Focus Topic Keynote: Bio-synthetic materials: from fiber to fabric

A thought leader in her field, Sophie Mather has spent ~30 years championing and directing sustainable innovation across the breadth of the global supply chain.

Her journey began in Asia, setting up Nike's Innovation department in the years before the Beijing Olympics, before she moved to the US to lead Global Advanced Materials for the brand. Driven to make sustainability the whole of her work, she founded biov8tion in 2010 as one of the first sustainability-focused material consultancies of its time with the ambition to advise and support brands, retailers, suppliers, and NGOs turn ambition into strategy. She built the business case for biosynthetics from 2008, years before the term entered the mainstream conversation.

By 2016, she'd turned her attention to an invisible problem: microfibre pollution. Her crowdfunded #DontFeedTheFish campaign put the issue on the industry's radar, and in 2018 she co-founded The Microfibre Consortium, creating the Microfibre 2030 Roadmap and Commitment and the underlying Microfbre Data Portal, which the industry still acts on today.

In 2024, Sophie stepped into a more expansive role as an Innovation Assessor and Advisor, working with organisations including The Earthshot Prize and the Apparel Impact Institute, while independently advising a select group of innovators pushing the next generation of material science forward.

She has taken the stage at TEDx, been featured by the BBC, addressed parliament, and briefed HRH King Charles always with the same message: real change starts where others hesitate to look.

Sophie doesn't wait for the hard problems to be solved. She goes looking for them, and brings audiences, boards, and innovators along with her.