Why Does Cashmere Cost So Much?

Cashmere can be more expensive than other wools because producing it is such an intensive process -- for the goats that grow it and the humans who care for them. Learn more in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff.
I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. And if you were to ask Windy Paia,
a goat farmer in bread and Maine, to name what
she likes most about her work, she'll tell you it's
the individual personalities of the goats for which she cares.
She said, I think of the word capacious, that comes
from the word caprine, which is Latin for goat. They're

(00:24):
like that. They'll jump and dance, and they'll climb on anything.
They're affectionate, pious. Particular type of goats, forty to eighty
of them, depending on the year, are also some of
the providers of a valuable product for humans, kashmere. Yes,
in case you didn't know, your favorite, softest and probably
most expensive sweater comes from the fur of the kashmere goat.

(00:45):
And once you know what's involved in making a kashmere sweater,
the price might not seem so exorbitant. The goats are
one of at least eleven wool producing animals. The list
also includes sheep, rabbits, and lama. There are several varieties
of kashmere goat goats, and a number of farms, factories,
and conglomerates around the world using various production methods to
make kashmere. The first goats purported to be used by

(01:08):
humans to produce fabric to keep warm are said to
be the Pashima goats. They're found in the super high
altitude regions of western and northern Tibet. The goats soft
and dense under fur is built to withstand extreme temperatures
as low as negative forty degrees fahrenheit or celsius. The
wolf from these bucks and Nanni's, favored by British Royalty,
eventually came to be processed in Kashmir in northern India,

(01:31):
hence the name. Various bloodlines of Kashmir goats have, with
human help, spread around the world. Australia has a particular
breed that provides luxuriously soft threads, and North American kashmere
goats are found in the colder regions of the U
s and Canada. North America is where Paya and her
husband Peter Gough come in. They have run Springtide Farm

(01:52):
since n Pia eleven goats for his birthday, in part
to help clear their farmland. It has a learning experience
since then. Pia estimates that Springtide is one of two
hundred to three hundred kashmere goat farms in North America.
Most cashmere goat farms in the US are small in size,
less than sixty goats, says Paya, who is also the

(02:13):
president of the Kashmere Goat Association, a nonprofit whose website
claims it brings together breeders, fiber artists, and others interested
in these charming animals and the fiber they grow in
March and April. You know, early spring is when the
goats start to naturally shed their winter wool and when
production begins on the farms. A few US farms share
these kashmere goats, though because of production loss and the

(02:36):
high cost to weed out the valuable downy undercoat. Instead,
most facilities hand comb the wool. That means workers often
the farm owners themselves, set with each animal and slowly
tease out the fur that creates the fine wool for
cashmere with a dog rake up to an hour and
a half per goat. Paia explained, when you look at

(02:57):
these goats, you see the long draping fur that's the
guard hair. The cashmere hair is under that. The crimp
in cashmere is three dimensional, and that's part of what
makes cashmir so incredibly soft. An average goat provides just
three to four ounces of cashmere that's about grams. That
means it typically takes about six goats to make enough

(03:18):
fiber for just one cashmere sweater. Once the kashmere fur
is separated, samples of it are sent for quality testing
to one of two labs in the US, one in Texas,
one in Colorado. Most legitimate US cashmere farmers have made
a commitment to provide only high quality fiber, outlined in
the Kashmir Goat Association standards and backed by organizations like

(03:40):
the Kashmere and Camel Hair Manufacturers Institute. That means consistency
or uniformity in the fiber. Each follicle should be at
least one point to five inches that's three point two
centimeters in length and its relaxed or unstretched state, and
no bigger than nineteen microns in diameter. If wearing wool
make you itch, that's actually because the wolf fibers have

(04:02):
an uneven thickness. The standard thickness of wool is twenty
eight microns. Cashmere is much finer that standard, of less
than nineteen microns, is why kashmere can feel less scratchy.
Cashmere that fails to beat these standards inevitably creates quality
problems like pilling in the final product, and there are
plenty of examples of bad cashmere out there. While the

(04:23):
Federal Trade Commission enforces the Wool Product Labeling Act in
the United States, it gets murky on the international market.
Even the FTC says quote routine testing of fiber contents
by a qualified, independent testing lab is the best way
to assure accurate labels, and that means it's hard for
consumers to determine where the cashmere they're buying comes from

(04:44):
and specifically how the goats are treated. Kashmere demand is
one of the problems. It reportedly far exceeds how much
goats can produce every year. That means that less scrupulous
producers may turn to inhumane methods to produce more wool
for lesser operating costs. The organization PET has accused Chinese
conglomerates of shearing the goats midwinter, when the animals need

(05:05):
the fur to keep warm. A pious says that some farms,
to save production costs, have even experimented with restricting goats diets,
But aside from compromising the animal's health, it also directly
affects the quality of the cashmere. She said, if you
starve your animals, the hair will get finer and shorter
and more brittle. You can't spin it. They call it
hunger fine. So if you wear cashmere, Paia recommends buying

(05:29):
directly from the source or choosing very carefully. Cash Beer
will consist of about one percent of a goats total
woolf production for apparel, so the fabric and those sweaters
should have a price to reflect this scarcity. But even
for farmers like Paia, who sells her cashmere online and
at fairs and festivals, it's difficult to tell if it's
the real deal. Paya herself has been fooled. She recalls

(05:52):
a time when she found a cashmere sweater at a
store for less than a hundred dollars. She bought it.
It turned out to be a crylic. Another time, she
and her husband were visited by a group of people
who said they were interested in getting into the Kashmir industry.
They brought with them samples of Kashmir they had bought
a trade shows in Italy. Pia recalls they had this
one shawl. It was shiny, and Kashmir isn't shiny, so

(06:13):
we had to say to them, you know, this is
really nice. I don't know what it is, but it's
not Kashmir. Today's episode was written by Jamie Allen and
produced by Tyler Clang for iHeart Media and How Stuff Works.
To learn more about Kashmir with a K, check out
our patriot podcast Dressed the History of Fashion. They've got

(06:34):
an episode all about it called Kashmir with a K,
The Controversial History of a Shawl, And of course from
more on this and lots of other fine topics, visit
our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com