Ambercycle
ROLE
Founding team / first commercial hire
ORGANIZATION
Ambercycle, Inc.
IMPACT
Built the commercial function from 0 → 1, contributing to $100M+ in committed agreements
Selected Proof
Co-led €70M+ Inditex partnership / built 100+ opportunity pipeline / grew flagship accounts into recurring programmes
YearS
2021 - 2026
FROM ZERO TO SCALE
I joined Ambercycle as its first commercial hire when we were four people and the technology was still being built.
I came from AI, not textiles. I had to learn the material, supply chain and circular economy while simultaneously helping build the commercial side of the company from scratch. Over the next several years, that work expanded across partnerships, market strategy, brand, communications, team-building and company positioning as Ambercycle moved toward global scale.
THE QUESTION
How do you build a market for a breakthrough when much of what it needs around it does not exist yet?
IN PRACTICE
COMPLEXITY → CLARITY
IDEAS → ADOPTION
SYSTEMS → EXPERIENCE
01 / BUILDING FROM ZERO
In the beginning, almost everything had to be built at once.
On my first day, one of the clearest asks was simple: build the brand and get us into the market. Three months later, we launched publicly through a partnership with Avery Dennison that I built from the first conversation onward. It was not a perfect expression of what Ambercycle would eventually become, but it gave us something real to organize around and helped create external proof at a critical stage of the business.
MARKET / CYCORA®
Giving the technology something the market could understand.
One of the earliest gaps was language. The technology was complex, the category barely existed and recycled polyester was largely treated as a commodity. I created cycora® as the market-facing expression of the technology, building the name, positioning, brand architecture and go-to-market system that made it easier for brands and consumers to understand what we were building.
EXPLORE THE CYCORA® CASE STUDY →
SYSTEM / SUPPLY CHAIN
Building what did not yet exist around us.
Circularity was not just a product story. We had to understand and help piece together the physical system around it, from feedstock and sorting to processing, manufacturing and customers. In the earliest days in Los Angeles, we sometimes collected feedstock ourselves when that was what the work required.
There is very little room for ego when you are building something that does not exist yet. We got plenty wrong along the way. What mattered was staying close enough to the market to see it, change course and keep moving.
FROM ZERO TO SCALE
I joined Ambercycle as its first commercial hire when we were four people and the technology was still being built.
I came from AI, not textiles. I had to learn the material, supply chain and circular economy while simultaneously helping build the commercial side of the company from scratch. Over the next several years, that work expanded across partnerships, market strategy, brand, communications, team-building and company positioning as Ambercycle moved toward global scale.
THE QUESTION
How do you build a market for a breakthrough when much of what it needs around it does not exist yet?
IN PRACTICE
COMPLEXITY → CLARITY
IDEAS → ADOPTION
SYSTEMS → EXPERIENCE
01 / BUILDING FROM ZERO
In the beginning, almost everything had to be built at once.
On my first day, one of the clearest asks was simple: build the brand and get us into the market. Three months later, we launched publicly through a partnership with Avery Dennison that I built from the first conversation onward. It was not a perfect expression of what Ambercycle would eventually become, but it gave us something real to organize around and helped create external proof at a critical stage of the business.
MARKET / CYCORA®
Giving the technology something the market could understand.
One of the earliest gaps was language. The technology was complex, the category barely existed and recycled polyester was largely treated as a commodity. I created cycora® as the market-facing expression of the technology, building the name, positioning, brand architecture and go-to-market system that made it easier for brands and consumers to understand what we were building.
EXPLORE THE CYCORA® CASE STUDY →
SYSTEM / SUPPLY CHAIN
Building what did not yet exist around us.
Circularity was not just a product story. We had to understand and help piece together the physical system around it, from feedstock and sorting to processing, manufacturing and customers. In the earliest days in Los Angeles, we sometimes collected feedstock ourselves when that was what the work required.
There is very little room for ego when you are building something that does not exist yet. We got plenty wrong along the way. What mattered was staying close enough to the market to see it, change course and keep moving.
02 / FROM INTEREST TO COMMITMENT
The milestone was not another launch. It was committed demand.
As the company matured, we learned that market enthusiasm and market readiness were not the same thing. Brands wanted pilots and innovation, but wanting something new did not mean their sourcing systems, economics or decision-making were ready to adopt it at scale.
As the partnerships grew, the work changed too. Moving from pilots to scale meant working with executive sponsors and navigating commercial, sourcing, product, sustainability and operational teams inside some of the world’s largest organizations to find a path they could actually execute.
The market can want the future before the system is ready for it.
PIPELINE / MARKET DEVELOPMENT
100+ opportunities became a way to understand how organizations adopt something new.
I built Ambercycle’s early commercial pipeline across more than 100 opportunities in fashion, performance, outdoor and lifestyle. Just as importantly, those conversations became a learning system: what customers valued, where adoption stalled, which pilots had a credible path to volume and where we were spending energy without enough signal.
The work was rarely about convincing one person. In larger organizations, adoption depended on building alignment between the people excited by innovation and the people responsible for making it operationally possible.
ANCHOR PARTNERSHIP / INDITEX
€70M+ committed demand.
I co-led the origination and negotiation of Ambercycle’s partnership with Inditex directly with our CEO, from the initial proposition through negotiation, internal alignment, signed agreement and delivery. The three-year €70M+ commitment became the largest commercial relationship in the company’s history and a major signal that demand could move beyond pilots toward scale.
ACCOUNT DEVELOPMENT / FLAGSHIP PARTNERS
Turning experimentation into recurring adoption.
I built and grew relationships including GANNI, Reformation and Patagonia from early conversations into recurring, multi-season programmes. The work was often less about selling a material than finding a viable path through product requirements, timing, internal champions and supply-chain constraints.
Over time, the work changed from doing whatever was needed to get something off the ground to helping some of the world’s largest organizations work out how to adopt it.
02 / FROM INTEREST TO COMMITMENT
The milestone was not another launch. It was committed demand.
As the company matured, we learned that market enthusiasm and market readiness were not the same thing. Brands wanted pilots and innovation, but wanting something new did not mean their sourcing systems, economics or decision-making were ready to adopt it at scale.
As the partnerships grew, the work changed too. Moving from pilots to scale meant working with executive sponsors and navigating commercial, sourcing, product, sustainability and operational teams inside some of the world’s largest organizations to find a path they could actually execute.
The market can want the future before the system is ready for it.
PIPELINE / MARKET DEVELOPMENT
100+ opportunities became a way to understand how organizations adopt something new.
I built Ambercycle’s early commercial pipeline across more than 100 opportunities in fashion, performance, outdoor and lifestyle. Just as importantly, those conversations became a learning system: what customers valued, where adoption stalled, which pilots had a credible path to volume and where we were spending energy without enough signal.
The work was rarely about convincing one person. In larger organizations, adoption depended on building alignment between the people excited by innovation and the people responsible for making it operationally possible.
ANCHOR PARTNERSHIP / INDITEX
€70M+ committed demand.
I co-led the origination and negotiation of Ambercycle’s partnership with Inditex directly with our CEO, from the initial proposition through negotiation, internal alignment, signed agreement and delivery. The three-year €70M+ commitment became the largest commercial relationship in the company’s history and a major signal that demand could move beyond pilots toward scale.
ACCOUNT DEVELOPMENT / FLAGSHIP PARTNERS
Turning experimentation into recurring adoption.
I built and grew relationships including GANNI, Reformation and Patagonia from early conversations into recurring, multi-season programmes. The work was often less about selling a material than finding a viable path through product requirements, timing, internal champions and supply-chain constraints.
Over time, the work changed from doing whatever was needed to get something off the ground to helping some of the world’s largest organizations work out how to adopt it.
03 / BUILDING THE COMPANY
Building the market also meant building the company around it.
As Ambercycle grew, the boundaries around my role became less useful. Commercial strategy affected the product. Brand affected demand. Customer traction affected fundraising. Hiring affected what we could execute. The pieces were already shaping one another, so much of my work became connecting them.
BRAND / COMPANY POSITIONING
Making the company as legible as the technology.
Beyond cycora®, I led Ambercycle’s broader brand, corporate communications and PR, helping shape how the company explained its technology, commercial ambition and role in a changing industry. I worked across leadership narrative, partner communications, investor materials and global media as the business evolved.
ORGANIZATION / COMMERCIAL TEAM
Building the capability around the work.
I helped build the wider commercial organization beyond my own direct team, participating in hiring and shaping roles as the function grew across partnerships, market development, brand and communications. I also built and led a four-person internal team and managed three external agencies.
Much of the work required leading through influence rather than hierarchy, connecting founders, technical teams, commercial colleagues and external partners around decisions that crossed organizational boundaries.
CAPITAL / COMPANY STORY
Connecting traction to the story of scale.
I supported leadership through multiple fundraising cycles as Ambercycle grew from roughly $2M to more than $50M in financing, helping translate customer demand, commercial commitments and the industrial vision into a story investors could understand and believe in.
SCALE
4 people in an LA warehouse → 120+ globally.
The company changed enormously around me, and so did my role: from hands-on zero-to-one execution to navigating decisions across executive teams, functions and global partners.
WHAT IT TAUGHT ME
Coherence is not everything going to plan.
We made plenty of mistakes. We pursued things that looked promising and went nowhere. We learned that enthusiasm for pilots did not necessarily translate into readiness for scale. Assumptions that felt obvious from inside the company often changed the moment they met customers, economics or the realities of the supply chain.
That experience changed how I think about building. You have to stay close enough to reality to let it challenge you. There is little room to become too attached to a title, a plan or your own assumptions when the work itself is telling you something different.
To me, coherence is not having the perfect strategy from the beginning. It is being able to keep seeing the whole clearly enough to bring the pieces back into alignment as reality changes.
The ambition stayed constant. The path did not.
03 / BUILDING THE COMPANY
Building the market also meant building the company around it.
As Ambercycle grew, the boundaries around my role became less useful. Commercial strategy affected the product. Brand affected demand. Customer traction affected fundraising. Hiring affected what we could execute. The pieces were already shaping one another, so much of my work became connecting them.
BRAND / COMPANY POSITIONING
Making the company as legible as the technology.
Beyond cycora®, I led Ambercycle’s broader brand, corporate communications and PR, helping shape how the company explained its technology, commercial ambition and role in a changing industry. I worked across leadership narrative, partner communications, investor materials and global media as the business evolved.
ORGANIZATION / COMMERCIAL TEAM
Building the capability around the work.
I helped build the wider commercial organization beyond my own direct team, participating in hiring and shaping roles as the function grew across partnerships, market development, brand and communications. I also built and led a four-person internal team and managed three external agencies.
Much of the work required leading through influence rather than hierarchy, connecting founders, technical teams, commercial colleagues and external partners around decisions that crossed organizational boundaries.
CAPITAL / COMPANY STORY
Connecting traction to the story of scale.
I supported leadership through multiple fundraising cycles as Ambercycle grew from roughly $2M to more than $50M in financing, helping translate customer demand, commercial commitments and the industrial vision into a story investors could understand and believe in.
SCALE
4 people in an LA warehouse → 120+ globally.
The company changed enormously around me, and so did my role: from hands-on zero-to-one execution to navigating decisions across executive teams, functions and global partners.
WHAT IT TAUGHT ME
Coherence is not everything going to plan.
We made plenty of mistakes. We pursued things that looked promising and went nowhere. We learned that enthusiasm for pilots did not necessarily translate into readiness for scale. Assumptions that felt obvious from inside the company often changed the moment they met customers, economics or the realities of the supply chain.
That experience changed how I think about building. You have to stay close enough to reality to let it challenge you. There is little room to become too attached to a title, a plan or your own assumptions when the work itself is telling you something different.
To me, coherence is not having the perfect strategy from the beginning. It is being able to keep seeing the whole clearly enough to bring the pieces back into alignment as reality changes.
The ambition stayed constant. The path did not.
