From Steppe to Sweater: A Fibre's Long Journey

Every cashmere garment begins as loose, matted down clinging to the belly of a goat in the Gobi, combed out by hand over three or four weeks each spring. What follows is a slow accumulation of small, human-scale steps — sorting, washing, dehairing, spinning — each one determining how the finished cloth will feel a decade later. This is that route, told through the people who walk it.

The comb, not the shears

Cashmere goats are not shorn. They are combed, gently, by hand, using a tool that resembles a wide-toothed metal rake. The timing is narrow: for roughly three weeks between mid-April and mid-May, as the Gobi's brutal winter releases its grip, the goats begin to moult their winter undercoat naturally. A herder works through the herd animal by animal, drawing the comb through the belly, flanks, and throat, lifting away the soft grey-brown down while leaving the coarser outer guard hair mostly in place. A single goat yields, on average, 150 to 200 grams of raw combed fibre a year — barely the weight of a bar of soap, and less once the guard hair is removed.

In Bayandalai, a soum in Ömnögovi province where OYU sources part of its raw fibre, a herding family typically manages a mixed herd of 300 to 500 goats alongside sheep, camels, and horses. Combing the goats alone takes a household of three or four people the better part of a month, working from before sunrise to avoid the worst of the midday heat, which by May can already exceed 30°C. One herder we buy from, Otgonbayar, describes the work less as a task than a season: it structures the calendar the way lambing or harvest might elsewhere, arriving whether or not the family feels ready for it.

Sorting by hand, twice

The raw fibre that comes off the comb is a mixture: soft undercoat tangled with coarser guard hair, bits of dust, and vegetable matter from the pasture. It is first sorted by hand at the household level, then again at a collection point, usually a small trading post in the soum centre, where buyers grade it by colour, length, and fineness before it is bagged for transport to Ulaanbaatar. This second sort matters enormously — a batch contaminated with too much guard hair will never dehair cleanly, no matter how sophisticated the machinery downstream.

From the soum, the fibre travels by truck across roughly 500 to 700 kilometres of largely unpaved road to reach a processing facility. It is not a fast supply chain, and it is not meant to be; speed at this stage tends to come at the expense of the sorting quality that determines everything else.

Dehairing and spinning

At the mill, raw fibre is washed to remove grease and dust, then mechanically dehaired — a process that separates the fine, soft undercoat (the cashmere proper) from the coarser guard hair, which is sold off separately for felting or other industrial uses. Of the original 150 to 200 grams combed from a single goat, perhaps 120 to 150 grams survives as usable dehaired cashmere. It takes the annual output of roughly two goats to provide enough clean fibre for one adult sweater.

The dehaired fibre is then carded to align the fibres, spun into yarn, and — depending on the piece — either hand-knitted or machine-knitted on equipment that can still take a skilled technician years to operate at a level fine enough for a 14-micron yarn, which snaps under too much tension and forgives almost no inconsistency in twist.

Why the distance is the point

It would be simpler, and considerably cheaper, to buy processed cashmere yarn on the open market, where fibre from many regions and many herds is blended before anyone asks where it came from. We buy raw, unblended fibre directly from herding households in specific soums instead, which means paying more per kilogram and accepting more variability season to season. The trade-off is traceability: we know which province, and in most seasons which family, a given batch of fibre came from. It is a slower, costlier way to build a supply chain, and it is the only way we have found to also build an honest one.

The current collection, made from fibre combed this spring in Ömnögovi, is in the shop →

See also The Science of Softness: What Microns Actually Mean and The Price of Honesty: What Real Cashmere Costs.