Katherine Homuth shipped off the first pair of almost unrippable Sheertex tights in 2019. Since then, the Montreal-based company’s best-known product has become a global phenomenon, rumoured to be a favourite among celebrities like Taylor Swift. Now with its rebranding to SRTX into a broader textiles tech company, Homuth hinted that an IPO isn’t out of the question. 

At The Logic Summit Monday, Homuth spoke with The Logic reporter Anita Balakrishnan, to discuss everything from how she captured the attention of Joe Mimran (best known for founding brands like Joe Fresh and Club Monaco), to whether Canadian entrepreneurs have enough ambition. Homuth also spoke about how SRTX’s goal is to one day make “all the world’s clothes out of Canada”—and how that vision will require raising large amounts of capital.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

SRTX kind of looks like a stock ticker. What would the IPO market have to look like to see your name on the NASDAQ?

SRTX did actually start as an aspirational stock ticker, and then we decided it’s actually pretty cool. 

We’ve started to put time into building that brand over the last couple years for a few different reasons. The funding market is a very, very big part of it. We believe that building big infrastructure for us—we want to build all of the world’s clothes out of Canada—is going to take raising a lot of capital. And we believe that the funding brand, the company brand, the technology brand, are just as important as some of our consumer brands. 

It’s been a couple years now that we’ve been working on [our brand]. It’s starting to catch on that there’s a separation between our consumer brands and what we do as a business. 

So, is that a maybe? 

It would not be wrong for me to say that we have very, very large ambitions to build a multi-hundred-billion-dollar company here in Canada.

There’s been debate over whether there’s a lack of ambition in Canada to take big swings and build big ventures. Where does your ambition come from, and was there anything in the Canadian ecosystem that stood in the way?

I personally agree with [Shopify president Harley Finkelstein] on this. There are not enough people in Canada who are swinging for the global fences—beyond just wanting to have a successful business, wanting to be able to make money for yourself. Like, I would love to be the female Elon Musk without a lot of the weird political stuff. 

Certainly I love Canadian entrepreneurs, but I don’t think that we have created peer groups [here] that are doing things at the highest level. There’s a difference between just blind ambition, and ambition with a peer group with experience that knows what you’re trying to build. I am very lucky I spent time in Silicon Valley—a huge amount of my 20s was spent going back and forth to San Francisco. 

You’re a company that has actively been onshoring. Is there less pressure now to outsource than a few years ago?

If we here in Canada can become the makers of things, I think it would become an absolutely huge opportunity for us. And I think it’s going to take a lot of capital. I have become growingly frustrated with the short-term nature of software-based investments. I think there is much more tech in manufacturing than there is in the average web app these days.

I think that investment has just been going over to the SaaS side. I understand recurring payments and business models and how great that is. But at the end of the day, I think the actual consumer economy and long-term growth of our countries is going to be by the businesses that are doing hard tech, that are doing things that have a longer time horizon.

Your technology is the first automated hosiery assembly line in the world. Is [manufacturing] still done in a very analog way, and why is that?

A lot of the individual aspects of the manufacturing process have been automated for quite some time, for example, a knitting machine or sewing machine. What we really identified as our opportunity, as we continue to automate this process, is all of the interconnected bits of it [from powder to yarn to knitting machines to dyeing]. We’ve decided to do all of this in Montreal. We’re conscious to make sure that our labour rate is not going to be why we can’t be super competitive. We want to be the most automated, the most tech- and engineering-heavy version of apparel manufacturing. 

This is just the very beginning of a much more ambitious project. We believe that there’s a future in apparel where you could effectively make it for nothing more than the cost of energy. And what I mean by that is: could you actually use waste textiles and actually decompose those into their parts, put them back through that powder-extrusion process, and then basically have no cost of raw material? 

This kind of sounds like science fiction, but in this version of the world, really what you have is a lot of people in the knowledge economy working on building up these systems rather than necessarily being the hands in these systems.

Where do you source SRTX’s material from, and how is it different from traditional tights?

My background was originally in software and high-tech manufacturing, and I must say, pantyhose is the last possible industry I thought I would end up in. I was working with people on very interesting products, but so many of them I felt were just technology for technology’s sake. I wanted the next thing that I did to start with a problem first and then figure out what the technology was after. 

Pantyhose caught my attention almost because it was so boring. Why was it that something that was so simple had been around for so long and had so many issues? It could barely last one or two wears, whereas we have space travel and self-driving cars.

I started with very simple Google searches. I started ordering all of these fibres on Alibaba and Amazon … After going through about 15 different types of fibres, I finally got so frustrated. I was like, what is the strongest polymer in the entire world?  The answer to that question was ultra-high-molecular polyethylene. I was quoted $2,000 from one spool of fibre. I got this precious spool shipped to my house, I put it on my finger, and it nearly took my finger off rather than breaking.

Joe Mimran was one of the first investors I pitched with this little piece of cheesecloth. And at the time, honestly, he looked over the table at me, and he just thought I was insane. He literally told me, ”You’re absolutely crazy. This is the worst prototype I’ve ever seen. But if you’re going to be the person that invents unbreakable pantyhose, I don’t want to miss out.” And he ended up being one of our first, one of our most supportive investors. 

It turned out in addition to just being really strong, [the material is] also incredibly lightweight. It’s cool to the touch. It doesn’t have any PFAs chemicals that you can find in other traditional waterproofing or high-performance garments. So it had all of these things that also made it really good for activewear. Give us 20 years, and you’ll all be wearing a little bit of ultra-high-molecular polyethylene out of our factories. I really see that special material as being our wedge into the market.