At 14,000 feet above sea level, on the Changthang Plateau in Ladakh, a small goat is combed. Not shorn — combed. Once a year, in spring, when the animal naturally sheds its winter undercoat, a shepherd coaxes the soft fibres free with a wide-toothed comb. From a single goat, he might collect 80 grams of usable fibre.
That is less than the weight of a bar of soap. A single pashmina shawl requires the annual yield of three to five goats.
The Changthangi goat
The Changthangi thrives only at extreme altitude, where temperatures drop to minus thirty degrees in winter — and where that brutal cold is precisely what stimulates the growth of the fine, warm undercoat that makes pashmina possible. Move a Changthangi goat to lower altitude and the fibre coarsens within two generations.
The long journey to the loom
From Ladakh, the raw fibre travels south to Srinagar. In the old city, the fibre is cleaned, de-haired by hand to remove the coarser guard hairs, and spun into yarn on a traditional spinning wheel called a yinder. The spinning alone can take weeks for a single shawl worth of yarn.
On the loom
The weaving happens on hand-operated pit looms — low wooden frames set into the floor of small workshops in the old city. An experienced weaver produces perhaps twenty centimetres of fabric in a working day. A plain pashmina shawl — 200 centimetres long — takes roughly ten to fourteen days. An embroidered piece can take months.
Why it matters
When you wrap yourself in one of our shawls, that history comes with it. We think that is worth knowing.