Carlo Centonze: «The covid-19 crisis is both a massive opportunity and a huge threat for our company.»

When you were a kid, what did you want to be?

I wanted to fly planes for the military and I almost did. I was one of those kids who wanted to be like Tom Cruise in the film "Top Gun" that has just come out. I was on the finish line of military training when the brigadier told us that they had just bought their FA-18, so they only needed a quarter of their pilots.

But looking back, it wasn't such bad news as I went to university instead. If they hadn't bought their plane, I probably wouldn’t have done that.

You graduated from ETH with a degree in forest engineering. Why did you decide to study at ETH?

I initially started studying economics in St. Gallen. But in the first semester I found that I just wasn't interested in the subject. So I switched to biology at the University of Zurich. I could almost have trained to become a scientist but I didn’t have the patience or creative urge.

I needed to find something halfway between economics and biology and then I heard about the forest engineering course at ETH. It’s now known as environmental systems science. The course provided a multi-disciplinary education in business administration, law, biology but also applied forestry. It was multi-disciplinary in the sense that we looked at both the economic and legal side, which in Switzerland is very heavily regulated in this field. You came out the other end as a managing director with some scientific knowledge so you could become a regional head forester or forestry manager.

I found the whole course very wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, which was hugely appealing to me and still today this way of thinking out of the box is definitely one of my strengths.

How did your degree from ETH help you get onto the career ladder?

As I've mentioned the business components of my course were certainly very important to me. Seven of us from my course got together as a group and founded myclimate, which today ranks as one of the leading Swiss climate protection NGOs. After two years of hard not-for-profit work, I had the opportunity to found a new start-up and this is how my second ETH spin-off HeiQ, a sustainable chemical textile company, came about.

myclimate focused mainly on CO2 emissions from air travel. Comparatively speaking, textiles are responsible for a much higher percentage of emissions. So I’ve now embarked on the same mission but on a much bigger scale. My time spent tinkering as a student has had a huge influence on what I do today: being involved in two start-ups and it’s now 15 years since HeiQ was founded.

You were a co-founder of HeiQ and are currently CEO. What does your company do?

Dr. Murray Height and I founded HeiQ. Murray studied chemical engineering at MIT and it’s this mix of science and a nose for business that cements our partnership.

We soon became friends at ETH and one day we went hiking in the Swiss Alps. We were both wearing polyester T-shirts that stank so much that our girlfriends at the time sent us on ahead so they didn't have to put up with the smell. And typical of two engineers, wherever there’s a problem, there has to be a solution. That very evening when looking for the solution, we came up with the idea of pursuing the functionality of textiles.

HeiQ is synonymous with innovation in textiles and the comfort and protection of these textiles. We create chemical formations to give textiles particular functionalities, for example, to make them anti-static, water repellent or able to control odours or, as is very important at the moment, to lend them anti-viral properties.

There are three different main pillars to what we pursue at HeiQ: research & development, global production and ingredient brand marketing. The last two pillars are hugely important to our success. Unlike many other start-ups, we’ve kept production in-house. We believe that you can find and analyse a lot of innovation at the production stage. This stance also creates more jobs in Switzerland and more importantly means that we keep know-how within our own four walls. And by marketing our products, we get to communicate the technologies we have developed and the benefits of them for textiles and consumers. For example, we have worked with the furniture giant IKEA to launch a product called “Gunrid”, the world’s first curtain that uses daylight to clean the indoor air of volatile organic compounds.

As a development, production and marketing company, we have created a network which enables us to serve the entire globe. At HeiQ we joke that “the sun never sets on HeiQ” – through our cross-cultural and cross-ages operation, we work 24 hours a day, hand in hand, as a team all around the world.

What impact is the current covid-19 crisis having on your company?

Once the one hand, the current crisis is a huge problem for the textile chemistry industry because we depend on consumption, and that just isn't happening at the moment. We are having to pursue a difficult defensive strategy and use our resources very carefully in order to ride out this crisis.

But on the other hand, we have been able to launch HeiQ Viroblock. At the start of this crisis, we sensed that we weren't just facing another bout of influenza, but something much bigger. Last November, we immediately put all our resources into a potential, antiviral product. It’s very fortunate that a few years ago we undertook some research and development into an antiviral function with another ETH spin-off. So within three months and just two hours after Switzerland declared a state of emergency, we were able to launch an antiviral product – something that would normally take between nine and twelve months. The crisis represents a huge opportunity for HeiQ. Developing HeiQ Viroblock demonstrates what an agile, flexible company we are, which can move into a new field in just one month. It’s a huge achievement by my team and I’m very proud of them.

Over the last four weeks, we’ve received enquiries for HeiQ Viroblock chemicals and protective masks from over a thousand new companies. We’ve had so many orders that we can barely keep up at the moment. And now is a very difficult time to train new people so our current workforce are having to work very hard. The covid-19 crisis is both a massive opportunity and a huge threat for our company.

What advice would you give to today’s students?

I would give them three key tips. Firstly, try your hand as an entrepreneur, it’s great fun! Start-ups are fantastic. Sometimes, it’s tough but if you’re the kind of person who stays the course, it will come good in the end.

Secondly, if you are founding a start-up and are having to count every last penny before you spend it, it’s important to consider getting yourself a business partner! There are so many ups and downs that it's better to work with someone else, preferably someone who complements your skills, like Murray and me.

Thirdly and most importantly: never ever give up!