Dezeen has profiled Tequilana Tex, a textile that London based startup Cuemái manufactures from the agave fiber left over after tequila distillation in Jalisco, Mexico.
The material is built from bagasse, the fibrous plant matter discarded once a distiller has cooked and pressed the agave piña for sugar, and it is one of several byproduct fabrics now working their way through design trade shows rather than distilleries.
What Tequilana Tex is made from
Cuemái describes the material as engineered from what remains after distillation inside the tequila industry's protected denomination of origin zone. Blue agave takes years to mature before a distiller can use it, and the company's own account of the process ties the textile's raw material directly to that growing cycle. According to the company, the plant takes eight to twelve years to mature and produces spirit for roughly one season, after which the leftover fiber is what Cuemái processes into fabric rather than the plant grown specifically for textile use, as is the case with most bio based materials on the market.
Who is behind the company
Cuemái began as a Material Futures master's thesis at Central Saint Martins in London, a project its founder started to reconnect with Mexican heritage before turning it into an operating material company. Speaking to Grazia magazine, the company's designer, Alonso Hernández, said working with tequila experts and engineers let him "push the boundaries of what I thought was possible." The company has shown its fabrics at ISPO Munich's Material Lab, the Future Fabrics Expo in London, and Milan Design Week, where it exhibited at Basic Village in 2025 inside the Winners Pavilion run by Isola Design. Cuemái won the material category at the Isola Design Awards in Dubai in 2024 and was later nominated for the What Design Can Do Accelerator program.
How this fits the wider byproduct materials field
Cuemái is not the first company to route tequila's leftover fiber into textiles. Mexican firm Adriano Di Marti, maker of the cactus leather Desserto, launched a companion product called Desserto Agave in 2023 built from the same bagasse stream: for its first production run the company processed 12 tons of bagasse into 1 ton of raw material, enough for roughly 8,000 meters of finished sheet good, according to FashionUnited. The scale of the underlying waste stream is large by any measure. Tequila's regulatory body, the Consejo Regulador del Tequila, estimated in 2016 that the industry generates more than 4.7 million tons of bagasse and 2.5 billion liters of vinasse a year, a figure widely cited in coverage of agave byproduct ventures including a 2023 Modern Farmer report on a separate project turning the same waste into building brick. Cuemái's own materials describe a 2024 tequila output of 464.2 million liters, with each liter requiring three to four piñas, as the scale problem its process is meant to address.
What is not yet documented
What is publicly available from Cuemái so far is descriptive rather than quantitative. The company states that Tequilana Tex is biodegradable and recyclable and that its process reduces reliance on synthetic fiber, but it has not published third party test data, a fiber composition breakdown, or a production volume figure of its own comparable to the tonnage Desserto has disclosed. Cuemái has also not named which distilleries or NOM registered producers supply its agave fiber, describing its sourcing only as operating within the existing infrastructure of an industry spread across the five Mexican states with tequila denomination of origin status.
Where this goes next
The story here is a design press write up of a young materials company, not a claim about any bottled tequila. Nothing in Cuemái's public record connects the textile to a specific tequila brand this desk rates, and none of the houses in the database above are named suppliers. What would move this from trade show circuit to industry fact is a disclosed volume of processed bagasse and a named list of distillery partners, neither of which has surfaced yet.