Norrøna Partners With Uluu on Seaweed-Based Performance Fibre

Norrøna, the Norwegian outdoor brand, has signed a development partnership with Australian materials company Uluu to build a performance fibre made mostly from seaweed, and the two have already spun fibre using seaweed-derived Uluu PHA as a core ingredient. The collaboration is exploratory, not a commercial order. No volumes, timelines or garment launch dates have been disclosed.

Norrøna will now test the material for durability and performance attributes with one of its key suppliers. The brand frames this as familiar territory: it developed Europe's first Gore-Tex jacket prototype in 1977.

"Building the next generation of outdoor materials requires brands to get involved before every question has been answered," said Jørgen Jørgensen, CEO and fourth-generation owner of Norrøna. "For nearly a century, Norrøna has developed products around the demands of the outdoors. We are now bringing that experience upstream, helping shape the fibre itself around what outdoor performance requires."

What does the material offer?

Uluu is one of the first companies to make a plastic alternative from seaweed rather than land crops. The process works much like a brewery, fermenting sugars from the seaweed in saltwater to create a natural material that can then be made into fibre. Seaweed requires no farmland, minimal freshwater and no fertiliser, which lowers the input footprint of the raw material.

On the compliance side, the material is designed to biodegrade and has passed TUV marine and home biodegradability tests. That positions it against fossil-based synthetics, which shed microfibres during wear and washing that persist in the environment.

How will testing proceed?

Brad Boren, director of innovation and sustainability at Norrøna, said the brand's role is to push the material hard and feed results back into development. "By bringing our performance requirements into the process early, we can help shape a new material around the demands of outdoor use and contribute to a broader shift in how our industry makes fabric," he said. The testing will run with an unnamed key supplier, and any eventual adoption in Norrøna products remains dependent on results.

"Nature already knows how to build high-performance materials," said Dr Julia Reisser, co-CEO and co-founder of Uluu. "We're harnessing that biology to transform seaweed into natural, plastic-like materials."

A parallel kelp restoration effort

The fibre work runs alongside Norrøna's support for Bellona, the environmental foundation, in restoring Arctic kelp ecosystems along Norway's northern coast that have been damaged by sea urchin overgrazing. The two programmes are connected by raw material: kelp forests are the source ecosystem for seaweed-derived inputs.

For sourcing teams, the relevant questions are cost, capacity and certification at scale. Uluu has demonstrated biodegradability credentials and pilot fibre spinning, but neither company has published production volumes, price positioning relative to polyester or nylon, or a certification pathway for finished fabrics. The partnership is a research-stage play, and commercial adoption in outdoor apparel remains a stated ambition rather than a confirmed outcome.

Norrøna says the goal is to develop fibres and fabrics tough enough for the outdoors and one day use them in its products. Whether seaweed PHA can meet the durability bar set by nearly a century of shell development will become clear as supplier testing proceeds.