broader commercial supply, the new funding campaign will be open to potential participants across the UK and EU. Its initial private launch earlier this week will be followed by a public rollout at a later date, allowing the general public to back the regenerative production method if interested.

Engaging with mainland Europe reflects Ponda’s growing collaboration with industry players in the region. The company operates within two 10 million euro Horizon Europe projects surrounding paludiculture–PaluWise and PaluSDemos–both focused on scaling the method across Europe.

Germany and the Netherlands are emerging as key markets, with peatland preservation practices already more established. In the Netherlands, Ponda has supplied two tonnes of seed pellets and plans to participate in this year’s annual harvest while trialling its own custom-built low-ground-pressure harvester.

“You can’t drive a tractor onto wetlands, so we created a tracked machine with less ground pressure than a human foot,” Ellis-Brown explained. “The Netherlands is becoming really important in this space, there’s a real community forming around wetlands that connects fashion, conservation, research, and science.”

For Ellis-Brown, the long-term objective is creating a wetland-based supply chain that is both scalable and economically viable for farmers. “Success is about making this replicable, scalable, and easy to use, while ensuring the people most affected by it, the stewards of the land, benefit from it,” Ellis-Brown said. “Farming is not an easy or generally profitable job. One key measure of success for us is building systems that help farmers create more reliable and resilient incomes.”