Image via china30s
SHOKAY is a successful Chinese producer of well-designed and high quality knit from yak fiber sourced directly form Tibetan herders. The products exude an extraordinarily natural aesthetic and feature rewarding customer experience.
SHOKAY creates job opportunity for poor and marginalized people, offers persistent and stable income for local herders, and protects their traditional lifestyle. They entrusted local animal husbandry to train herders collecting the best yak fiber; they also formed a weaving and knitting group in Shanghai.
I appreciate SHOKAY for it pioneers in applying business mode to solve social problems and help people in need; while in China, the concept “sustainable fashion” is nearly a blank page. Their value proportion is to combine fashion and social responsibility into a sustainable business type.
However, I still feel uncertain about its future. As time passes by, “social enterprise” will penetrate and root in Chinese people’s perception, so more competitors will enter the industry and share the market of yak-fiber-made products. SHOKAY can hardly undergo economics of scale, because it is a vertical integration from collection of raw resources to design to weave and finally to retailing. Maintaining efficient production chain requires highly efficient management.