Stocking snags might seem like a small problem. But billions of pairs of stockings and tights end up in landfills, a huge waste that’s terrible for the planet.
By Amy Feldman, Forbes Staff
Back in 2017, Katherine Homuth, a young Canadian tech entrepreneur, was on the hunt for a material for long-lasting sheer tights that would survive the rips, snags and runs that normally plague them. She ordered dozens of different fibers, each time wrapping them around her fingers and trying to pull them apart – and every time she did so the material broke. Finally, she discovered a material that was pretty much indestructible, whatever she tried: ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene, which is used in bulletproof vests because of its dense structure.
She called distributors dozens of times, begging them to send it to her. “I finally got one spool of fiber and it cost $2,000,” she said. “I shipped it over to a factory in China, and I got an angry note back that we ended up breaking their machine. It choked on the fiber.”
From that inauspicious beginning, Homuth, 34, has built a substantial business in non-rip sheer tights that she claims can last up to 10 times as long as a traditional pair, billions of which typically end up in landfills. A Forbes 30 Under 30 list alum, Homuth expects to bring in $30 million in revenue for 2024. The previous year, Sheertex’s classic sheer tights were the number one selling pair of tights in the U.S. measured by dollars, she said. But growing a consumer business is hard, and revenue is down from $45 million in 2023 as she shifted the business from largely direct-to-consumer sales on her website to signing up retailers like H&M, Costco and QVC. She expects it to rebound to more than $70 million in 2025.
Now SRTX, the company behind the Sheertex brand, is working on going beyond tights into other materials, including a water repellant material that’s free of toxic ‘forever chemicals,’ or PFAS, which for years have been used in everything from rain jackets to hiking boots. The move would, she hopes, transform SRTX from a consumer-products business to a sustainable materials one. “We want to be the DuPont of the sustainability industry,” Homuth said. “It’s about creating these new materials that have never been produced before.”
To get there, the company has raised a total of $143 million in equity funding from investors that include retailer H&M, sustainability-focused venture firm ArcTern Ventures and Lululemon’s billionaire founder Chip Wilson, at a valuation of $350 million at its most recent round two years ago. It’s also recently built out a new 300,000-square-foot factory in Montreal to meet demand earlier this year.
With manufacturing in Canada and much of its sales in the United States, Homuth is watching talk of Trump’s tariffs closely. “It is certainly a concern for us,” she said, adding that it was hard to know how to act given the current uncertainty.
Homuth, who had previously founded and sold a company called ShopLocket that helped hardware entrepreneurs bring products to market, first had the idea about making hosiery that would last seven years ago. “I’d become a bit jaded. A lot of products seemed like tech for tech’s sake,” she said. “When I got into tights, I thought I’d do a little Googling, realize somebody had done it and move on.” Instead, she said, she realized just how little materials innovation there had been since nylon was invented in the 1930s and spandex followed in the 1950s.
After trying to outsource to China and breaking a manufacturer’s machine, she set up a small research lab north of Toronto and ran three knitting machines extremely slowly to figure out how to work with ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene. While the tights are not biodegradeable, neither are regular tights, which are typically made from petroleum-based nylon and elastene, so the big selling point is how long they last. “It starts with durability,” she said. “If the product can’t last, it’s never going to be a sustainable product.”
In winter 2018, she took the company, then known as Sheerly Genius, through the Y Combinator accelerator, and built her own factory in Montreal. In the beginning, the tights cost $50 a pair to produce, making them a niche product at best. Homuth got the costs down by having Sheertex make its own fibers, turn them into yarns and do its own knitting. It has an in-house lab to develop and test materials. Producing higher volumes helped it spread its overhead over more production and buy its raw materials at lower cost. “Last year, we hit $12 to produce a pair,” she said. “In two years, we expect that to be $2.50.” The tights sell for $19.99 for a basic pair of black sheer ones at H&M to $99 for newly developed micro fishnets direct from Sheertex.
H&M, which first invested in SRTX in 2020, began carrying small volumes of Sheertex tights in some of its COS stores in 2022, and added distribution in its flagship H&M stores in 2023. That’s part of Homuth’s big shift from direct-to-consumer to retail, a transition that she argues is necessary for the company to set a foundation for scalable growth. Most direct-to-consumer brands eventually need to link up with retailers if they want to keep growing, but it’s also a tough move to make because wholesale prices (typically around half the retail price) are so much lower. That means Homuth’s ability to both reduce Sheertex’s costs of production and get retailers to sell large numbers of tights will be critical. “We considered this as a first test to evaluate the potential,” Peter Ekeberg, H&M’s head of finance and investments, new growth and ventures, said by email. “In 2024, we have increased the volumes significantly,” he added, though he declined to give numbers.
Selling is one thing, producing at scale another – and SRTX’s goal is to ramp up to 30 million pairs by 2027, a 15-fold increase in volume over 2024. “Scaling up manufacturing to [that level] is absurdly hard,” said Alexandre Aubrey, managing partner at Export Development Canada, which has invested in the business and provided debt financing for the new manufacturing plant. “It is so difficult, and she is so focused on getting that done.”
Homuth recently introduced fishnets, which require a more complex production process, and a new direct-to-consumer label called Sheertex Studio that produces styles like those with mini dots or back seams that are not available in stores. The company also started a private-label business. Shoe brand Steve Madden launched a collaboration for “Steve Madden X Sheertex” black tights in its Canadian stores this year. “The selling feature is you can wear them for an entire season and not have to replace them,” said Jennifer Walewski, president of Steve Madden Canada. “It’s actually crazy how much they are going to save in the landfills,” she added.
Next up: SRTX’s effort to go beyond sheer tights to other sustainable materials, starting with a non-toxic water repellant material known as Watertex. It’s targeting swimsuits for its first version, which it says third-party tests showed dried in half the time of three competitors’ swimsuits. A second technology in development is for a non-toxic water-repellant membrane that could take the place of PFAS-based coatings.
That’s a potentially giant market, especially at a time when Europe has cracked down on a group of PFAS and regulators in states like California are also taking a tougher line on them. Grand View Research estimates the market for waterproof breathable textiles is currently $2 billion and growing at a rate of 5.9% a year. It’s also doing research on other potential new materials, including a recyclable replacement to spandex that it calls Elasta.
“We’re changing the business pretty dramatically,” Homuth said. “It’s more about the technology.”
