TORONTO — SRTX started with tights. Now it wants to do a whole lot more. “We want to build all of the world’s clothes out of Canada,” Katherine Homuth, CEO of SRTX said at The Logic Summit in Toronto. “I would love to be the female Elon Musk—without a lot of the weird political stuff.”

Homuth is a serial entrepreneur who sold her first pair of almost unbreakable Sheertex tights in 2019. Since then, the company has changed its name to SRTX, which Homuth admits is “an aspirational stock ticker.” But, she said, it also encompasses the company’s broader ambitions in material science. 

The Montreal-based company has disrupted the textile industry by using automated manufacturing to create modern, resilient materials. Its tights, which use a miniaturized version of the polymers in bulletproof vests, are up to ten times more durable than regular materials. As a result, they’re now the best-selling brand in the U.S., and are sold at major retailers including Costco, H&M and Skims.

As it moves beyond tights, SRTX recently expanded into a new 300,000-square-foot headquarters in Pointe Claire, Que., which the company says will help reduce costs and better control its supply chain. It also launched a line of swimsuits using new waterproof materials. It’s the “beginning of a much more ambitious project,” Homuth said. 

She sees a future in apparel where manufacturers can make the products for “nothing more than the cost of energy,” where textiles are recycled, and automation reduces labour costs. “I know this sounds kind of science fiction,” she said. “But in this version of the world, really what you have is a lot of people working on machines, a lot of people in the knowledge economy.”

Having built SRTX’s automated manufacturing process in Canada, Homuth is a proponent of onshoring supply chains to control intellectual property and all aspects of manufacturing. But, she cautioned, such a bold move only makes sense if the technology is “truly proprietary” with IP to protect. “I think it is also a case study: How can we start to bring manufacturing back to Canada, back to North America?” she said.

Homuth, who is also the founder of Female Funders, an online platform for female angel investors, also said she agrees with Shopify president Harley Finkelstein’s recent comments about the state of entrepreneurial ambition in Canada. “There are not enough people in Canada who are swinging for the global fences,” Homuth said, adding that she believes Canadians aren’t doing things at the highest level. 

Her comments come after Finkelstein said Canada’s lack of ambition was the source of the country’s low productivity. Homuth compared the Canadian environment to San Francisco, where she spent a large portion of her twenties, urging people to go to Silicon Valley to learn and then come back to Canada to build, as she did. 

Homuth also criticized the amount of regulatory red tape in Canada, which, she argued, slows the process of getting work permits to hire the best talent from across the world.