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Adriana Santanocito of Ohoskin on Turning Sicilian Orange Waste Into a Luxury Leather Alternative for Ganni and Beyond
- Style Essentials Edit Team
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Adriana Santanocito, Ohoskin
In an exclusive conversation with Shweta for Style Essentials, Adriana Santanocito, the woman who co-founded Ohoskin in Catania and watched it travel from a local citrus farm to a Ganni runway, a Sonus Faber speaker cabinet, a motorsport track and the Quirinale Palace, talks about what the future of luxury materials actually looks like when someone is brave enough to build it.
The next time you peel an orange, consider what happens to the skin. Not in your kitchen, but at industrial scale. Sicily alone generates 1.3 million tons of orange processing waste every single year. Peel, pulp, seed, the residue of the juice industry that nobody asked for and almost nobody knew what to do with. For decades it was treated as a problem to be managed, a cost to be absorbed, something that needed to disappear.
Adriana Santanocito grew up in Catania looking at it differently.
She studied fashion in Milan, specializing in textile materials and production technologies, and spent enough time inside the industry to understand both how materials are made and how they fail, what luxury demands of a surface and what the conventional answers to that demand are costing the planet. She came back to Sicily with a question simple enough to sound naive and specific enough to become a company. What if orange byproduct was not the end of something but the beginning of something else entirely?
In 2019, she co-founded Ohoskin with Roberto Merighi and Stefano Mazzetti. The material they developed takes orange peel and prickly pear cactus residue, blends the plant fibers with biopolymers and natural resins into a compound, and produces through a coating process powered by sustainable energy a finished material that looks, feels and performs like premium leather. It comes in a wide range of colors, textures, softness levels and tactile finishes. The entire supply chain runs through Italy, the first phase in Sicily close to the raw material, then through manufacturing partners in Lombardy, Tuscany and Veneto depending on the application. Two international patents protect the process. Every step of the supply chain is tracked so that anyone, a brand, a consumer, can follow the material from orange byproduct to finished product and see exactly what happened along the way.
It is not a sustainable alternative. That framing, Adriana will tell you directly, is precisely the problem with how the industry has approached materials innovation for the last decade. Because a material, first and foremost, must perform. If it does not meet technical requirements, it will never be adopted at scale, regardless of how sustainable it is. This is a crucial point that is often overlooked. From the beginning, Ohoskin chose to prioritize performance. Each material comes with a detailed technical datasheet, Martindale abrasion tests, Bally flex tests, durability and resistance benchmarks, because without that data no serious brand can integrate a new material with confidence. For us, she says, sustainability is not a standalone concept. It is the result of good material design. A material that performs, lasts and is actually used is inherently more sustainable.
This distinction has defined every significant milestone in the company's story.
When the industry was moving toward PU and away from PVC as its preferred sustainable chemistry, Ohoskin chose PVC. Not out of stubbornness but out of a clear-eyed reading of what durability actually means for a material's environmental footprint. New generations of bio-attributed PVC, combining recycled content with components derived from renewable sources, produce a material with exceptional longevity. And a material that lasts is, across its lifetime, more responsible than one that degrades quickly and needs replacing. One square meter of Ohoskin generates approximately 2.57 kilograms of CO2, significantly less than many conventional alternatives. At the beginning, brands were skeptical, Adriana says. But once they saw the material and the test results, the conversation shifted. In the end, it is always the product and the data that speak.
Ganni was the first brand to believe. The material was presented in 2022 and by January 2023, after an initial testing phase, it was already on the runway and subsequently featured in Vogue UK. That moment, years of research and development becoming something worn and experienced by real people in real rooms, was the confirmation that Ohoskin had crossed the threshold from interesting idea to serious material. Ganni has continued to integrate it across multiple collections since. But what has followed demonstrates that the story is far larger than fashion.
The collaboration with Sonus Faber, one of Italy's most respected high-end audio manufacturers, placed Ohoskin inside the Concertino G4 speaker cabinet, an object defined by acoustic precision and aesthetic refinement in equal measure. Seeing Ohoskin interact with wood in such a sophisticated object, Adriana says, confirmed its versatility in a way that no fashion application could. Then came motorsport. In January 2024, Ohoskin became the first plant-based material in history to pass the FIA fire resistance tests, validated on Sabelt racing shoes. The FIA sets some of the most demanding technical standards in the world. Passing them with a material made from orange peel and cactus is not a small achievement. It is proof that the original ambition, performance first, sustainability as consequence, was the right one.
And then Patricia Urquiola chose Ohoskin for her installation at Heimtextil 2026. One of the world's most respected designers, selecting a material not for its story but for what it could do structurally and aesthetically in a demanding installation context. When a studio of that stature makes that kind of choice, she says, the way the material is perceived changes. It is no longer seen as an alternative. It is seen as a solution.
The recognition has come from directions that Adriana could not have anticipated when she was asking her first questions about orange peel in Catania. In October 2023, the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, presented her with the ENI Joule Award for Entrepreneurship at the Quirinale Palace in front of a jury that included Nobel Prize laureates. For me, as a founder from Catania, she says, it was a powerful affirmation that ideas rooted in local contexts can have a truly global impact. In April 2024, Ohoskin won the Best Product or Service for Sustainable Development award at the Enterprise Environment Award, the most important Italian recognition in the sector. In November 2025, she received the Semplicemente Donna International Award for sustainability and female-led innovation. In April 2025, her story was exhibited alongside Adele Casagrande Fendi and Cristina Bombassei of Brembo at the Made in Italy Women's Enterprise exhibition at Palazzo Piacentini in Rome, part of Italy's first National Made in Italy Day. A second patent was filed in February 2025. The company is committed to hiring at least fourteen new staff members in 2026 as it scales toward broader industrial partnerships and new applications.
What does all of this tell us about where the world is going?
It tells us that the most interesting materials of the next decade will not come from laboratories designing new synthetic compounds. They will come from people who looked at what already exists, what agriculture discards, what industry throws away, what geography provides in abundance, and asked a different question about it. Ohoskin is not the only company doing this. But it is one of the clearest examples of what it looks like when it is done with genuine technical rigour rather than as a marketing exercise. The traceability, the FIA certification, the Martindale abrasion tests, the patents, none of this is decoration. It is the evidence that the material is serious, that the people who made it understand what serious means, and that the luxury industry has found in it something it did not know it was looking for.
Transparency is essential, Adriana says, because without it there is no credibility. We have built a fully Made in Italy supply chain, and this represents a significant value. Telling the story of this supply chain means highlighting not only the material, but also the people, skills and processes behind it. The question is not where Ohoskin can go next. It is what it can enable.
Sicily still generates 1.3 million tons of orange waste every single year. The difference now is that at least some of it is becoming something worth wearing.
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