Key takeaways

• The fashion veteran brings decades of apparel and fiber expertise to Avalo’s AI-driven mission to breed better cotton.
• Industry peers have credited her with efforts to advance circulose, textile-to-textile recycled material from doomed startup Renewcell.
• Carey spent 24 years at fiber giant Lenzing Group, where she led denim strategy and expanded the use of Tencel.

Send news about sustainability leadership roles, promotions and departures to [email protected]. Read more Executive Moves.

Tricia Carey, a veteran of sustainability innovation in apparel, is joining a six-year-old startup that seeks to accelerate the evolution of climate-friendly cotton. As the new chief commercial officer for AI-focused Avalo, she will help develop irrigation-free cotton plants that use 30 percent less fertilizer than conventional methods.

Based in New York City, Carey will help the Durham, North Carolina, company expand a two-year effort in Texas to discover “low-input” cotton strains that require fewer chemical applications than when conventionally grown. 

Carey brings deep experience in fiber and textile development, honed over more than two decades at Lenzing Group. In the late 1990s, she helped usher the company’s new semisynthetic fiber, Tencel into supply chains for brands including Gap, Levi’s and UnderArmour. She worked her way up to become director of business development for denim and the Americas.

More recently, Carey attracted a mix of sympathy and criticism in her nearly two years as the chief commercial officer of Renewcell, which she left last July. The promising Stockholm circularity startup recycled old cotton jeans and T-shirts into material to be blended and spun into new clothes. H&M, Zara and Levi’s featured the product in capsule collections. Due to a mix of bad timing, failure of purchasers to honor agreements and the pressures of a newly public company, Circulose filed for bankruptcy. However, its product, circulose, lives on in a new namesake company and in mainstream clothes by Reformation and others.

Carey has held numerous leadership roles at fashion sustainability groups, including Textile Exchange and the Fashion Impact Fund. She sits on the boards of Accelerating Circularity and the Transformers Foundation, of which she is also a member.

“What excites me most about Avalo is its ability to reimagine agriculture at the intersection of science, AI, and sustainability,” she told Trellis. “My vision for this role is to help scale Avalo’s cotton from pilot to full commercialization — connecting the dots from farm to retail. On a weekly basis, that means working closely with farmers, industry partners, spinners, and mills to optimize fiber performance, as well as collaborating with brands and retailers to align on sustainability goals and product development.”

Avalo’s vision of “low-input,” low-carbon cotton

“We’re so excited to have Tricia on board who has brought industry changing innovation to the textile world,”  Avalo CEO Brendan Collins said in a press statement. “That said, her experience as a strategist, supply-chain connector and coalition builder will help us bring similar innovation to other industries that desperately need