LETTER FROM ZURICH
To understand how and why Switzerland has been ranked, every year for the past twelve years, at the top of the ranking of the most innovative economies on the planet drawn up by theworld intellectual property organization, it is sometimes necessary to take side roads. Like the one that takes us to an improbable old industrial area along the railway lines, between the financial metropolis of Zurich and the old industrial city of Winterthur. Here, on the site of the old red brick factory which saw the birth of the legendary Maggi bouillon cubes in 1886, we have moved on to something completely different: the place houses a start-up incubator, including Haelixa.
This young company, founded in 2016, employs about twenty employees of various nationalities and, as is often the case in the country, the Swiss are in the minority. But almost all the individuals who gravitate to two floors of studious laboratories come from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, an institute which, like its French-speaking counterpart in Lausanne, has risen to the top of the international charts over the past twenty years. excellence in research. Co-founder and CEO, Michela Puddu, is Italian. After studying chemistry in Rome, she continued in Zurich with a doctorate in applied genetics. ” In principleshe says, we can mark everything with DNA. We started with gemstones, but now our main sector is textiles. »
What is it about ? From a rather revolutionary invention: an invisible liquid that just needs to be sprayed on a raw material, somewhere on the planet, and that will be found throughout the value chain, without risk of dilution or disappearance.
“Immense prospects”
Take the example of cotton. In concrete terms, DNA can be created in the laboratory, on demand, for each geographical origin or type of production (organic, recycling). A harvest in central Pakistan from a grower who respects strict environmental standards, and certified as such by an approved verifier, is thus marked thanks to the “spraying” of an ad hoc DNA. The initial fiber then undergoes all the stages of its transformation into yarn, before bleaching, dyeing, washing. At this stage, this Pakistani cotton can perfectly pass through a “fast fashion” workshop in Bangladesh, which would respect the work and safety rules better than the average, also audited and, in turn, be marked with another specific DNA.
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