Educating Fashion Designers from US on Alpaca Textiles

I was sent this great article today on Fashion Designers from New York city heading to Peru to learn more about how to incorporate Alpaca fiber into their product lines.  This is awesome!!!  This is so what our Alpaca Industry needs.  I've been on my soap  box a lot lately talking about how we need more product driven ventures.  On CNN last night, they had a documentary on Ted Turner and my ears perked up on one of the briefest comments of the entire show.  He mentioned his Bison venture and how way back when he first started it, he had the vision that he had to have an end use to make it a viable and growing venture.  So he started restaurants that served Bison meat.  It was all part of the big picture of his breeding and livestock business.  It had to go hand in hand as he bred and grew the herd.  If you don't have a solid end state, then we quickly run out of ways of selling and bringing in income.  If all we do is sell to each other, we will have a glutted market.  We have small starts in bringing alpaca to more textile products but we have a long way to go.  These New York Designers are a great start in making this concept come to fruition.  What is missing in this article is US Alpaca breeders going with these designers to learn too what they need from us as the crop providers.  I'm afraid they will go to Peru for their end product needs when we have so much wonderful and beautiful fiber here in the US.  We need to be a part of this! 

Instead of worrying about whether we should merge the Alpaca Owners and Breeders Association and Alpaca Registry, Inc, we should be pushing to have teams working with these designers.  Then we wouldn't need to worry about financial challenges because we will be building a viable industry that will need these two entities.  We need to have visionaries that see our industry grow into more markets.  How business has worked for the first twenty years of this industry is not going to sustain it.  We need to quickly transition to a true textile provider. 


I say to you alpaca breeders who may know some of those fashion designers, start asking them what they need from us so we can start making it!  These are opportunities for us and for those of you that have that entrepreneurial eye.  Let's get cracking!  It is time to set this industry on the road to success.  And I define that success not just by how many Color Championships and Blue Ribbons I have won in a show ring but by us getting our fiber out of our barns and filling up mills and manufacturers with our homegrown, lush and wonderful alpaca fiber!!!!

Ready to supply fashion designers US grown alpaca fiber!