Why this market should exist.

Cotton has had a futures market since 1870. Linen never has. Wool clears through a century-old auction in Sydney. Cashmere settles bilaterally over WhatsApp. We think that is about to change, and we want to be the venue that proves it.

The problem in plain language

European textile mills are mostly family owned. Most have no instrument to lock in forward sales beyond an annual handshake contract. Mid sized brands have no way to hedge fibre cost against retail price. Everyone is exposed to the same volatility, and no one has a price discovery surface that fits how this industry actually works.

Linen, wool and cotton prices have swung wider in the last three years than at any point since the early 1970s. A 30 percent move in a single quarter is now normal. For a family mill in Biella or a brand in Berlin, that is not a number on a screen. That is a closed factory or a cancelled collection.

Why a market is the right answer

Every other agricultural commodity that matters has a venue. Cotton has ICE. Coffee has C. Wheat has CBOT. Cocoa has NYBOT. The pattern is not new: when a commodity is economically important and price-volatile, a market emerges because both sides want one.

For European textile fibres beyond cotton, the market has not emerged for one reason only: without verifiable, standardised data, you cannot have a market. Buyers and sellers cannot price what they cannot trust. Until the contract specification can name composition, origin, and traceability in a way both sides accept, there is nothing to trade.

From 2027, every textile sold in the EU must carry verifiable composition, origin, and traceability data. That data becomes, for the first time, contract-grade. FBX uses it as the contract specification, making fabric tradeable as a true commodity.

What FBX wants to be

Long term: a regulated trading venue for ten benchmarked European fibres. Spot and forward contracts. Anonymous order book. Central clearing. Physical settlement into a bonded warehouse network or cash settlement against the FBX benchmark.

Short term: a validation project. We are not building the trading engine yet. We are testing whether the demand exists with the people who would actually use it.

What we have to see before we build

Four questions. All four have to come back yes. Any one of them coming back no kills the project. There is no partial yes that justifies building infrastructure of this kind.

1. Do mid sized European brands say they would commit forward purchase commitments to a venue like this, if it existed?
2. Do European mills say they would post supply on it?
3. Is there a credible market infrastructure partner willing to host the venue?
4. Does the regulatory path through BaFin or an equivalent look navigable?

The waitlist questionnaire is how we answer the first two. Conversations with venue operators and counsel cover the other two. We are running this on a strict timeline, with a clear go or no go decision at the end.

What we are deliberately not doing

If validation comes back no, we share what we learned and stop. If it comes back yes, this is the first move toward building the venue, and the founding cohort respondents have priority access.

Who is doing this

FBX is being incubated by HACOY, the ethical clothing brand based in Munich, and led by Maximilian Rupp. HACOY ships products built around European fibres and verifiable supply chains. We have seen the inside of this industry from the brand side, and we have wanted a venue like this to exist for our own procurement. Building it for everyone else came second.

The validation phase runs through the summer of 2026. The decision to build, or not, lands at the end of it. Either way, we will publish what we learned.

Last updated: 28 May 2026 · This page reflects the public-facing version of our internal project brief. The full operational plan lives on the HACOY Studio brain.