In photos: US startup makes leather from invasive snakes and fish
US company Inversa is making leather from invasive species including the Burmese python and the lionfish. The leather is used by fashion brands — like this Gabriela Hearst bag. Gabriela Hearst
Leather has been a staple of human fashion for millennia, but the fashion industry is increasingly embracing more sustainable alternatives.
Traditional leather comes mainly from cows, and cattle farming is linked to deforestation, habitat loss and land degradation. The tanning process is polluting and can use up to 50,000 liters (13,209 gallons) of water for each ton of raw animal hides.
Vegan and lab-grown leathers are on the rise, but one US company is supplying fashion houses with the real thing — only rather than using cattle, it’s sourced from invasive exotic animals.
Pythons from Florida’s Greater Everglades, silverfin carp from the Mississippi River Basin and lionfish from Caribbean reefs are the three alien invasive species that Miami-based startup Inversa currently harvests. The leather it produces is eventually turned into products such as clothing, bags and other accessories by fashion brands such as Gabriela Hearst, Khaite, Catherine Holstein and Johanna Ortiz.
“This all starts with a fish,” said Inversa CEO Aarav Chavda, who co-founded the company in 2020. “I’ve been a scuba diver for almost 15 years now, and I’ve just been obsessed with the problem of the invasive lionfish and what it’s doing to coral reefs throughout the Caribbean and the Mediterranean — taking a sledgehammer to native biodiversity on those reefs.”
Swatches of Inversa’s lionfish leather. Inversa
Invasive species are animals and plants that are introduced due to human activity to an area where they are not native. They end up harming the local ecosystem, for example by eating native species, spreading disease or outcompeting other organisms for food or resources. They can cause extinctions and irreversible damage to the environment.
“My co-founders and I firmly believed that one way to solve this problem was to tap into the power of the consumer,” Chavda added. “We then zeroed in on the fashion industry — it really wants to do better and it’s looking for healthier and more sustainable feedstock materials. We ended up turning the lionfish into leather, and that was the genesis of this wonderful idea. I’m here to make a structural impact on invasives, which the UN considers to be a top five driver of biodiversity loss.”
Invasive menace
After an initial focus on the lionfish, Inversa started harvesting silverfin, a carp native to China that was imported in the US in the 1970s, mostly to control algae in municipal sewage lagoons. However, it soon escaped into the wild: “In the Mississippi river ecosystem it’s completely decimating native biodiversity,” Chavda said. “It consumes an unbelievable amount of native vegetation and biomass and it’s now in several US states — it’s a major problem.”
The Burmese python soon followed: “It’s a constrictor snake originally from Southeast Asia, which was released into the Florida Everglades in the 1990s,” Chavda said. The snakes, likely from the pet trade, quickly multiplied and turned into super-predators, leading to the collapse of the populations of native mammals like raccoons, opossums and bobcats.
Inversa manages a network of hunters who procure the invasive species, and then processes the skins in three tanning facilities — two in Europe and one in the US. The system is managed through a digital platform called Origin, which integrates real-time field data, satellite imagery, predictive modeling, and AI-driven invasion mapping, with the goal of streamlining the operation and allowing traceability of every product: “Invasive species are a 21st century ecological crisis whose management cannot be solved with outdated, fragmented approaches,” Chavda said.
“We are building a completely transparent, traceable and verifiable supply chain, all the way back to the hunting itself.”
Chavda noted the tanning process is different from using cow hide — especially for fish skin, which is made up of very thin but also very strong fibers.
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