This Indian plant-based leather brand has Stella McCartney’s stamp of approval

At heart, entrepreneur Jinali Mody is a science whiz. Yet the founder of Banofi, the creators of a plant-based alternative to leather of the same name that’s made using upcycled banana crop waste, is looking to make big moves in the fashion industry.

“I was always very sustainability minded,” says Mody during a recent visit to Mumbai shortly after winning the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2025. “So, whenever I shopped, I always felt either massively guilty or I struggled to find alternatives. I wanted to make it easier for people to enjoy fashion, to express themselves, but without damaging the environment.”

We’re chatting while surrounded by a range of accessories that Mody has developed to show Banofi’s potential. There are structured, office-ready totes (28-year-old Mody carries one herself), a fashion-forward angular sling bag, a rectangular, lipstick-red clutch that I’m already eyeing, laptop cases, wallets and card holders, and plenty of office supplies, such as notebooks, pen holders, and desk organisers. Some have been embossed with a pebble finish or reptile-skin textures, others are smooth, but all of it looks, feels, and even smells like leather.

After she founded the company in 2022, it took Mody and her team of researchers nearly three years of development to reach a final, stable product that could be scaled up for manufacturing. Right now, they can roll out 4,000 metres of banana-based leather a month, although they have the capacity to double that.

Along the way, though, there were versions that caught fungus, that absorbed water, or just didn’t smell like the real deal. The process is both surprisingly earthy and high-tech.

It starts with the banana crop waste that the team gets delivered from 100 small farmers around their factory in Rajpur Sonarpur, West Bengal. In India, more than 100 million tonnes of banana crop waste are incinerated or dumped every year, so there’s no shortage of raw material. The waste becomes a source of cellulose fibre, which is then processed with natural gums and adhesives, and coated with colour and other protectants to become the final leather-like material. The result produces 90 per cent less carbon emissions and uses 95 per cent less water than regular leather.

It was while she was at Yale completing her Master’s in Environmental Management that Mody realised that India’s crop waste problem could provide an infinite source of raw material needed to create a leather alternative. She knew there were already versions out in the market made using other organic sources, like mushrooms, pineapple or cactus leaves, even grape skins. “Crop waste is such an incredible resource. You get it in large volumes, it’s cheap, and it’s all organic material that’s not mixed in with anything else.”

Another positive is that the company is able to provide farmers with an additional source of income. “But more than just buying the waste, we’re creating jobs. We pay for labour, for transportation. For example, one of the guys who delivers the banana waste comes from a farming family. He now hires a tempo two or three times a week, collects the waste from the surrounding farms, and then puts that additional money back into his family.”

Amongst all the talk that we hear about sustainability in fashion, leather’s omnipresence is hard to deny. The industry consumes a huge amount of water, and the heavy metals used to treat leather so that it lasts for generations pollute waterways, impacting both the people who live around leather tanning facilities and marine life. As an avid scuba diver with multiple PADI certifications, preserving water bodies is a cause that is particularly close to Mody’s heart.

But still, it’s hard to get people to give up on that image of a beautiful leather bag or the perfect biker jacket, which, in a way, is why Mody chose to start with Banofi. “People really respond to leather; they care about it and realise its complexity. I also love this idea that in a world where we have machines for everything, people still want a handcrafted bag,” she says.

So, what’s a conscious shopper to do in this world? If you’re a high-street shopper especially, many of the vegan-leather alternatives are made from two types of fossil-fuel-derived plastic: PU and PVC. The answer for Mody was to find an entirely new category of materials that would fill the gap. As she puts it, “Consumption is only increasing, so unless we change the material components of things, we’re really in trouble.”

While phase one is seeing Banofi put to use for accessory design, she’s also thinking ahead to the world of footwear, home decor, and even automobile interiors. At the same time, they’re also researching a plant-based alternative to goose-down for jacket stuffing.

Her team of 25 includes 15 factory workers, most of whom are women from the area, and 10 people on research and development. Not the usual structure of an accessory company. She breaks it down, “Our head of R&D is a PhD in Polymer Science. We have chemical engineers, graduates from IIT Kharagpur, and the Government College of Engineering and Leather Technology [Kolkata].”

Proximity to the college was one of the reasons why the Mumbai-born Mody chose to set up a factory in West Bengal. Her team is 60 per cent women, and Mody has consciously tried to build a workspace that accommodates that. “I’ve seen the women cry when they open their first bank account. Now they can get insurance and be breadwinners themselves. It’s a gamechanger to be able to give them that,” she says. “Plus, they’ll always come and remind me to have lunch.”

Over the last year Banofi has tied up with a range of brands on designs using their raw material. They include Polite Society, Studio Beej, Cove and Lane, Jade by Monica and Karishma, even Huemn on a ‘leather’ jacket. They’re also trying to spread the word internationally and have already been blessed by the OG queen of vegan leather, Stella McCartney. McCartney awarded Mody the Hult Prize, the world’s largest social entrepreneurship competition for students, which came with a $1 million cash injection. “She gave us a lot of her time and guidance, and we’re still in touch with her team,” says Mody about the win. “I fundamentally believe that people want to be sustainable, especially designers. It’s just about providing access to materials and the right price.”