T-Rex Leather

The world’s first product made from lab-grown T-Rex Leather™

Office: France

Client: Lab Grown Leather Ltd

With T-Rex leather, we’re harnessing the biology of the past to create the luxury materials of the future.

The stark reality is that lab-grown leather hasn’t yet convinced the luxury world. Why? Because it feels like an imitation. So VML, The Organoid Company, Lab-Grown Leather Ltd. and luxury handbag designer Enfin Levé unveiled the world’s first T-Rex leather handbag crafted from lab-grown dinosaur collagen.

As much about science as it is about brand positioning and category creation, the project aims to inform consumers about sustainable innovation and inspire ways to make eco-friendly alternatives to traditional materials a reality.

This project demonstrates how genome and protein engineering can create entirely new classes of biomaterials. By reconstructing and optimizing ancient protein sequences, we’ve designed T-Rex leather inspired by prehistoric biology and cloned it into a custom-engineered cell line. It’s a bold example of synthetic biology extending beyond medicine into sustainable material innovation.

Thomas Mitchell CEO of The Organoid Company

The luxury industry does not merely reject lab-grown materials. It has built an ideology against them. For over a decade, lab-grown leather companies tried to breach this wall through sustainability arguments, celebrity endorsements, and fashion partnerships. Every attempt failed. The problem was never marketing. It was the material's soul. Lab-grown leather had no origin myth, no scarcity, no story worth telling. It was a replica, and luxury does not collect replicas. The only way in was to create something so extraordinary that the material itself became undeniable. Not a better substitute. Something that had never existed before.

The most exclusive material is no longer one that is hard to find, but one that shouldn’t exist. To solve the luxury world's rejection of lab-grown replicas, we did not create another substitute. We resurrected an original. By engineering leather from the DNA of a T-Rex, we created a material whose story of origin is unparalleled. This act of "resurrection, not replication" gave our technology the soul it lacked and transformed the conversation forever.

We reconstructed an extinct animal's collagen protein from 68-million-year-old fossil fragments. A sequence of over 1,400 amino acids that has not existed since the Cretaceous period. The reconstructed protein, over 18,000 letters of genetic code, was inserted into living cells. It folded correctly. It expressed with zero toxicity. There was no precedent for this working. Lab-Grown Leather Ltd then cultivated the cells into actual leather. One sheet. One handbag. Unveiled in a museum, next to the skeleton of the very animal it came from. We did not make an ad about resurrection. We performed one.

Commercial Transformation: LGL's share price soared +279% and inbound interest from luxury brands increased x10. 
Cultural Impact: The creation generated 4.63 billion media impressions, with The Times declaring: "Move over, Birkin. Watch out, Chanel. There's a new apex predator." 
Perception Transformation: A survey showed a +26% uplift in luxury prestige perception.
Industry Precedent: This project resulted in a new class of biomaterials. As Florent Chatel, luxury watch executive at Vacheron Constantin, put it: "This is the first new luxury material I've seen in years that genuinely excites me. It doesn't compete with tradition; it predates it by 68 million years."

We knew we had to do something radically different. Not a substitute, but something entirely new. So we went back 66 million years in time. The result is a material that doesn’t copy the past but reimagines it. Seeing it realised as a luxury object is a powerful milestone in shaping a new category of sustainable luxury.

Bas Korsten Global Chief Creative Officer, Innovation & CCO EMEA at VML