Inside Erdos, the Chinese Cashmere Specialist You’ve Never Heard Of

On a remote ranch in Inner Mongolia, cashmere goats are played pop music, closely monitored by scientists and treated with extraordinary care. They belong to Erdos, the Chinese fashion producer now making its first tentative steps into Britain

On a dry, isolated ranch in China’s Inner Mongolia, hundreds of goats are listening to pop music. They are surrounded by a landscape where the vastness of the sky competes with the starkness of the land below. The huge grassland stretches for hundreds of miles in every direction, eventually giving way to the sands of the Gobi Desert in the north. All of which is to say, there is nothing there. Except the goats, of course, and a team of researchers in lab coats, holed up in an S-shaped building so futuristic and out of place that it looks like debris from a space station. 

This is the Erdos Eco Ranch and, inside, these researchers are working in laboratories with names like “Resource Conservation & Breeding Technology” and “Nutrition & Health, Disease Prevention and Control”. Not only are they monitoring every moment of the goats’ lives, but they are also pioneering technologies to support the long-term health of the grasslands they graze on. All of this is happening because these aren’t just any goats, they’re cashmere goats. And in this particular stretch of the Inner Mongolian grasslands, the cashmere they produce is considered among the finest in the world.

Everyone on the ranch works for Erdos, the Chinese cashmere megabrand. Founded in Inner Mongolia in 1980, Erdos became a household name during the Eighties, helped by a canny television advertising campaign built around a tagline known to millions: “Erdos cashmere sweaters, warming the whole world.” Over the years, Erdos has become a powerhouse in Chinese fashion and spawned numerous diffusion labels, each of which act as a distinct entity. The most popular include Erdos 1980, its heritage label; Blue Erdos, aimed at a younger demographic; and 1436, its high-luxury label. The latter’s numeric name actually refers to the specifications of what the company calls diamond-quality cashmere: a fineness of 14.5 microns and a length of 36 millimetres. Across China, Erdos has more than 500 outlets, around 30,000 employees and billions in annual revenue. And all of it rests on those goats. It should come as no surprise that they’re so pampered.

In the last decade, Erdos has set its sights beyond China. Tapping the German designer Dirk Jaster as its menswear design director in 2017 was one step towards bringing a more global fashion sensibility to the company. Speaking at Erdos’s head office in Beijing, Jaster tells us some of his initial challenges designing for the Chinese market, as opposed to in Europe. “When I joined Erdos, I felt that Chinese men were, in general, more understated in the way they expressed luxury,” he tells us. “Unlike many southern European customers, they often preferred quiet confidence over obvious self-expression.” Chinese men may once have baulked at the sight of, say, a Pitti peacock, but the past decade has seen a sea change in how Chinese consumers approach luxury fashion, according to Jaster. “Chinese consumers have become incredibly knowledgeable – they travel internationally and follow global fashion closely.”

This September, Erdos will mark one of its biggest moves outside China yet – making their debut in the UK with a capsule collection in collaboration with the University of Cambridge. For the brand, it makes sense to be collabing with a hallowed educational institution, rather than with another label. “When we consider collaborations, we always look at what is distinctive about a potential partner,” an Erdos spokesperson told us. “With Cambridge, what particularly inspired us was its eight-hundred year intellectual tradition and a culture shaped by curiosity, independent thinking and the courage to question established ideas.”

Given that it’s a collaboration with a university, the collection, naturally, has a preppy air. Blazers feature custom buttons and hardware, while crisp shirts come in boating stripes. Knee-length skirts are sharply pleated and classic baggy cardigans are, of course, rendered in cashmere. Even the big university logo jumper gets a reworking, featuring the Cambridge lion above the words “Cambridge x Erdos”. “The collection retains a sense of Cambridge while remaining unmistakably Erdos,” the brand tells us.

While the Cambridge collection will primarily launch in China, the brand is hoping that some of the pieces will be available to buy through the university. This would mark the very first time any British consumer would be able to buy an Erdos product outside of China. For the brand, it’s one small step into a whole new world. The fact that Britain played a pivotal role in the industrialisation of cashmere, while China was central to its sourcing, is not lost on Erdos. In many ways, the two nations have been in conversation for centuries when it comes to cashmere.

Back on the ranch, a herder unlocks a gate and hundreds of cashmere goats spill out onto the Inner Mongolian grasslands. The tinny speaker continues to pump out the finest in Chinese easy-listening pop. From a viewing platform, you can watch the goats, packed together as tightly as a shoal of fish, wander across the five thousand acres they have all to themselves. Soon, they’ll be combed for their cashmere, which Erdos will treat with the same reverence as gold. It’ll be packed up by the tonne and sent through a number of processes, including cleaning, dehairing, dyeing, spinning and, eventually, knitting, before making its way to boutiques around China. But the goats don’t need to worry about that. For now, it’s grass, blue sky and the endless horizon.