Our Cashmere
Cashmere brands rarely grow their own cashmere.
Our holistic approach ensures a real affinity with these precious animals.
SUPERIOR CASHMERE
Our bales of cashmere are much more than a raw commodity. They're a vital ingredient in understanding and developing artsian expertise...
Cultivating fine cashmere requires knowledge. For over a generation we have selectively bred the healthiest goats who grow the finest fleece. Our goats produce their down-fibre naturally as an essential undercoat. It provides a supreme level of insulation when exposed to the coldest winters on high terrain. Their precious cashmere undercoat is featherlight
and extremely breathable. It’s this finesse that makes cashmere so desirable, being one of the finest hairs found in the natural world. Like all the good things in life, it’s also limited by nature. Each goat’s fleece producing a small yield of 250g to 450g, from which only 150g of the very best cashmere quality is used for our products.
SUSTAINABLE
We farm our cashmere with sustainable values. Our unique breed of goats thrive on protected coastal headlands, roaming freely to grow their naturally renewable cashmere undercoats.
We care about our ecological footprint and animal husbandry, aspiring to set a benchmark for sustainable cashmere. Although cashmere is a naturally renewable resource, we don’t exploit nature and only produce our cashmere in small batches in limited quantity. We limit supply to ensure the welfare of our animals and to preserve the natural topography of our landscape. By monitoring the carrying capacity of our land we avoid overpopulating our goat herds. In the world’s major cashmere producing countries, excessive consumption and lack of social responsibility has
led to poor husbandry, with bare grasslands and desertification creating sand storms, air pollution and other environmental concerns.
FROM GOAT TO GARMENT
By rearing our own goats we know exactly what good quality cashmere looks and feels like.
Our precious cashmere is highly prized for its unique profile. Most of the world’s cashmere
is produced in volume as a commodity, with traders selling cashmere bales mixed between different goat herds. We take a rather different approach by farming our own. It means we can tell our customers exactly which hills in Tolaga Bay our cashmere was grown on.
TRACEABLE
Tolaga Bay cashmere is grown as a soft, downy, undercoat on our own breed of cashmere goats. This makes our cashmere traceable with provenance of nature’s most desirable luxury fibre.
Our ethos of rearing our own cashmere goats provides greater assurance over quality and traceability. We believe authentic products have a story to tell and are proud of the quality acheived. Our commitment to work
in tandem with nature ensures the cashmere we farm is traceable and sustainable.
SHEARING
Responsible harvesting. We harvest our cashmere when our goat’s start to naturally moult. We individually shear each goat with the same
love and care we imbue into each cashmere garment.
Our cashmere fibre is collected from our goat’s soft downy undercoat. This process can be done by hand-combing or hand-shearing. In New Zealand we prefer to shear and employ highly skilled shearers who prioritise our goats welfare. The cashmere
fibre is collected in cloud form as an entire fleece. The fleece contains long coarse guard hair that needs to be carefully de-haired to separate out the precious cashmere fibre. Once shorn our goats are given shelter before we return them to the coastal headland to grow their new year’s fleece.