4 ms·

The Vicuñas and the $9k Sweater

70 points by throwaway2037 3y ago

lsb 3y ago
It’s an absolute scandal, as if France only sold wine grapes, and no one in France had ever made or tasted wine. Most of the value add is in the processing.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ZiiS 3y ago
They are paying the village the local minimum wage for a month per jumper and the village can't afford to pay her for one day's work?
- wmf 3y ago
  Somebody's embezzling that money and this article seems remarkably incurious about that fact.
  - truculent 3y ago
    I think there’s enough pointed inclusions in the article to make that clear, to be fair. Although I agree it seems weirdly restrained, like half an article.
- truculent 3y ago
  In 2012, they brought in $788,526 - where did that go? Who is the leader of the indigenous community making these decisions? Was the journalist able to get a comment from them? If not, why not?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
readyplayernull 3y ago
Now also tell me what chemicals they use to clean the fibers and how and where they dispose the residues? Just to be sure I'm not portraying a wrong image of them.
jerpint 3y ago
I’ve been to Peruvian mountains recently where they farm vicuñas and alpacas and can confirm they live in pretty poor conditions in a very harsh environment; high altitude barren mountains. The majority of income comes from tourism, and it’s very common to see villagers try to sell you goods made of alpaca/llama/vicuna wool. Funny enough, most shops in the bigger cities tend to sell stuff made in china because it’s significantly cheaper to obtain
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >they live in pretty poor conditions in a very harsh environment; high altitude barren mountains. But isn't that just the Peruvian mountains? If your statement was supposed to be relative ("there are good conditions in <x>") then I'm not sure what you expect. If it was supposed to be absolute, then you're correct but stating something that hasn't changed since long before humans started living in the area is hardly worthwhile.
  - brailsafe 3y ago
    I understood the whole statement to mean that both the physical environment of the mountains and the conditions for living in them (for both alpacas and people) are difficult. As in, "the mountains are a harsh environment and people are living in poor conditions upon them" which would suggest an even more limited set of circumstances than being just poor somewhere else or just on those mountains but not having to depend on them for everyday living.
- DanielVZ 3y ago
  How did they farm vicuñas? Common knowledge here in the andes is that they aren’t domesticated and don’t reproduce in captivity. That’s why their fur costs so much. Afaik alpacas can be farmed, but llamas are fully domesticated instead and easy for having larger livestock.
  - clvx 3y ago
    There you go: https://elpais.com/america-futura/2023-09-03/la-fuerza-del-chacchu-una-ancestral-practica-de-conservacion-de-vicunas.html https://elpais.com/america-futura/2023-09-03/la-fuerza-del-c... Pretty much Chaccu. Free festival. It's usually in June. You can make a trip of it going to Paracas, Ica's dunes, Nazca Lines and finish in Pampas Galeras. Keep in mind in Galeras there's nothing. Just a post of the National reserve and that's it. It's also at 4K meters of altitude so walking for hours could be a whole experience.
Gimpei 3y ago
The value in the 9K sweater is not in the material. You can get just as nice sweaters for a lot lot less money. Probably 20X less will get you a very nice, very well made, very soft sweater. The value of the sweater is in the brand. Somehow Loro Piano has found out how to get people to agree to pay 9K for a damn sweater. If they can do it with Vicuna, they’ll find another material to do it with as well.
- xvector 3y ago
  Have you actually stepped into a Loro Piana store and felt their cashmere? It is otherworldly. I have some degree of experience in picking out high-end cashmere, telling the overpriced scams apart from the legit ones, and Loro Piana is definitely a noticeable level above the others. I have skin that is hypersensitive to cashmere. Most high end cashmere itches for me, but not Loro Piana cashmere. There are significant differences in cashmere fiber length, diameter, etc.
  - markdown 3y ago
    All the differences in the world don't make that little amount of animal hair worth $9k. It's the value adding... mostly via brand development. I mean it says right there in the article that it's worth $280. BTW why are you talking about cashmere when this is about Vicuna hair?
    - gaadd33 3y ago
      Isn't the raw hair worth $280 but it still needs woven into fibers and then turned into clothing? Definitely not $9k but the vicuna clothes for sale in Peru (not a fancy brand name) are still significantly more expensive than other fiber. I think the cheapest sweaters from baby alpaca in Cusco are about $300.
      - markdown 3y ago
        $300 sounds right... shipping is negligible so 3 times that in the US... around $1000 would be about right. The other $8000 is just for the brand.
elephant81 3y ago
I toured the Loro Piana mill in Roccapietra a few years back. Highlights include the cashmere carpets they make for gulfstream, the Scottish nettles they brush fabrics with and the five story storage bins that run an automated elevator call back system. It was very impressive. Sure it is even more so since it was purchased by LVMH.
- thfuran 3y ago
  >Scottish nettles they brush fabrics with Why would someone go and do a thing like that?
  - throwup238 3y ago
    It's called fulling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulling First they soak the fabric in stale urine. Then the tiny stinging hairs on the nettles acts as a natural brush to lift and separate the wool fibers.
throwaway2037 3y ago
Spotted here: https://www.ft.com/content/8fa8550e-7a55-44a7-b3d5-cdb0f81aebc3 https://www.ft.com/content/8fa8550e-7a55-44a7-b3d5-cdb0f81ae...
vanc_cefepime 3y ago
https://archive.is/cmHOj https://archive.is/cmHOj
chongli 3y ago
Forgive my ignorance but isn't there an obvious solution here? Stop selling the raw fibre. Build local industry and sell the finished product. Or is 99% of the value added after the raw fibre step?
- imgabe 3y ago
  Or just stop selling it altogether and focus on some other more profitable industry. LVMH can find another supplier or tend Vicuñas themselves.
  - resolutebat 3y ago
    As the article explains, LVMH does tend vicuñas themselves, on fenced lots and at an industrial scale the villagers can't compete with.
- photochemsyn 3y ago
  This looks like a artificial scarcity means of creating value. Vicuna wool is not particularly finer than alpaca wool, but the rarity of the former means a cost increase in the exclusive luxury market, so the owner can say, "it's vicuna" at social gatherings. It's probably no more difficult to raise alpacas and vicunas then Cladoir sheep, the latter being a fine-wooled local Irish breed. So if you start paying the Andean villagers a lot of money for vicuna wool, all their neighbors will start raising vicunas, because who doesn't want to get rich raising sheep in the mountains? Then the market would be flooded and nobody would pay top dollar for not-so-exclusive vicuna anymore (the villagers probably know all this, but don't have access to direct-to-consumer marketing for more competitive pricing - get them a Starlink Terminal and ah, err, Tiktok account? Fashion is a funny business, more about social science than economics. Incidentally wool demand might be rising due to microplastic concerns over synthetic fleece clothing.
  - nemo 3y ago
    >So if you start paying the Andean villagers a lot of money for vicuna wool, all their neighbors will start raising vicunas, because who doesn't want to get rich raising sheep in the mountains? Vicuñas are dromedaries, they're not closely related to sheep. You can't just raise them. They're the wild animal that was domesticated into the alpaca. They're not a domesticated animal, they are a wild animal with very poor temperament and locals do not keep them, they capture wild vicuñas to shear. There's no realistic way to flood the market, the supply is limited by nature.
brigadier132 3y ago
Why is there only one customer?
- Retric 3y ago
  Because the price is actually extremely high, and the alternatives are far cheaper “$280 for an equivalent amount of fiber” is just a lot of money to spend on raw materials for a sweater. Include the overhead of selling luxury goods and you need to be charging ~1,000+$ per sweater to break even. Add in there’s only 200,000 animals worldwide and that’s just not a lot of room for multiple companies to be interested in participating in such an inherently limited market.
  - rKarpinski 3y ago
    Loro Piana does over 1B Euro in revenue at over 20% margin [1], I'd say there is room for more than one company. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loro_Piana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loro_Piana
    - imgabe 3y ago
      They make other things besides this one sweater though, right?
      - Retric 3y ago
        Yea it's a bunch of different products, "textile division produces high quality textiles from cashmere, vicuña wool, linen, and merino wool;" I don't know the exact numbers for this sweater. But it takes a alpaca 4 years to produce enough cashmere for one sweater. 200,000 / 4 = 50k sweaters at 20% profit margin on 9k a pop that's 90 million in profit a year assuming they sell everyone at full price. More realistic could be 2/3 to 1/4 of that, though I'm just guessing here. Now split it across X companies and it’s going to be a small market. Edit: Looks like other companies are using this kind of wool, just not from that particular location. https://www.alpacacollections.com/belen-vicuna-sweater.html https://www.alpacacollections.com/belen-vicuna-sweater.html
samatman 3y ago
There are other perspectives here worth comparing and contrasting. https://www.conservation.org/blog/in-wind-swept-andes-sustainable-vicuna-wool-is-good-as-gold https://www.conservation.org/blog/in-wind-swept-andes-sustai...
- truculent 3y ago
  This is notably looking at the Bolivian communities, not the Peruvian ones as in OP
Beijinger 3y ago
That is a nice Sweater. Would complement my 10k comforter... https://icelandicdown.com/product/eiderdown-comforter/ https://icelandicdown.com/product/eiderdown-comforter/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- throwup238 3y ago
  Damn for that amount of money it should be made of Sasquatch down or some other hitherto unknown cryptozoological specimen.

70 points by throwaway2037 3y ago

lsb 3y ago

It’s an absolute scandal, as if France only sold wine grapes, and no one in France had ever made or tasted wine. Most of the value add is in the processing.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ZiiS 3y ago

They are paying the village the local minimum wage for a month per jumper and the village can't afford to pay her for one day's work?

wmf 3y ago
Somebody's embezzling that money and this article seems remarkably incurious about that fact.
- truculent 3y ago
  I think there’s enough pointed inclusions in the article to make that clear, to be fair. Although I agree it seems weirdly restrained, like half an article.
truculent 3y ago
In 2012, they brought in $788,526 - where did that go? Who is the leader of the indigenous community making these decisions? Was the journalist able to get a comment from them? If not, why not?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

readyplayernull 3y ago

Now also tell me what chemicals they use to clean the fibers and how and where they dispose the residues? Just to be sure I'm not portraying a wrong image of them.

jerpint 3y ago

I’ve been to Peruvian mountains recently where they farm vicuñas and alpacas and can confirm they live in pretty poor conditions in a very harsh environment; high altitude barren mountains. The majority of income comes from tourism, and it’s very common to see villagers try to sell you goods made of alpaca/llama/vicuna wool. Funny enough, most shops in the bigger cities tend to sell stuff made in china because it’s significantly cheaper to obtain

Dalewyn 3y ago
>they live in pretty poor conditions in a very harsh environment; high altitude barren mountains. But isn't that just the Peruvian mountains? If your statement was supposed to be relative ("there are good conditions in <x>") then I'm not sure what you expect. If it was supposed to be absolute, then you're correct but stating something that hasn't changed since long before humans started living in the area is hardly worthwhile.
- brailsafe 3y ago
  I understood the whole statement to mean that both the physical environment of the mountains and the conditions for living in them (for both alpacas and people) are difficult. As in, "the mountains are a harsh environment and people are living in poor conditions upon them" which would suggest an even more limited set of circumstances than being just poor somewhere else or just on those mountains but not having to depend on them for everyday living.
DanielVZ 3y ago
How did they farm vicuñas? Common knowledge here in the andes is that they aren’t domesticated and don’t reproduce in captivity. That’s why their fur costs so much. Afaik alpacas can be farmed, but llamas are fully domesticated instead and easy for having larger livestock.
- clvx 3y ago
  There you go: https://elpais.com/america-futura/2023-09-03/la-fuerza-del-chacchu-una-ancestral-practica-de-conservacion-de-vicunas.html https://elpais.com/america-futura/2023-09-03/la-fuerza-del-c... Pretty much Chaccu. Free festival. It's usually in June. You can make a trip of it going to Paracas, Ica's dunes, Nazca Lines and finish in Pampas Galeras. Keep in mind in Galeras there's nothing. Just a post of the National reserve and that's it. It's also at 4K meters of altitude so walking for hours could be a whole experience.

Gimpei 3y ago

The value in the 9K sweater is not in the material. You can get just as nice sweaters for a lot lot less money. Probably 20X less will get you a very nice, very well made, very soft sweater. The value of the sweater is in the brand. Somehow Loro Piano has found out how to get people to agree to pay 9K for a damn sweater. If they can do it with Vicuna, they’ll find another material to do it with as well.

xvector 3y ago
Have you actually stepped into a Loro Piana store and felt their cashmere? It is otherworldly. I have some degree of experience in picking out high-end cashmere, telling the overpriced scams apart from the legit ones, and Loro Piana is definitely a noticeable level above the others. I have skin that is hypersensitive to cashmere. Most high end cashmere itches for me, but not Loro Piana cashmere. There are significant differences in cashmere fiber length, diameter, etc.
- markdown 3y ago
  All the differences in the world don't make that little amount of animal hair worth $9k. It's the value adding... mostly via brand development. I mean it says right there in the article that it's worth $280. BTW why are you talking about cashmere when this is about Vicuna hair?
  - gaadd33 3y ago
    Isn't the raw hair worth $280 but it still needs woven into fibers and then turned into clothing? Definitely not $9k but the vicuna clothes for sale in Peru (not a fancy brand name) are still significantly more expensive than other fiber. I think the cheapest sweaters from baby alpaca in Cusco are about $300.
    - markdown 3y ago
      $300 sounds right... shipping is negligible so 3 times that in the US... around $1000 would be about right. The other $8000 is just for the brand.

elephant81 3y ago

I toured the Loro Piana mill in Roccapietra a few years back. Highlights include the cashmere carpets they make for gulfstream, the Scottish nettles they brush fabrics with and the five story storage bins that run an automated elevator call back system. It was very impressive. Sure it is even more so since it was purchased by LVMH.

thfuran 3y ago
>Scottish nettles they brush fabrics with Why would someone go and do a thing like that?
- throwup238 3y ago
  It's called fulling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulling First they soak the fabric in stale urine. Then the tiny stinging hairs on the nettles acts as a natural brush to lift and separate the wool fibers.

throwaway2037 3y ago

Spotted here: https://www.ft.com/content/8fa8550e-7a55-44a7-b3d5-cdb0f81aebc3 https://www.ft.com/content/8fa8550e-7a55-44a7-b3d5-cdb0f81ae...

vanc_cefepime 3y ago

https://archive.is/cmHOj https://archive.is/cmHOj

chongli 3y ago

Forgive my ignorance but isn't there an obvious solution here? Stop selling the raw fibre. Build local industry and sell the finished product. Or is 99% of the value added after the raw fibre step?

imgabe 3y ago
Or just stop selling it altogether and focus on some other more profitable industry. LVMH can find another supplier or tend Vicuñas themselves.
- resolutebat 3y ago
  As the article explains, LVMH does tend vicuñas themselves, on fenced lots and at an industrial scale the villagers can't compete with.
photochemsyn 3y ago
This looks like a artificial scarcity means of creating value. Vicuna wool is not particularly finer than alpaca wool, but the rarity of the former means a cost increase in the exclusive luxury market, so the owner can say, "it's vicuna" at social gatherings. It's probably no more difficult to raise alpacas and vicunas then Cladoir sheep, the latter being a fine-wooled local Irish breed. So if you start paying the Andean villagers a lot of money for vicuna wool, all their neighbors will start raising vicunas, because who doesn't want to get rich raising sheep in the mountains? Then the market would be flooded and nobody would pay top dollar for not-so-exclusive vicuna anymore (the villagers probably know all this, but don't have access to direct-to-consumer marketing for more competitive pricing - get them a Starlink Terminal and ah, err, Tiktok account? Fashion is a funny business, more about social science than economics. Incidentally wool demand might be rising due to microplastic concerns over synthetic fleece clothing.
- nemo 3y ago
  >So if you start paying the Andean villagers a lot of money for vicuna wool, all their neighbors will start raising vicunas, because who doesn't want to get rich raising sheep in the mountains? Vicuñas are dromedaries, they're not closely related to sheep. You can't just raise them. They're the wild animal that was domesticated into the alpaca. They're not a domesticated animal, they are a wild animal with very poor temperament and locals do not keep them, they capture wild vicuñas to shear. There's no realistic way to flood the market, the supply is limited by nature.

brigadier132 3y ago

Why is there only one customer?

Retric 3y ago
Because the price is actually extremely high, and the alternatives are far cheaper “$280 for an equivalent amount of fiber” is just a lot of money to spend on raw materials for a sweater. Include the overhead of selling luxury goods and you need to be charging ~1,000+$ per sweater to break even. Add in there’s only 200,000 animals worldwide and that’s just not a lot of room for multiple companies to be interested in participating in such an inherently limited market.
- rKarpinski 3y ago
  Loro Piana does over 1B Euro in revenue at over 20% margin [1], I'd say there is room for more than one company. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loro_Piana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loro_Piana
  - imgabe 3y ago
    They make other things besides this one sweater though, right?
    - Retric 3y ago
      Yea it's a bunch of different products, "textile division produces high quality textiles from cashmere, vicuña wool, linen, and merino wool;" I don't know the exact numbers for this sweater. But it takes a alpaca 4 years to produce enough cashmere for one sweater. 200,000 / 4 = 50k sweaters at 20% profit margin on 9k a pop that's 90 million in profit a year assuming they sell everyone at full price. More realistic could be 2/3 to 1/4 of that, though I'm just guessing here. Now split it across X companies and it’s going to be a small market. Edit: Looks like other companies are using this kind of wool, just not from that particular location. https://www.alpacacollections.com/belen-vicuna-sweater.html https://www.alpacacollections.com/belen-vicuna-sweater.html

samatman 3y ago

There are other perspectives here worth comparing and contrasting. https://www.conservation.org/blog/in-wind-swept-andes-sustainable-vicuna-wool-is-good-as-gold https://www.conservation.org/blog/in-wind-swept-andes-sustai...

truculent 3y ago
This is notably looking at the Bolivian communities, not the Peruvian ones as in OP

Beijinger 3y ago

That is a nice Sweater. Would complement my 10k comforter... https://icelandicdown.com/product/eiderdown-comforter/ https://icelandicdown.com/product/eiderdown-comforter/

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
throwup238 3y ago
Damn for that amount of money it should be made of Sasquatch down or some other hitherto unknown cryptozoological specimen.