A yak isn’t a creature one might associate with The Savoy or Savile Row. Sometimes weighing in at over 2,000lb and standing more than a metre tall, the hairy beast is often treated as the haulier of the Himalayas – a muscly animal with which to pull or move things. Or, given its thick subcutaneous fat layer, the walking larder of the nomadic community: a wild, hardy mountain cow to provide life-giving milk and meat over freezing, nine-month-long winters.
That the shaggy, dense coat that keeps it cool during 40C summers and warm in -40C winters could be valuable didn’t seem to have occurred to anyone. Until, that is, Nancy Johnston came along.
As a child in California, Johnston had dreamt of travelling to foreign countries, and had pored over photographs of nomadic people living in faraway lands. So, when a career break came along – after medical school in the US and jobs as a social worker and in international development in London – she booked a dream trip to Mongolia to live with a family in a yurt.
What shocked her most, she says, was the poverty of the nomads, many of whom herded goats for the cashmere industry. The more fibre the industry demanded, the more the price of it dropped. And the more animals they needed to survive, the more degraded the environment became. Families were often so desperate, Johnston says, that they didn’t even use their own yaks’ milk, because they needed to sell it.
What they didn’t seem to use, though, was the yaks’ fibre. Which was odd, Johnston thought, because it was odour-resistant. It was water- and fire-resistant. And the finest fibres were exquisitely soft, hypo-allergenic, warmer than merino wool and thermal-regulating. “It was incredible to me that these creatures, which lived in some of the toughest regions on earth, produced something exquisite that no one valued,” she says.
So she stayed with the herders. She experimented with fibres from various areas. And in 2013 she launched Tengri, the world’s first supplier of sustainable, eco-friendly “noble yarns”, made from threads spun from the combed belly of the yak – and more recently the camel.
That’s not just because of the fabric’s rarity: each yak, when its belly is combed in spring and summer, produces only around 100g of the finest fibres a year. It’s because the colours of the creatures vary and some colourways are very rare. For instance, red camel hair is found only in animals that graze on plants with a rich iron content. And silvery yak hair can be combed only from a handful of creatures. “That’s the rarest,” she says. “Today, there are only about a dozen people in the world who have a jacket made from it.”
While Johnston clearly enjoys the creative process of making luxury sustainable fabrics (“it’s like being in a kitchen and coming up with new recipes”), she is most proud of the impact she’s had on communities. The nomads now get a guaranteed price, under a Fairtrade agreement, so they can make a living from their yaks, and earn an average of 50 per cent more than they did seven years ago. (A Tengri mattress topper, as found in the Savoir bed in the Royal Suite of the Savoy, retails for £21,000, and the fabric costs from £450 a metre to “thousands of pounds”.) As a result of the new trade, the Mongolian government has given more herders land to graze their yaks; there are now 4,500 families in Mongolia’s north-western Khangai region supplying Tengri. And with Johnston’s help, the herders now have a voice at national and international levels, which helps them to protect their livelihoods, their traditional ways of living and the biodiversity of the region.
In addition, because Johnston is now a member of the UK Business and Biodiversity Forum, and a contributor to the UN’s Environment Programme, she is in a place to help communities around the world to harvest other forms of natural fibres and to use them in sustainable ways in luxury.
And that, she says, is “my childhood dream come true. I’m using the skills I learned doing social work negotiating with the herdsmen. I’m using my science skills to develop innovative ways of working fibres – without destroying their innate natural luxuriousness. And I’m travelling.”
Next year, she’s also collaborating with, as yet unnamed, fashion designers and interior designers. “What’s there not to love?” she smiles.
Tengri.co.uk
