An innovation does not appear overnight. Even ideas, which often seem to pop into our heads at the most random moments, are also the fruit of a trajectory of experiences, exchanges, and perceptions that accumulate and blend into our unconscious.  

With LOVR, the story could not be different. For the development of our revolutionary textile, a long journey was traveled, crossing years and continents. Let's start at the beginning, with the story of when our co-founder Lucas Fuhrmann went to Nepal.  

The year was 2016. Lucas was in his early twenties and had just finished his bachelor's degree in Germany. Tired of the abstract world of academic papers and disappointed with his internship experience at a fashion company, he decided it was time to do something to improve the world.

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“My idea was: we need to start really from scratch if we want to do something different there”.

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And this is how Lucas realized that he wanted to delve into the textile industry. He already had a certain "inclination" for bananas, after working on a banana plantation in Nicaragua when he was younger.

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“I've seen it with my own eyes. Banana plants have fibers inside them. So why not use it? Why do we need to grow something like cotton or use synthetic fibers when we can take advantage of a fiber that is available but being discarded?”.

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After doing some research online, he discovered that Nepalese farmers were trying to work with banana fibers. In search of answers, Lucas packed his luggage and left for Nepal.  

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"Before I traveled, I just connected with a local guy through an internet chat. Unbelievably, he came to the airport to pick me up and invited me to stay with his family. It was an adventure, we traveled to the middle of the country in a jeep, in mountainous areas, with no roads, just narrow paths beside cliffs."

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During this time, he met with different banana farmers. Everyone he talked to recognized that there was a lot of biowaste, but no one knew how to harness this potential. Lucas' luck seemed to change when he was introduced to a group of local entrepreneurs...

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"They claimed to be obtaining fine fibers from the straw of the plant. So, I visited them, they showed me the process, and I worked with them for three weeks. Long story short: it was a scam”.

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He only discovered that he had been tricked sometime later, when he returned to Germany. Excited about the fine fibers he had acquired, Lucas began to do tests in the home laboratory he had set up in his parents' garage. Only his attempts to replicate what he had been shown in Nepal were not working. When he took the material to specialists, they found under a microscope that these were not natural fibers.

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“At this point, I could have stopped working on it. But the reality is that I was getting even more hooked on it. Because the principle was still correct, right? You have one industry with a massive problem in sustainability in textiles. And on the other hand, you have agriculture and biomass, but the way of connecting these was still not clear”.

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Even with a frustrating start, Lucas chose to keep trying. LOVR was still far from becoming a reality, but the idea behind its concept had already germinated. This was just the beginning of the journey...

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