2025 showed us that Celium™ is not the future of materials

This year marked a turning point for Celium™. In 2025, we explored Celium™ through more applications, more collaborators, more processes, and more forms than ever before. What started as an alternative to traditional materials has become a category of its own.

From ‘Alternative’ to Its Own Category

Celium™ was once labeled as a “leather alternative”.
Today, that definition no longer holds.

Not because leather has been surpassed, but because Celium™ follows a different material logic. Its cultivated structure enables translucency suitable for lighting design and foam-like expressions that can be used in cosmetics, packaging, consumer products, interior components and dimensional pieces for design and automotive contexts. It also carries an aesthetic that traditional materials cannot replicate.

Where traditional materials are bound by their own nature, Celium™ adapts, reshapes, and evolves.

Material Behaviors and Expansions from 2025

This year expanded our understanding of Celium™. Across our design studio, our facility and our collaborations, the material showed new aesthetic, structural and sensorial behaviors: controlled translucency suitable for lighting, lightweight yet stable structures, clean responses to finishing techniques, forms that hold definition, chromatic results informed by violacein and a foam-like expression with a soft, petal-like tactility.

These qualities proved consistent across more than 100 material applications developed with GANNI, Secrid, Natural Urbano, Someone Somewhere, Sistta, REI Co-op, Veshin, Nous Étudions, Piel Canela, Bala di Gala, Val de Grace, and a growing network of designers and manufacturing partners. Each category, from ready-to-wear and accessories to footwear, interiors, lighting, and outdoor applications, required different construction logics. Celium™ responded to each one in its own way.

A Year Defined by Material Explorations

Throughout 2025, Celium™ took shape across multiple contexts. 

Ready-to-Wear
GANNI Signature Blazer; Nous Étudions runway pieces; Val de Grace Blazer.

Accessories & Bagmaking
Bou Bag series; XXL Hobo Bags; cardholders with GANNI, SECRID and Artemio; crossbody bags with Someone Somewhere; clutches and portfolios in multiple finishes.

Footwear
High-top sneakers with SISTTA; ankle boots with Bala di Gala.

Interior & Furniture
The Cuddle Sofa and Fungi Sofa; Lapso Natural and Lapso Humo with Natural Urbano.

Lighting & Object Design
The Cartilage Lamp; lighting explorations enabled by Celium™ Manto’s translucency.

Cosmetics & Consumer Goods
Espumante powder puffs; early foam-like applications for beauty and packaging.

Outdoor & Travel Applications
Roadtripper Pod with REI and Someone Somewhere.

This curated overview reflects the range of applications explored this year. The full catalogue continues to expand as new work is completed.

To Those Building the Future of Materials With Us

Thank you.
To the designers who experiment.
To the engineers who challenge assumptions.
To the manufacturing partners who refine processes with us.
To the brands willing to imagine new material worlds.

You make this mission possible.

At Polybion, we exist to cultivate materials that expand what can be made responsibly, creatively, and scientifically. This year proved that the future does not belong to imitation or substitution. It belongs to materials designed with intention, performance, and imagination.

What Comes Next

In 2026, Celium™ will continue to evolve through new versions, deeper scientific breakthroughs, and collaborations that push performance and aesthetics further.

To everyone who joined us in exploring the potential of Premium Cultivated Cellulose:Thank you for expanding the possible.

Celium™ is not the future of materials.

It is the beginning of a new material language.