At the height of its journey, between 2021 and 2022, NFW with Mirum employed more than 300 staff, attracted both public and private investment, and poured resources into expanding its production facilities. Today, however, the Peoria, Illinois-based company — once hailed as a champion of fashion’s green/vegan revolution thanks to its innovative materials — finds itself in the final stretch of a crisis spiral that began several years ago. The board has decided to “scale back” production processes — a move that feels very much like the last step before closing down.
What happened to NFW with Mirum
Speaking to the local press, Steve Zika, CEO of the start-up founded in 2015 under the name Natural Fiber Welding (later shortened to NFW), admitted that downsizing operations “is not what we would have wanted, but it is the most responsible choice for our stakeholders”. The company once pitched itself under the slogan “creativity without limits” (as seen in the photo). Yet, after four rounds of redundancies and a pivot from manufacturing to a trading-based business model, it discovered that creativity always faces one limit: the market. As we have already reported, the current fashion climate is not only straining the traditional supply chain but also decimating the emerging one. NFW is simply the latest casualty on the road to industrial scalability. Ultimately, the market has asked itself what kind of innovation it truly needs — and has stopped buying the unnecessary.
