NEXTILE Design Challenge

In its inaugural year, the NEXTILE Design Challenge invited design students across the US to leverage their creative and problem-solving skills to produce the next sustainable innovation in textile design. The catch? Students must create their products using one versatile ingredient — soybeans. Each participating individual or team received a design kit including seven sustainable, soy-based materials: soy thread, soy leather, soy French Terry, organic pigment and other soy products. Project submissions leveraged one or more of these ingredients to produce new textile threads, dyes, paints, designs and more.

U.S. Soy has long been a key ingredient for product innovation, going all the way back to Henry Ford who used soy-based paints, textile materials and plastics for automobile design. And today, U.S. Soy is used in more than 1,000 products on the market — from tires and shoes to fabrics and artificial grass. As a renewable crop grown on U.S. farms, and replenishing the soil annually with each growing season, soy is an important frontier for bio-based products.  

Image: NEXTILE winner, Kasandra Wright. Image above: second-place runner-up, Anna Stuffelbeam of North Carolina State University, foliage appliqué sample inspired by the plants that made up her fabric’s materials — soy, pomegranate and madder.

This year's winner was Kasandra Wright from University of Arkansas, for her moth design textile sample, symbolising transformation, survival and new beginnings.  

“Throughout this experience, I learned about the importance of what soy-based products can provide in the apparel and textile industry,” Wright said. “Soy fiber has an excellent drape and is a beautiful alternative to protein fibers as a sustainable material for apparel.”  

The national winner was chosen from a pool of students who advanced past the first round of judging, which included students from six schools across the country. Judges from Levander Design, Springs Creative Products Group, United Soybean Board and Modern Meadow chose the winner and runner-up. 

U.S. soybean farmers and industry partners consistently push the limits of innovation to discover and deliver solutions to the biggest challenges our world faces, such as food security and climate change. NEXTILE was created to put sustainable soy materials into the hands of the brightest young minds in design to create the next generation of eco-friendly textile solutions.  

Learn more about NEXTILE, the participating schools and students, and the next round of U.S. Soy-based sustainable innovation at www.ussoy.org/nextile.