A hat made from Rambouillet wool is a perfectly nice hat. The fiber, shorn from a Rambouillet sheep, is fine and soft. Not at all scratchy. “They call it the American merino,” says Dan Widmaier, the founder of Bolt Threads, a biotech company that grows synthetic spider silk from yeast.
Earlier this year, Bolt bought Best Made Company[1], a high-design outdoor brand that makes hand painted axes and fancy toolboxes. It was an unexpected move—what did a biotech company want with a lifestyle brand, anyway? It turns out, Bolt wanted to make a new kind of wool hat.
For its first joint product, the companies are launching a limited edition version of Best Made Company’s Cap of Courage, a $198 striped beanie that’s made by combining Bolt’s Microsilk and Rambouillet wool. More than anything, the run of 100 caps is a proof of concept. It’s a way to show that the elusive science behind crafting synthetic spider's silk is no longer elusive. In fact, it’s scalable enough that customers can walk into a store, pick up a spider silk hat, and wear it on their walk home.
Home-Brewed Silk
Five years ago that would’ve been unthinkable. Spider silk is an ace of a material. It’s soft, flexible, and strong as steel. But it’s also a terror to produce en mass. Spiders, no surprise, tend to cannibalize each other before they crank out enough silk to be useful. Scientists tried BioSteel goats, animals that are genetically modified to produce the filament of a Golden Orb spider, but that proved untenable, too.
For more than a decade, Widmaier has worked on solving the problem[2] by growing proteins that mimic spider silk in yeast. “It’s been one of those...