Wool & Prince: research for t-shirts you never have to wash

It turns out that no one has ever bothered to study how much a piece of fabric starts to smell when it’s worn repeatedly without washing. Now, a company based in downtown Brooklyn, Wool & Prince, is looking to change that.

They have joined Cornell University‘s Jumpstart program to engage in a comparative study of different fabrics after treatments with bacteria cultured from human sweat. The aim here is creating and mass-producing clothing that rarely needs to be cleaned.

You can’t exactly study “smelliness,” Katie Elks, the team of three’s Creative Director explained to Technically Brooklyn, but you can study bacterial growth. All of Wool & Prince‘s shirts for men are made from 100 percent wool, super fine. 16.5 microns in their t-shirts and 18.5 microns in their button downs (though they are exploring getting that down to 17.5 microns).

The company is supplying fabric samples of their own and other fabrics to a lab at Cornell University who will do the science of smell work. The researchers will apply bacteria to the shirts over the course of repeated 24 hour tests to check how much bacteria has grown over time.

They will even compare pure wool to other fabrics that have had anti-bacterial surface treatments. Those treatments, Elks explained, aren’t great environmentally and wash away over time. Wool & Prince‘s wool is just wool, and they believe it will compete with the artificial stuff.

Mac Bishop founded the company after graduating from Cornell‘s Agricultural and Life Sciences School. He prototyped various wool button downs and got user testers to wear them for 100 days without washing to see how they felt and smelled. The team used Kickstarter both to generate pre-orders and to educate the customer base about the advantages of using superfine wool. That campaign set a goal of $30,000 and raised $300,000.

Technically Brooklyn learned about the company by way of the annual gear post of marathon traveler Tynan, who’s long been a big wool booster.

The team has another Kickstarter going now, this time for a t-shirt. In the video below, you’ll see the founder Mac Bishop ask various people to smell his shirt and let him know if it has any odor. They all tell him no. Then he tells them that he has been wearing it for days without washing it. This study seeks to quantify what the team already knows qualitatively to be true about its product:

[kickstarter url=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1868906/woolandprince-the-wear-more-wash-less-t-shirt width=640]

Back their Kickstarter now for $58 and get a t-shirt you hardly ever need to clean. With four days to go, the campaign is already at 180 percent of its goal.

Elks said one of the challenges for their company early on has been the long lead time required of working with manufacturers on custom fabrics. “Its easier to do custom work overseas,” Elks explained, because those factories have the volume and equipment to handle special orders. But it’s slow.

“Another big goal of ours is to move production back into the U.S. We’ll probably be looking at smaller mills,” she said, hoping to speed up their prototyping process and turnaround for new products, fabrics and designs.