Interview with Mary-Cathryn Kolb

In 2014, Brrr° grew from the idea of "clothes that make you feel cooler, not warmer." The motivation behind the idea was asking how to disrupt the fashion industry with something new and cool. People wear clothing to wrap up and warm up, so the concept was doing just that, but with a cooling technology. Brrr° incorporates technologically-advanced fabrics with superior cooling performance that can enhance the comfort of bed sheets, apparel, denim, undergarments and other textiles.

Ours is a cooling fabric that wants to be recognised with a unique brand name. When you think of the word 'brrr', you instantly think of words like cold, cool or chill. The degree symbol represents that our fabrics will reduce your skin temperature by 2-3° Fahrenheit.

Our technology has three unique cooling effects that combine to immediately and continually reduce skin temperature: embedded natural minerals that permanently draw heat away and bring an immediate cooling sensation, a special fibre core that enhances moisture wicking, and a proprietary fabric pattern to maximise airflow to boost cooling.

We recently produced the first known king-size, seamless sheets with our cooling technology. We are now working on denim and fabric for the automotive industry.

We have a partnership with Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA), a non-profit institute with its headquarters near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). We also collaborate with the Hohenstein Institute in Boennigheim, Germany, an accredited test laboratory and research institute. We just sent fabric headers to be featured in New York-based Material ConneXion, which maintains the world's largest subscription-based materials library with thousands of innovative materials and processes. We have also sent fabric headers to be a part of the Penn Libraries' Fisher Fine Arts Library at University of Pennsylvania.

We have four patents pending.

We have a brilliant material scientist, Apurba Banerjee. She is doctoral candidate at the University of Georgia in polymer, fibre and textile sciences. She received her Masters in textile science from Colorado State University and completed her Bachelor's degree from the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai. Apurba focuses on driving new innovations and research and development of cooling technology for Brrr°. We also have garment industry expert Newbery Su running our Taiwan office. He coordinates design and manufacturing of Brrr° fabric for all licensing partners and development of new applications for the patented technology.

We wanted our presence in the hub of textile technology and engineering, which Taiwan is. Having a staff there allows for boots on the ground for daily quality control of current production and the execution of our research and development pipeline.

We want to continue to innovate smart textiles and let Brrr° turn a leader in the textile revolution.

In the last decade, technology has exponentially improved our lives while our textiles remained virtually unchanged from the beginning of time. Cottons are still your cottons, linens are still your linens. It's now time for technology to disrupt our textiles by making fashion smart and functional.