Can seaweed make a better sequin?

When Taylor Swift played the UK leg of her Eras Tour last year, fans turned up in enough sequins to fill two Olympic-sized swimming pools in a single evening. It’s the kind of fact Nitya Amarnath, 44, responds with when asked for a parallel that will put the work she does in context.

“It is really difficult to put a figure on how many sequins exist, but it’s considered to be a $14 to 15 billion market,” Amarnath says. A lot of that figure is buried in sequinned fabric rather than loose sequins, she explains. Work backwards from a single sequined top—roughly 400 grams or 10,000 individual discs—and multiply that across garments, bags, shoes, accessories, and even home and event decor, and the scale becomes almost impossible to comprehend. What’s easier to state plainly is the problem: traditional sequins, made from petroleum-based plastics, are non-biodegradable. They break down into microplastics that end up in the soil and oceans and are virtually impossible to recycle once stitched onto a garment.

Amarnath’s answer to all that polluting shimmer is Bequin, a bio-based sequin made from derivatives of seaweed. Developed by Botto Labs, a Goa-based bio design lab, each Bequin disc is about 15 mm in diameter, water-based, and built without a trace of plastic. “I basically say it’s a small disc that shimmers and goes onto your garment,” she says of how she explains it to strangers. 

The naturalness runs all the way through to colour. The designer refused to use synthetic pigment, which meant turning to natural dyes (indigo, madder) and then solving the very unglamorous chemistry of getting an ancient dye to bond permanently to a biopolymer. “It’s not like a dye bath where you stir the indigo in water with the cloth and it gets dyed,” she says. “We had to develop the whole process from scratch.”

The effort has produced a colour book of 28 shades, many of them custom-developed for individual clients, built off a base shade card of 13-14 options. Her target customers, for now, are luxury designers who show embroidered garments on runways in Paris, London and Milan—the majority of which, she points out, are hand-embroidered in India.

Bequin sequins have already made it onto two looks by the Copenhagen-based fashion house Ganni’s autumn/winter 2025 runway shown in Paris in February 2025: a rare feat, she notes, for a material this early in its development cycle.

Right now, three people working out of her lab in Goa can hand-make about 700 to 800 Bequins a day: a number capped not by skill but by lab capacity. The real goal, she says, is a lakh a day, the point at which Bequin can hit price parity with synthetic sequins and move beyond the luxury segment it currently serves.

Amarnath’s route here began far from the runway. She grew up in Mumbai, the product of what she calls a “weaver-engineering family”; her mother’s side were weavers from Madurai, her father’s side engineers from Chennai. She studied textile design at NID in 2001 and then worked at studios like Fabindia and Neeru Kumar, where long before “circularity” was fashionable she gravitated straight to the waste department, once turning discarded leather offcuts at Hidesign into notebook covers during an internship. She went independent in 2011 with Botto (meaning ‘fabric’ in her mother tongue, Saurasthra)—a practice built almost entirely around what the fashion industry was throwing away.

By 2016, Amarnath had turned into a self-taught scientist, converting a room in her own home in Bengaluru into a makeshift lab, growing mycelium and bacterial cellulose and experimenting with rice husk, wood chips, compost, and fruit waste. A bio-based leather emerged around 2018, but the market, she felt at the time, wasn’t ready for it. She returned to biomaterials in 2022, this time chasing the smallest possible surface area rather than the largest. A sequin, unlike a full hide of leather, is small enough that a failed batch costs almost nothing to throw out and redo, as well as easier to scale.

The road from lab experiment to runway-ready sequin was equally unglamorous. The earliest batches of material (that took about nine months), made in her mould-prone Goa facility, grew mould within two days of production—presenting the first problem she had to solve. From there, it was a matter of tackling a series of issues one at a time: uneven drying that left some patches of a sheet thicker than others, colour that separated from the base material, and, later, colour consistency itself. “I cannot offer a client dark indigo and then, when they approve it, supply a different hue of indigo,” she says of the discipline required to standardise a natural, and therefore inherently variable, dye process for a luxury client.

The hardest part, however, has been simply explaining what Bequin is and navigating the Indian manufacturing ecosystem that wants finished stock, not a material still in development, unlike Western buyers who are more comfortable backing something pre-commercial.

According to Amarnath, Bequin has now reached TRL 6 (level six on the Technology Readiness Level scale that denotes a model or prototype runs in a realistic setting). Raising the funds to scale has been her singular focus for the last six months. In the meantime, the recognition keeps arriving: Botto Labs was recently shortlisted as a finalist for the R|Elan Circular Design Challenge in partnership with the United Nations. “Every time I meet a new designer, the imagination they have around Bequin is humbling,” she says. “I know it will trickle down.”