Collaboration is the name of the game in the new adidas TERREX HS1 hoodie which was released this summer. It’s the inaugural product that the global sporting brand has made in partnership with Spinnova. We first heard about the HS1 hoodie back in February, following adidas’ $3.65 million USD investment in the Finnish textile material company. Now that it’s available globally, we caught up with adidas and Spinnova to hear a little bit more about the innovative new product and how their partnership is going.

First, a quick reminder. The adidas TERREX HS1 is a hoodie made from the patented SPINNOVA® fiber, comprising 30 percent wood-based fibers, 70 percent organic cotton and zero microplastics. The wood fibers are ground mechanically and are sourced from sustainable FSC certified wood and waste. And the hoodie’s undyed and natural ecru finish keeps water and chemical usage to a minimum.

As stated, this is the first product of the two brands’ partnership. Without such a large investment from adidas, Spinnova may not have been able to grow and scale up its production. “adidas was one of the cornerstone investors in Spinnova’s initial public offering,” Spinnova told us. “The funding collected through the IPO has been used to scale production and capabilities.”

The benefits of the collaboration are not just financial. For Spinnova, adidas provides “agile and advanced testing and analysis capabilities, and direct feedback from the athletes has helped the development of the hoodie and SPINNOVA® fiber.” This kind of research and development is usually out of reach for Spinnova. Now, it can find out first-hand how its products work and perform in the real world.

For adidas, choosing to work with Spinnova was “about finding innovators with areas of expertise that we might not necessarily have internally, to help us get better and achieve our goals,” explained Marwin Hoffmann, Vice President Marketing, Global Outdoor at adidas. It looked outside its own expertise to enable action at speed and scale. While adidas has historically worked with many types of cotton and polyester materials, collaborating with Spinnova expands its “material portfolio to include more recycled polyester and natural materials.”

“The launch of the adidas TERREX HS1 is just the beginning with plans to develop more products in the future,” Hoffman told us. “We’re just at the start of this new and exciting journey exploring and experimenting to see what is possible. The fibers used to create our products this season came from a pilot production, so we are not on a fully commercial scale yet.”

To get to commercial scale, “Spinnova is building its first commercial scale factory with its investor and joint venture partner Suzano, and the factory is expected to be ready by the end of 2022.”

Each of these collaborations helps each of the brands move forward just a little bit more. Bit by bit, hoodie by hoodie, they make progress. As adidas said to us, “there is only one way to create a more sustainable future, and that is to co-create it.”

By 2025, adidas says it wants nine out of ten of its products to be the result of more sustainable technologies, materials, or design. We asked Hoffman if the brand was on target for that: “Yes, we are on track. Today over 90 percent of the polyester we use is recycled and we will only use recycled polyester by 2024 wherever possible.”

Shop the adidas TERREX HS1 at adidas.com and in stores.