Many have asked me why I do what I do? What brought me to this place and what’s a man like me doing in a wool project? Well in order to answer those questions I need to tell you a little story. I was traveling in South West China around ten years ago and fell in love with the many beautiful minority people and their cultures that I came across. Their lives were so completely different from the west. So incredibly interesting with the great big warm smiles they meet everybody with, it would be hard for anybody not to fall in love with this place. In my travels I went to a place that is now named Shangri La before Zhong Dian.  Shangri La is a Tibetan autonomous region in the northern part of the Yunnan province of China next to Burma at the start of the foothills of the Himalayas.  Being a mountain man from Alaska this quickly became my favorite place.

I moved into the biggest city in the Yunnan province of China named Kunming and started studying the Chinese language. During my four years of studies the passion for Shangri La stayed with me and in 2008 I moved there and started looking for business opportunities. I spent a lot of time in the villages and started to realize many of the people thirty years and older have never been to school.  If they did get the chance to go it was only up to the third or forth grade. I started inquiring about the younger kids and most of them are now able to go as far as middle school, that would be the equivalent of the eight grade in the US. After the eight grade they have to pay for their schooling and most of these rural families just don’t have the money so the kids stay at home and help in the fields and rearing yaks.

There are a lot of obstacles trying to bring employment to people living in remote areas. The Chinese government has been doing an incredible job of improving roads; building more schools, clean water projects, subsidized health insurance and even subsidizing money to improve their homes. Unfortunately these rural village communities are just to far out to bring any real sustainable employment so farming and rearing yaks are about all there is. Out of these circumstances came the birthing of “The Rocking Yak Company.”

To be honest, it was a bit of a no brainer. Lot’s of yak standing around and villages ladies in the winter months waiting to plant their next crop standing around too. I started inquiring about yak wool fibers and the possibilities of making knitted products and I found a company that sold high quality clean and combed completely de-haired yak down fibers. This Company purchases the raw yak down from Tibetan nomads. I brought some back to the area I love so much and the Tibetan ladies were able to spin this fine down fiber into a beautiful yarn. My first purchase of down was in 2008 of 50 kilos to test the market and we found there was a demand for yak down yarn. The fall of 2009 I purchased 200 kilos and the ladies started spinning the wool in November 2009 and finished the end of February 2010.

Through this company we are bringing much needed income to impoverished rural communities. It is our hope that our company will be a model that other businesses can follow giving a HAND UP to these communities who just need a little opportunity to earn some extra income to support their families. Our company is a for-profit-company but all of our profits will be returned to our partnership communities in the area of education and health care.

And what do I get out of all this? The satisfaction of helping some kids like this little girl in the picture below get a better education and helping to meet the needs of people less privileged than I. Won’t you join us???

Bret Colledge

CEO of “The Rocking Yak”