eMade™ Products are Everyday Products Made from Air
Updated: 2 hours ago
A new era of brand innovation starts upstream: the same products your customers know and love, made from air.
By Alisa Leonard, Chief Brand & Marketing Officer, Twelve
I’ve spent my career at the intersection of brand, marketing, and product innovation. Working with brand teams at Fortune 500's to develop new product ideas and innovation pipelines, I understand firsthand how difficult it is to build innovation pipelines that deliver meaningful growth—and how much harder that challenge becomes when sustainability goals, supply chain realities, and consumer expectations all have to come together in the same product.
Truly new-to-the-world brand innovation is rare. Brand teams spend years looking for ideas that can create meaningful differentiation, unlock new consumer value and open new sources of growth. That’s why I’m so passionate about what is happening now at the intersection of materials, manufacturing and climate innovation.
The idea is remarkably elegant: what if we could take an iconic product people already know and love and make it from air instead of oil?
Not a different version that asks the consumer to compromise. Not a niche sustainable alternative. The same high-performing product, but without petroleum as the source of its carbon and without the associated emissions of conventional fossil-based production.
To me, that is groundbreaking. It is the kind of product innovation brand teams do not encounter often because it changes something fundamental about how a product is made while preserving what consumers already value about it. And the implications extend far beyond any single product.
The Challenge Starts Upstream
Look around you: your running shoes, your phone, your clothes, your shampoo bottle, the detergent in your laundry room, the seat in your car.
Thousands of everyday products depend on chemicals and materials derived from fossil fuels—particularly oil, or petroleum. We tend to think about oil primarily as something we burn for energy, but petroleum is also a fundamental raw material for the products around us. Plastics, synthetic fibers, foams, coatings, solvents, packaging, detergents and countless other materials begin with hydrocarbon building blocks traditionally made from petroleum.
The scale of that dependence is enormous. Nearly every manufactured product relies on chemistry somewhere in its value chain, and more than 95% of the feedstocks used by the chemical industry today are fossil-derived.
For consumer brands trying to decarbonize, this is the core challenge: oil is the default building block of our material world.
Brands have made meaningful progress switching to renewable electricity, improving logistics, reducing packaging and addressing operational emissions. But removing fossil fuels from the product itself is much harder because petroleum-derived chemicals and materials sit deep within global supply chains and have been optimized over decades for quality, performance and scale.
For innovation leaders, that creates a difficult tension: how do you make meaningful progress against sustainability goals while protecting the performance, consumer experience and brand equity you have spent years building? One of the most powerful answers is to go upstream and change the source of the building blocks themselves.
A New Starting Point for Thousands of Products
One of those essential building blocks is naphtha. Conventional naphtha is derived from petroleum and sits near the beginning of the chemical value chain. From there, it becomes an input to chemicals and materials used across thousands of products, including plastics, packaging, synthetic fibers, coatings and solvents. At Twelve, we make E-Naphtha™ from CO2, water and renewable electricity instead of petroleum.
E-Naphtha is chemically identical to conventional naphtha and can serve as a drop-in substitute within existing chemical and manufacturing value chains. Rather than asking manufacturers to abandon materials and systems they already know how to use, it gives them a new source for an essential building block.
E-Naphtha™ is chemically identical to conventional naphtha and can serve as a drop-in substitute within existing chemical and manufacturing value chains.
That is what I find especially compelling from a brand innovation perspective. The opportunity is not to convince consumers that a lower-performing product is acceptable because it is more sustainable. The opportunity is to preserve what makes the product great while fundamentally changing where it begins.
For brands, E-Naphtha brings together three qualities that are rarely found in the same material innovation:
Petroleum-free: Made from CO2, water and renewable electricity rather than conventional petroleum feedstocks.
Drop-in: Designed to move through existing chemical and manufacturing value chains.
No compromise in quality or performance: Chemically identical to conventional naphtha, enabling the same high-performance materials brands already depend on.
From Possibility to Production at AirPlant™
There is a major difference between proving that something is technically possible and building the industrial capability to make it at meaningful scale. That is why AirPlant™ matters.
AirPlant™ is Twelve's Power-to-X platform for producing fuels and chemicals from CO2, water and renewable electricity. AirPlant One located in Moses Lake, Washington, is producing E-Naphtha alongside E-Jet® fuel.
What excites me about AirPlant is what it makes possible downstream: E-Naphtha can enter existing supply chains and ultimately become part of materials used across apparel, footwear, beauty, electronics, automotive, home care, packaging and many other consumer categories.
An industrial breakthrough upstream can therefore become a product innovation that millions of consumers want.
Industrial advancement creates new building blocks. Brand innovation turns them into products people want.
That connection is important. New manufacturing systems do not change the world simply because they exist. They change the world when companies build with them.
Reframing Sustainability as Innovation
This is also why I believe we need to change the way brand leaders think about sustainability. Too often, sustainability enters the innovation process as a constraint: use less material, replace an ingredient, reduce an impact, absorb an additional cost or accept some degree of compromise.
Those efforts matter, but they represent only one version of what sustainability can be.
Throughout my career, I’ve worked with innovation teams looking for ideas capable of producing meaningful differentiation and growth. The strongest innovation opportunities change the value equation. They allow a brand to do something meaningfully new or deliver familiar value in a fundamentally better way.
Making a product from CO2 instead of petroleum has that potential.
If I can take an iconic product—something consumers already recognize, trust and love—and make that same product without petroleum as its carbon source, that is not simply a sustainability initiative. That is product innovation.
And it is a particularly rare kind of product innovation because it connects priorities companies often struggle to solve simultaneously: sustainability goals, consumer relevance, supply chain transformation, brand differentiation and long-term growth.
When sustainability changes what is possible, it stops being a constraint on innovation and becomes a catalyst for it.
That shift matters organizationally, too. Sustainability can no longer sit only with a sustainability team working toward a future target. It belongs in the conversation with product, innovation, R&D, design, procurement, marketing and brand leaders deciding what their next generation of products should be.
Instead of asking only, How do we reduce the footprint of this product?, we can ask a more expansive question: What can we now create that wasn’t possible before?
From Pilot to Product: What We’ve Proven With Brands
This is not just a theoretical idea. Some of the work I’m most excited about at Twelve is what we have already demonstrated with leading global brands.
These projects have allowed us to take CO2-derived materials out of the abstract and put them into recognizable products and demanding real-world applications.
With Mercedes-Benz, Twelve worked with Mercedes and materials manufacturer Trinseo to create automotive components using CO2-derived polymers, including a polycarbonate C-pillar and CO2-derived foam. The project showed that CO2-based materials could meet the requirements of a category where performance, quality and engineering standards are exceptionally high.
With Procter & Gamble, we demonstrated CO2-based ingredients for Tide laundry detergent, bringing this new approach to one of the world’s most recognizable household products.
And with PANGAIA, Twelve created CO2Made® polycarbonate sunglass lenses, demonstrating how a material made from CO2 could become part of a highly visible consumer fashion product.
I love these examples because they make the opportunity tangible. A car component. Laundry detergent. A pair of sunglasses. Very different categories, but the same underlying idea: a product consumers already understand can begin with a different source of carbon.
The proof is already in the product: familiar experiences, made from a fundamentally different starting point.
These pilots are important proof points, but I see them as the beginning rather than the destination. E-Naphtha and AirPlant create the opportunity to move from individual demonstrations toward an upstream building block that can flow through broader manufacturing systems and eventually across entire product portfolios.
The ambition is not one sustainable product. It is a new foundation for making thousands of products.
Consumers Are Ready for Products Made Differently
For brand leaders, innovation matters only if it creates value for consumers. Our research suggests this idea resonates: we surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. consumers to understand how people respond to products made from CO2 instead of conventional petroleum-derived feedstocks. Over 74% said they would choose a CO2-based product over a conventional oil-derived product if quality were equal, while 90% said it is important for brands to eliminate fossil fuels from the everyday products they sell.
What I take from these findings is not that consumers suddenly want to become experts in industrial chemistry. They don’t. They want great products. They want quality, performance, design and experiences they trust. But increasingly, they also want companies to find better ways to make those products.
That creates a powerful proposition for brands: the same product you know and love, made from air.
Everyday products from brands you trust, made from air.
The sustainability story does not have to replace the product story. It can make the product story stronger.
Sustainability as Competitive Advantage
This is ultimately why I see this moment as such an important opportunity for brand leaders.
For years, much of the business conversation around sustainability has centered on responsibility, commitments, risk reduction and compliance. All of those things matter. But if we stop there, we miss an enormous part of the opportunity.
Innovation is how brands grow. A breakthrough that helps a company decarbonize while also creating a new consumer proposition, strengthening brand relevance and differentiating the product can do something sustainability initiatives rarely get credit for doing: create competitive advantage.
Our consumer research reinforces that connection: 76% of respondents said they would view a brand more positively for offering products made from CO2.
For an innovation leader, that should be exciting. This is not a choice between doing what is better for the planet and doing what is better for the brand. The opportunity is to find places where those interests reinforce one another.
Sustainability becomes a competitive advantage when it gives you a better way to innovate.
Brands that move early can build knowledge their competitors do not yet have, create distinctive products and stories, develop new supply chain capabilities and establish leadership in categories that will increasingly need alternatives to fossil-derived materials.
That is the kind of innovation opportunity I have spent my career looking for.
The Next Era of Brand Innovation Starts Upstream
For more than a century, petroleum has been the default starting point for many of the materials that make modern life possible. Today, we have the chance to change that starting point.
With E-Naphtha™, we can produce a foundational building block for thousands of everyday products from CO2, water and renewable electricity instead of petroleum. With AirPlant™, we’re bringing this model of manufacturing to commercial scale. And with brands, we can turn that industrial capability into products consumers encounter in their everyday lives.
The brands that lead this era won’t simply make more sustainable products. They will set a new standard for innovation, sustainability, and modern manufacturing.
What makes me so passionate about this work is the intersection of those things. It is product innovation and climate innovation. It is brand growth and industrial advancement. It is a way to make sustainability tangible not by asking people to consume less or settle for less, but by creating a fundamentally better way to make the products they already love.
That kind of opportunity does not come along often.
For brand and innovation leaders, I believe this is our opportunity to rethink sustainability not as a limitation on what’s possible, but as a source of new-to-the-world innovation, competitive advantage and growth.
Take an iconic product. Make it from air instead of oil. Keep the quality and performance consumers expect. Set the new standard.
A world made from air. That’s the kind of innovation worth getting excited about.
