From the pasture to the product

Every Wollken Studio piece will carry a Digital Product Passport: a record you open with your phone that shows where the fibre grew, whose hands it passed through, and what happened between the Khangai mountains and your door.

Why a passport

Most labels stop at fibre content. A percentage, a wash symbol, a country of manufacture that often refers only to the final seam. Nothing about the herding family whose animals grew the fibre, the workshop that combed and spun it, or what your purchase changed for the pasture it came from.

That gap is where most claims about sustainability live. A brand says something, a customer decides whether to believe it, and nobody can check. We would rather hand you the record and let you look.

Building on work that already exists

During UNCCD COP17 in Ulaanbaatar, we invited the Mongolian National Federation of Pasture User Groups of Herders to our side panel to talk about exactly this. They already run a digital traceability system that records livestock raw materials and where they came from, which means a Mongolian fibre can already be followed part of the way back through the chain.

We are building on that rather than starting beside it. Their system establishes origin. Ours extends it forward through processing and manufacture, so a single finished garment can be linked to the pasture, the herding family, the animal, the fibre lot, the spinning, the knitting, and the piece itself.

What your passport will show

We are building this out in stages. As it develops, it will carry:

The fibre. Where the khöövör was collected, which herding community in Uyanga, Övörkhangai it came from, and how it was graded.

The journey. Fibre collected in Uyanga, sorted and spun in Ulaanbaatar, knitted by our partner workshop, flown to Berlin. With the dates for your batch.

The people. The names and roles of everyone who worked on it, from the herders to Tsetsegmaa's weaving team in Ulaanbaatar.

The land. Which pasture the fibre came off, and what the restoration work on that ground looks like.

Your piece itself. A record tied to your individual garment, with its own number.

Why we bother

Roughly 40% of the world's raw cashmere comes from Mongolia, and most of it leaves the country as a commodity: sorted by weight, mixed with other lots, sold on. By the time it reaches a shop in Europe, its origin has dissolved. Nobody is hiding anything. The information simply stops existing somewhere around the second trader.

Once origin is untraceable, so is responsibility. A brand cannot pay a herder more for grazing carefully if it has no idea whose fibre it bought. The passport is the machinery that makes the rest of our work possible, which is why we are building it first.

Scan the tag inside your garment, and the chain behind it opens up.