Tolaga Bay Cashmere: Creating Garments at the Edge of the Pacific

It’s hard to imagine a more out-of-the-way place than Tolaga Bay, or one more ruggedly beautiful. Located on the windswept eastern shore of New Zealand’s North Island, the area is surrounded by emeraldgreen hills, blanched sandstone cliffs, and a crystalclear view of the vast expanse of the southern Pacific Ocean.

It’s not exactly the kind of place you’d expect to find a cashmere operation. Yet the region has a long history of both fashion and fibre-making. For centuries, Indigenous Māori weavers harvested the sword-like leaves of the native harakeke (New Zealand flax), weaving them into intricately dyed garments that symbolised social status and ancestral connection. In the colonial era, these fibres were exported globally for rope and sailcloth well into the 1950s. Today, the area is home to the Tolaga Bay Cashmere Company, producer of some of the most storied cashmere garments in the world.

As George Girling-Butcher, owner of the atelier, explains, the story of his family’s business began more than 40 years ago with his mother, Trish. “Growing up surrounded by the freedom and wild beauty of country life gave my mother a unique appreciation and love for animals,” Girling-Butcher says. After a sojourn in Europe ignited her passion for fashion, she returned home in the early 1980s with the idea of turning the 2,867-hectare family estate into the epicentre of a new industry. “After seeing wild goats on the family farm—and having a pet goat at home—her curiosity led her to wonder whether these wild goats yielded any cashmere in their fleece.”

Turns out they did, albeit in very small quantities. Thus began a decades-long effort to sort through the East Cape’s feral herds, hand-selecting animals for the quality of their close-to-the-skin undercoat, and breeding them to increase yield. It was no small undertaking. “My father would round up tens of thousands of wild goats, sometimes jumping from helicopters to do so,” Girling-Butcher recalls.

Forty years later, the effort has paid off. The family now maintains a lineage that roams the postcardperfect headlands surrounding the town’s U-shaped bay. From these goats comes a fibre that captures something of the spirit of the place: natural and beautiful.

Girling-Butcher acknowledges that his family’s approach is deeply shaped by its remote location. “Being so far away, we’re naturally slowerpaced,” he says with a smile.

Touch a Tolaga Bay sweater or scarf and you can sense that feeling of distance in the fibre, a character that stands apart from what Girling-Butcher diplomatically calls the “hustle and bustle” of major urban design centres.