In 2020, during the pandemic, Indra Leonardo founded the skateboarding and streetwear brand Televisi Star in Bali as a way to make ends meet. The brand quickly gained traction, but with garment production came an unavoidable challenge: textile waste. Determined to address it, Indra began saving fabric offcuts and launched the #THEREMUSTBENOWASTE initiative, turning larger scraps into one-of-a-kind patchwork garments. Yet the smallest pieces – too tiny to sew – still had no solution.

In May 2024, Eliot Lee joined Televisi Star as an intern. With a background in sustainable materials research, he shared his previous work creating bricks from mushroom mycelium. This sparked a question: if mushrooms can be transformed into building materials, could textiles do the same?

Spoiler alert: yes.

Together, Indra and Eliot created their first textile brick. Using tiny offcuts shredded by Indra’s mother, Oma, the prototype was pressed entirely by hand. Soon after, with support from donors, they acquired advanced machinery – making Oma happily “retired” from her cutting duties!

Their breakthrough led to a collaboration with Jewel Children’s Home, the East Bali orphanage where Indra and his mother once lived and where he first met Erik, now Televisi Star’s inventory manager. With the trust of the home and over $6,000 raised through GoFundMe, Kita Bisa, and a fundraiser organized by Eliot’s fraternity, Fabata transformed an unused space into a vibrant multipurpose room. The project included a Fabata brick mural, new flooring and tiling, replaced doors, donated sewing machines, and upcycling workshops. The initiative closed with a beach trip, celebrating creativity, community, and care.

From there, Fabata began experimenting with new possibilities—furniture, decorative wall panels, and even cutlery, created in collaboration with Sounds Familiar Knives for a partnership between Televisi Star and FED, a fine dining restaurant in Bali.

What started with scraps has become a movement. Today, Fabata envisions scaling beyond Bali to garment factories across Indonesia and Southeast Asia, turning waste into worth and building a foundation of sustainability, community, and opportunity.

Thank you for being part of our journey.