Kullvi Whims is a social enterprise committed to sustainable slow fashion, fair trade, and heritage. Our craft works as a culmination of many moving pieces, each unique, and all equally important. While the artisanal work like weaving, natural dyeing, and spinning get a lot of visibility, what sometimes goes unspoken is where the wool comes from and the traditional knowledge and practices around it.
The Gaddi shepherds are the cornerstone of pastoralism. They travel thousands of kilometres every year with their sheep, taking their herds to the lush alpine pastures as they have done for generations. This practice, called ‘transhumance’ is employed by nomadic shepherds all over the world to take their sheep to pastures for food. The sheep help support the Himalayan ecosystem by carrying seeds to and from each place they travel to. The shepherds regularly travel from place to place, and while this practice is good for the ecosystem, it made it hard for us to establish a supply chain. We followed them slowly on their journeys and formed connections with then over time.
Picture a shepherd trudging through a snowy valley, leaving snowcapped mountains behind him and in the distance. He is wrapped with a thick woollen blanket called a ‘Dodhu,’ woven in a checked black and white pattern. All around him and mostly ahead of him there are hundreds of sheep moving towards alpine pastures.
In order to start working with the shepherds, we had to learn a lot about their practices, their challenges; it is still a work in progress due to a lack of infrastructure, but we work with the shepherds to gain their trust so that we can overcome these challenges together. The shepherds are still shearing their sheep with traditional, non-mechanical shears. Ater shearing, transporting the wool to carding machines in the plains many thousands of kilometres away is not an option for them due to high costs. This lowers the value of wool they can sell. The challenges they face in their profession are: Due to higher traffic in the mountains as The Himalayas become more of a tourist attraction, the shepherds are forced to move at night, as Sharing the road with vehicles while managing 50-100 animals makes moving in the day difficult. At night the shepherds often face thefts and lack protection. The shepherd’s dogs are vital to their work, but tourists on treks feeding the dogs leads to the dogs following the tourists and then being left in villages when they get into cars, causing problems for the villages, the shepherds, and the dogs. The dogs also help protect the herd at night from wild animals such as Snow Leopards or bears. Other factors such as climate change have also affected the herders. A lot of the glaciers that the herders use to cross and travel on have melted, forcing them to traverse new paths.
Initially the shepherds were a little suspicious, and mostly curious about why we wanted their wool. They loved the wool for themselves and wanted to make sure their wool was used well, and were also not used to people asking for it. Over the last eight years, we have been able to establish a relationship with the herders with the herders, going from working with 5-6 families and buying 100 kilograms of wool to 200 families and 15,000 kilograms of wool. However, the challenges of processing the wool and the technology involved remain, and this is something that we at Kullvi Whims are actively working on so that shepherds can get fair value for their hard work
