Sourcing cashmere — what actually matters

This is the second in a series of supply-chain essays. The first, on wool, is here.

I. The myth

Cashmere is the most-mythologised fibre in fashion. The story you hear at most retailers is roughly: it’s combed (not sheared) from the underbelly of mountain goats, who only grow it once a year, in such small quantities that a single sweater requires the wool of three goats. Therefore: expensive, scarce, virtuous.

Most of that’s true. The sweater part is mostly true. But the part the story leaves out is what determines whether the cashmere is good: the length of the fibre (longer = better), the diameter (thinner = softer), and the species + altitude of the goats (Inner Mongolian goats produce the best cashmere because of how cold the winters are; the colder the winter, the finer the underbelly fibre).

II. How we buy

We work with one mill in Bayan-Khongor, in Western Mongolia. They buy directly from a herder cooperative of 280 households, all working the same 4,000-metre plateau. The cashmere is hand-combed (not sheared) in May, sorted by colour + grade at the cooperative, and shipped to the mill in Bayan-Khongor for spinning into yarn.

From there it travels by container ship to Bergamo, Italy, where it’s knit into our pieces. The total trip is 7,400km from goat to atelier. The carbon cost of the shipping is — this surprises people — less than 4% of the total carbon cost of the sweater. The bulk of the footprint is in the spinning + knitting energy.

III. What “sustainable” cashmere actually means

Cashmere has an overgrazing problem. Goats are unfussy eaters and they pull plants up by the roots when they graze. As demand for cashmere has risen, herd sizes have grown, and the Mongolian plateau has lost ~30% of its grass cover in twenty years.

The cooperative we buy from rotates grazing zones. They’re part of a Sustainable Fibre Alliance certification programme that requires herd sizes to stay below a calculated carrying capacity per hectare. Our prices reflect that: we pay roughly 28% more per kilo than the spot-market price for Mongolian cashmere. The cooperative passes most of that increase through to the herders.

IV. What we wish we’d known earlier

The most consequential decision in our supply chain isn’t the goat or the mill — it’s the spinner. Cashmere yarn is graded by fibre length, and the spinner’s tolerance for shorter fibres determines how the finished knit feels. Our Bergamo spinner runs longer cycles than industry-standard, which means our yarn is more uniform but slower to produce. We didn’t understand the impact of this until we’d been buying for three years.

V. What this costs you

The Hand-Loomed Knit retails at $580. Cost-of-goods on it is $182. Of that: ~$48 yarn, ~$72 knit + finish, ~$22 logistics + duties, ~$40 atelier overhead. Margin pays our HQ overhead + design + marketing + warehousing + customer service + the staff to mend it forever. The piece itself isn’t expensive. The infrastructure to make it the way we make it is.

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