FROM VINEYARD TO VANGUARD: VEGEA AND THE MATERIAL REINVENTING LUXURY
- Sumana Mukherjee
- Mar 30
- 2 min read
Bergamo, March 2026.
Ten years after Francesco Merlino founded Vegea with the idea of turning winemaking by-products — grape skins, seeds, and stalks — into a high-value biomaterial, the company is marking its anniversary with a significant industrial expansion. New infrastructure, new production units, higher output, shorter delivery times. GrapeSkin, the Italian biomaterial at the heart of it all, is now gearing up to match it's global appetite.
The Alchemy of GrapeSkin
Vegea's name is stitched from two ideas: VEG for vegan, GEA for Mother Earth. The material itself draws from grape leftovers, vegetal oils, and natural agricultural fibres to produce something with high bio-based, renewable, and recycled content — occupying its own category, grown rather than extracted, sitting comfortably alongside neither petroleum synthetics nor animal leather but well ahead of both.
The Names That Trust It
Calvin Klein, Bentley, Diadora, Stella McCartney, Rémy Martin, Moleskine. Across footwear, handbags, apparel, car cabins, homeware, and notebook covers — Vegea has made itself at home in the most demanding creative and industrial contexts on Earth. Rémy Martin shaped it into a bespoke artisan homeware range. Bentley brought it into the interior of the car. Moleskine wrapped its Precious & Ethical collection in it. A material trusted at that breadth of application has long stopped needing sustainable as a qualifier — it has simply become essential.
Expansion Without Compromise
As demand for biomaterials scales globally, GrapeSkin scales with it — and the material's specifications remain untouched: same bio-based profile, same quality benchmark, just more of it, more reliably, for more brands committed to circular-economy practices and the reduction of fossil fuel-based materials.
"Our industrial expansion marks a new phase for Vegea: more capacity, more continuity, and stronger support for brands pursuing a circular materials strategy," said Merlino.
The Bigger Picture
Working directly with Italian wineries, Vegea intercepts grape marc before it becomes an industry footnote and transforms it into something worth coveting. Green chemistry meets design rigour meets circular economy thinking — applied as actual, shippable material, and already inside some of the most iconic products of the past decade.
For fashion, interiors, and automotive — sectors actively rewriting their relationship with the materials they use — GrapeSkin arrives already at scale, already proven, with a decade of craft behind it and clearly, a great deal more ahead.
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