Our Story: Soil , Stich and Stone
The first cold snap in Ashland brings a quiet kind of light. Julie felt it in her hands the morning she stopped at a farmer’s market table and lifted a small, weighty ball of yak yarn. It wasn’t spectacle. It wasn’t a billboard. It was warmth and promise. After years inside the fashion machine—where seasons blur and waste piles high—she wanted something simpler and harder: one piece, made right, that could be kept. If it ever had to leave a life, its fibers would know how to return to the earth.
On another mountainside, higher and thinner in air, Andrés listened to the clack of needles and the hush of conversation in Andean homes. He had stood in factories and on runways, engineered stitches for names people whisper, built a new way to make only what’s needed. The work was impressive. But the hum that stayed with him was older than any machine. Lineage over volume. Hands that could read tension the way a vintner reads wind.
Andrew’s world smelled like cedar shavings and metal. He learned to shape light into stone and metal into memory—lost-wax casting, lapidary, the patience of finish. Years in building taught him tolerances that never apologize. Fatherhood sharpened it. Make things worthy of the people who will inherit them.
In 2025, three paths crossed. Julie called Andrés with a simple question: What if knitwear honored land and time—and we showed our receipts? Minutes later, he wrote back: I’m in. She rang Andrew next: If a garment is an heirloom, its closures should be jewelry. He laid a serial-marked clasp on his bench and smiled. Let’s build the thing we wish we’d found.
The Moment She Walked Away
Julie’s story in fashion began like so many others: in the bright lights of Los Angeles, at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, and on national television as a finalist on America’s Next Top Model. But even at the height of glamour, Julie revealed something unusual—she didn’t want to model clothes. She wanted to make them.
What followed was a decade inside the industry: retail counters, trade show floors, boardrooms negotiating department store orders. She rose quickly, but what she saw was unsettling. Overproduction, waste, and the quiet knowledge that “luxury” often came at the expense of land, labor, and meaning. By 2014, she walked away—disillusioned, disappointed, unsure if the industry she once loved could ever change.
The answer came years later, not in Los Angeles or New York, but in Ashland, Oregon. At a local farmer’s market, Julie found herself lingering at a friend’s booth. The friend was Sofia, a yak rancher. On the table sat something new: a ball of yak yarn. Julie was stunned—she hadn’t known yak wool could be spun into fabric. “What would it look like to make clothes here?” she wondered.
That question became a calling. In 2025, Julie picked up the phone and dialed her old college roommate, Andres. She shared her vision: clothing that was not just American-made and premium, but truly permanent in its philosophy. If the pieces ever failed, they should return to the soil in two years’ time, enriching it rather than scarring it. Within five minutes, Andres texted back: I’m in.
From that call, a new path began—one rooted not in trends or disposability, but in permanence, soil, and the slow craft of making something meant to be kept.
Where Innovation Meets Ancestry”
For Andrés, knitwear was never just fashion—it was engineering, craft, and culture. After studying in Milan and Los Angeles, he spent a decade building his own companies, consulting for global brands, and even programming knitting machines in Japan. His work touched everything from Raf Simons collaborations to Quentin Tarantino films.
But the deeper he went into the machinery of global fashion, the more restless he became. Factories scaled up, brands pushed volume, and the human dimension of craft slipped away. Andrés began looking elsewhere—toward sustainability, toward reimagining how clothes could be made.
In 2022, he turned his back on the industrial pipeline and returned to his roots in the Andes. Traveling through Bolivia and Peru, Andrés lived with knitting communities around Lake Titicaca. He learned their stitches, traditions, and rhythms of life, and he shared his own techniques in return. These exchanges convinced him that the future of apparel wasn’t in bigger factories or faster cycles—it was in blending the wisdom of tradition with the tools of modern design.
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