Indonesia's MYCL Transforms Mushroom Mycelium Into Leather for Global Brands

Inside an unassuming building in Bandung, the West Javanese city ringed by volcanoes and tea plantations, workers tend racks of fungal mycelium that will become leather. Not a synthetic approximation of it, not a plastic-based substitute, but a waterproof, pliable, durable material that Hyundai has trialled for car seats, Lexus has explored for interiors, and Indonesian sneaker brand Brodo has used to push into the Japanese market.

The company behind it is MYCL, also known as Mycotech Lab, and its product is Mylea: a mycelium-based leather alternative grown on agricultural waste including sawdust, sugarcane, and palm oil byproducts. The process draws its logic from tempeh, the fermented soybean cake that is a staple of Javanese cooking. Where tempeh relies on controlled fungal fermentation to bind soybeans into a coherent structure, MYCL applies a similar natural culturing process to grow mycelium filaments into sheets that mimic the tensile strength, texture, and visual weight of cow leather. The fungi reach harvest-readiness in seven days, a timeline the company contrasts pointedly with the three to four years required to raise a cow for hide.

After harvesting, the mycelium sheets are scraped, dried, cut to size, and dyed using natural pigments extracted from roots, leaves, and regional food waste. The absence of chromium-based tanning, the chemical process that makes conventional leather production one of the more toxic operations in fashion's supply chain, is central to MYCL's pitch. The finished Mylea is shipped to brand partners across Asia, Europe, and beyond.

By 2023, MYCL was shipping roughly 2,000 square feet of Mylea annually, enough to produce approximately 600 pairs of shoes. Production capacity sits at around 10,000 square feet per year, operated by only a few dozen employees. Co-founder and CEO Adi Reza Nugroho has acknowledged the company remains a small player relative to the scale of the global leather market, but order volumes tell a more optimistic story. In an interview with e27, Nugroho said clients have been "happy with the result" and that demand has kept the team busy through 2027.

That demand arrived largely without advertising. MYCL built its client base with no formal marketing budget, relying instead on growing industry appetite for non-animal, non-plastic leather alternatives. The company's domestic collaboration with Brodo (Bro.do), one of Indonesia's most prominent sneaker labels, has generated enough momentum that Brodo is now exploring expansion into Japan partly on the strength of the mushroom leather partnership. MYCL has also shown at Melbourne Fashion Week, extending the material's visibility beyond Southeast Asia.

The wider mycelium leather field includes California's Bolt Threads, whose Mylo material has been adopted by Stella McCartney, Adidas, Lululemon, and Kering brands, and NFW's Mirum, a plastic-free alternative backed by investment from both Stella McCartney and Ralph Lauren. Piñatex, derived from pineapple waste, supplies H&M and Hugo Boss; Vegea, made from grape industry byproducts, has partnered with Calvin Klein and Ganni. Against that field, MYCL's distinction is geographic and methodological: a Southeast Asian startup building on indigenous fermentation knowledge, sourcing raw materials locally, dyeing with regional plant waste, and empowering farmer groups in West Java, most of them women, who have supplied and processed the raw mycelium substrate since 2015.

The company's stated 2021 production goal of one million square feet, framed as serving 0.005% of the world leather market, remains aspirational given current output. But the trajectory from Bandung's racks to Hyundai interiors and international fashion weeks suggests MYCL's seven-day leather is not finished growing.