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When you’re in the business of £2,000 blankets, £300 scarves and £500 jumpers, launching a flagship store is all about location. It wants foot traffic and proximity to equally upscale neighbors to attract deep-pocketed gamblers.
so when Norlha, a supplier of textile products woven from the finest cashmere and soft yak down (called khullu), opened its flagship store in Ritoma, a rural village on the edge of the Tibetan plateau, last May, it was a surprise. Cattle herders and farmers are the main commuters: the nearest major airport is Lanzhou, more than four hours away by car. The trip from Chengdu, the nearest major city, takes up most of a day. Walk in any direction from the store’s massive wooden doors and you can wander for miles across the rolling, grassy steppes of northwest China’s Gansu province.
For Dechen Yeshi, Tibetan-American co-founder of Norlha, the remote location was eminently reasonable. “It’s never just been about putting a product on the market,” he says. “We want our products to convey local culture, a look at the lives of the people behind it. And with the journey involved, there is a discovery process for the customer. The product becomes part of them.”
Yeshi and her mother opened Norlha’s first khullu weaving workshop in Ritoma in 2007, thinking about helping to inject some cash into local Tibetan nomadic communities whose pastoral livelihoods had been disrupted as China urbanized. The initial plan was to source the khullu fiber that the yaks shed each summer from local herders and then set up a workshop in a remote area from which to sell their creations, but it was quickly realized that just purchasing the raw material would have little impact. “Each yak only sheds a little hair,” says Yeshi, and the low value of wool makes it difficult for herders to make a year-round living. “It would have been pocket money. “What the nomads really needed was a stable source of income.”
Today, almost two decades later, the Norlha workshop employs around 130 people from the area and has provided vocational training in everything from tailoring to business management. The wages have translated into better housing and education for the local community, while the gold-adorned monastery towering over the town now receives a steady stream of donations.
At the new flagship store, located in a sun-drenched wooden annex on the first floor of a traditional Tibetan wooden building, the air is filled with the aroma of sweet incense and the thud of looms spinning in the workshop down. Norlha’s entire collection, logoless and largely in earth tones, is displayed on wooden shelves along the walls: black felt khullu vests (from £234) and coats (£1,152); Midnight blue shirts with asymmetrical cuts and mandarin collars made from a khullu and silk blend (£492). Scarves range from full-body wraps in fleece-like boiled khullu (£298) to slim styles in the natural creamy white color of yak (£210). Larger pieces, such as felt quilts in sunshine yellow and rainbow ombré (from £1,160) and one-of-a-kind patchwork blankets created from unused scraps (£2,416) hide in vertical drawers that seemingly disappear into the wooden walls.
Using Norlha’s small guesthouse as a base, customers can turn their shopping trip into a vacation. Just a short distance from the front door, there are temples and endless mountain trails to explore and, of course, the wide expanse of the plateau, with its families of yaks.
Norlha, Ritoma Village, Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Gansu, China. norlha.com