Sheertex (SRTX)

Katherine Homuth founded Sheertex in 2017, after selling ShopLocket and Female Funders, to fix a product that had been disposable for decades: pantyhose that rip on the first or second wear. No textile fiber was strong enough, so she went outside textiles to ballistics, knitting tights from ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) — a polymer up to 10x stronger than steel by weight. The company went through Y Combinator, sold direct-to-consumer at sheertex.com, and customers averaged 20-50 wears per pair versus 3-4 for conventional tights. Renamed SRTX as a parent company, it bought Canada's biggest hosiery plant and built a roughly 300-person vertically integrated operation in Pointe-Claire, Montreal that spun its own polymer fiber — a bet that Canada could make tights cheaper than China. SRTX raised about US$255M in equity and debt along the way. The bet unravelled in 2025: February's US tariff shock froze cross-border sales and forced temporary layoffs of about 40% of staff, Homuth stepped down as CEO that spring as a condition of an emergency US$40M recapitalization, and successor Sophie Boulanger departed within weeks of her September appointment as the board launched a strategic review. SRTX filed a Notice of Intention under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act on February 17, 2026, and on February 26, 2026 the Québec Superior Court approved the sale of the Sheertex brand and technology to A.Y.K. International, a fellow Québec hosiery manufacturer, which kept fewer than 10 employees and did not take over the Pointe-Claire plant lease. The brand continues under AYK as of July 2026; the venture-scale manufacturing experiment remains one of the most ambitious hard-tech stories in Canadian startup history.