The conference tote. The festival hoodie. The corporate gilet worn for an internship and then forgotten. Branded merchandise is everywhere, handed out by companies, events and institutions in the millions, worn briefly, and largely made from fossil-based materials. It is one of the most disposable categories in fashion, and one of the least scrutinized.
Image Credit: Ponda
Ponda, a Bristol-based biomaterials company founded by a Forbes 30 Under 30 Imperial College London alumnus, has partnered with the university to bring a different kind of insulation into branded clothing. Imperial is ranked 2nd in the world in the QS World University Rankings 2026. The first products in this collaboration, a Mallard gilet and a Fern cap, are insulated with BioPuff®, a material made from bulrush grown on restored wetlands rather than oil or animal down.
The world produces around 92 million tons of textile waste every year. That is the equivalent of a bin lorry of clothing burned or landfilled every second. Branded merchandise sits at a difficult intersection of this problem: it often relies on conventional materials with significant environmental impacts, yet is discarded long before the end of its useful life. BioPuff® offers an alternative approach, using plant-based insulation designed to connect product manufacturing with wetland restoration, and lower-impact material systems.
BioPuff® is made from Typha (bulrush) grown through paludiculture, the farming of wetland crops on rewetted peatlands. Each BioPuff®-insulated gilet is equivalent to four square metres of healthy wetland. That represents approximately 9 kg of CO2e in avoided emissions each year, 800 litres of water stored, and three times the bird density of drained land. Wetlands hold more than twice the carbon of all the world’s trees combined. The millions of hectares of drained peatlands emit approximately 1.9 gigatons of CO2 a year, roughly twice the total emissions of the global fashion industry.
BioPuff® outperforms premium synthetics on warmth. It has already been used by Stella McCartney, Berghaus, Ahluwalia and Sheep Inc. In March 2026, Ponda exhibited at the Sustainable Markets Initiative CEO Summit at Hampton Court Palace, where the team met King Charles III and was recognized by the King’s Terra Carta Design Lab.
The collaboration is part of Sustainable Imperial, the university’s commitment to lead on climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution through research, education, operations and community action. But the ambition runs wider than one campus. Julian Ellis-Brown co-founded Ponda while studying at Imperial in 2020. The partnership is a test of a simple idea: that the branded clothing items organizations produce by the thousand can regenerate ecosystems rather than deplete them.
“Most organizations don’t think of merchandise as a supply chain decision. But every order creates demand for a particular set of materials and a particular way of producing them. This collaboration helps demonstrate a different model, one where the products we choose can create demand for ecosystem restoration rather than depletion. Opening our funding round to the public is about accelerating that transition and helping us scale the material, the supply chain and the restoration model behind it. If it works here, it works for any brand buying at scale,” Julian Ellis-Brown, Co-founder and CEO, Ponda.
The Ponda x Imperial College London collaboration will launch this autumn exclusively through the Imperial College Union Shop. The products for sale will include their Mallard gilet and Fern cap.
"This partnership will give Imperial's community the chance to directly back climate friendly fashion innovation. We're proud to celebrate this collaboration as part of our Sustainable Imperial Strategy (2026-2031), launching later this month. Ponda's story is a powerful example of how Imperial aims to maximise its positive impact on people and planet by giving our students and innovators the tools they need to find solutions to some of the world's most pressing challenges." Professor Anna Korre, Associate Provost (Sustainability), Imperial College London.
Ponda’s crowdfunding campaign is open now on Republic, giving the public a chance to invest in BioPuff® and the regenerative wetland supply chain behind it. The campaign builds on a $2.4 million seed round co-led by Faber and Counteract, bringing total funding to date to $6.6 million including grants and awards. The Ponda x Imperial products will be available to buy this autumn.