Brodie Cashmere - material makes a difference

Cashmere  MANIFESTO

Brodie CASHMERE STORY

Helmed by mother-daughter duo Anne-Marie Holdsworth and Jessica Talpade, Brodie is a family-owned, boundary-pushing luxury clothing brand. Originating in Yorkshire, from a long family lineage steeped in cashmere manufacturing, here at Brodie we are determined to bring our bold vision and innovative designs to our community through a responsible supply chain.

Today, all of Brodies herders hold an animal welfare certificate which has been regulated by the Sustainable Fibre Alliance (SFA) proving that our goats are safe, inoculated from disease, always have access to water and do not overgraze on the land, allowing for rejuvenation and maintaining balanced PH and Nitrate levels of the soil.

  • SCOURING

    The cashmere hairs are washed in a closed loop water system, whereby the water once used is cleaned with a water supplying partner and re-used again within the factory.

    DEHAIRING

    First, the cashmere hair is separated into 2 groups through a mechanical process called dehairing. Guard hair (coarse) and pure hair (fine), the guard coarse hairs are used within our factory for a variety of bedding businesses. In Mongolia many duvets are filled with cashmere hair. Did you know that only 10% of Mongolian cashmere hair is classed as white? It is only these pure white cashmere hairs that can be dyed into bright colours just like in Brodie designs.

    DYING

    We use non-toxic dye and ISO accredited colours in our fibre dying process that are custom made in Europe (Huntsman dyes used from Switzerland). We also use a low number of colours to dye and blend our fibres to create our desired shades. This ensures that we can create many colours by using fewer dyes, we know the more complex the colour the more chemicals are required so we stick to our blended hair for colour approach.

     


    CARDING & SPINNING

    We then card and spin our fibres into yarn. Firstly, the fibres pass through a Carding mechanical process to create a roving yarn, the roving yarn is then transferred onto a spinning mule to add twist into the yarn. Over the last 10 years we have tried and tested many combinations of twists to create a premium quality yarn.

    KNITTING

    We produce our garments using the very latest, technologically advanced knitting machines from Shima Seiki in Japan and Stoll in Germany.

Brodie is collaborating on finding split energy sources so that we can start supplying a percentage of our electric power through solar, wind and water energy. 

  • We work with two factories - one in Mongolia and one in China. 

     

    Both our Mongolian and Chinese factories are vertically integrated cashmere specialists. With this we can guarantee that our factories are true quality cashmere producers. This means the processing, dyeing, spinning and even knitting of our garments is done 100% in-house, ensuring we focus less on quantity from herders and more on the quality of our cashmere.

     

    By overseeing the entire production in a vertical integration, we drastically minimise our environmental impact. Through processing everything in one place we avoid large amounts of shipping, and as a result emit less carbon emissions.

     

    This is important to us because we can track, trace and control the entire production process end to end, cradle to gate and with it, improve the ethical and welfare practices for the people within factory cultures in both China and Mongolia.

Processing, dyeing, spinning and even knitting of our garments is done 100% in-house, ensuring we focus less on quantity from herders and more on the quality of our cashmere.

 


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