Channeling Spider-Man

Bolt Threads | 06.26.2017

What’s blue and red and webbed all over? Spider-Man: Homecoming, the latest installment of our favorite superhero film franchise. We often get compared to Spider-Man, and although we’re not superhuman, we share Peter Parker’s love of science and we’re using technology to make materials we think he’d be proud of. In fact, Spider-Man has been such an inspiration to... Read more »

Designing a BoltSpun tie: Conversations with a material

Bolt Threads | 03.13.2017

On March 10, we launched the world’s first ever human-made spider silk consumer product, a knit silk necktie. Why a tie? We chose a tie because we wanted to create an iconic product associated with the history of silk. Emperor Shih Huang Ti’s famous Terracotta Army in 210 BCE is depicted wearing a silk necktie... Read more »

Bolt’s Founding Story: How It All Began

Bolt Threads | 02.15.2017

It all started back when our co-founders Dan, David, and Ethan met in 2009. (Cue the flashback harp sound effects.) Ethan and Dan were UC San Francisco PhD students making microbes produce silk and David was a UC Berkeley PhD student using microfluidic devices to mimic the process of spiders spinning silk. Ethan and Dan... Read more »

The History Of Silk Fiber – From Silkworm to Spider Silk

Bolt Threads | 11.05.2016

For millennia, people have been fascinated with the magic of fabric, especially silk. Sericulture, the practice of making silk and raising silkworms (and your vocab word for the day) began in China around 3000 BCE. The chief wife of the first Emperor of China is credited with accidentally discovering how to reel silk when a... Read more »

The Interwoven Paths of Tech and Textiles – Part 2

Bolt Threads | 07.14.2016

The previous post dove into the history of technology in textiles from the Stone Age through the Industrial Revolution. But the love story between tech and textiles didn’t end there. The next wave of innovation came in the 20th century and was based on synthetic and semi-synthetic fabrics, many of which fill our closets today.... Read more »

The Interwoven Paths of Tech and Textiles – Part 1

Bolt Threads | 06.23.2016

Bolt Threads lives at the intersection of the two seemingly disparate worlds: fashion and biotechnology. We realize that technology and textiles aren’t so different after all: in fact, they have a long history of intertwining. (For an excellent longread, check out Virginia Postrel’s essay “How Textiles Repeatedly Revolutionized Human Technology”) Stone Age clothes were pretty... Read more »

Why Making Spider Silk Is So Tricky – Part 2

Bolt Threads | 05.07.2016

Over the past few decades, a number of groups have tried to make spider silk via modern biotechnology techniques, but spider silk textile products still aren’t available for sale. Why not, and what are we doing differently? Engineering a silk-producing organism neatly sidesteps the obstacles we mentioned in the previous post, but the method has... Read more »

Why Making Spider Silk Is So Tricky – Part 1

Bolt Threads | 05.06.2016

Why has the dream of making tons of spider silk been so elusive, and how are we finally turning that dream into a reality? People have been captivated by the allure of silk for ages. The quest for spider silk has been particularly intense. The awesomeness of spider silk is a story in itself, but... Read more »