Our Story: 47 Polish Farms, Zero Waste
In May, when the weather warms, we drive.
Klaudia, my sister, a trained alpaca shearer, loads equipment into the van with our father. We begin a circuit that takes six weeks, traveling from Suwałki in the northeast to the Tatra Mountains in the south. Farm to farm.
Alpacas must be sheared. It isn't a choice, an unshorn alpaca overheats, suffers, and can die. Shearing is an act of care, not harvest.
At each farm, the ritual is the same. Calm and catch the alpaca. Work quickly. Collect the fleece in a single piece if possible. Grade it by hand, feeling for fineness, checking for debris, separating the prime blanket from the coarser legs and neck.
By June, we have what we have. There is no warehouse to call for more. There is no supplier to negotiate with. Just the fiber from that year's shearing, from farms we've visited ourselves, from animals we know by sight.
Agnieszka Sela
Andrzej Sela
Klaudia Sela
Polish Alpacas
Poland’s animal register lists 9,426 alpacas, llamas and other camelids.
Not millions, like in Peru. Fewer than ten thousand animals, spread across 1,485 little farms. Most of these farms exist for agritourism. They are run by families who keep alpacas for visitors to meet, for children to feed, for the simple pleasure of having gentle animals on the land. They are not fiber operations. They don't think in kilograms and microns.
But every spring, those alpacas grow fleece. And every spring, that fleece needs to come off.
Here's the problem as industrial fiber processing requires minimum 1,100-pound batches. And a small farm produces 33 to 198 pounds per year. So the fiber sits, bags of it, in barns and basements. Year after year, until it's eventually thrown away. Exceptional material, finer than most wool, naturally hypoallergenic with almost no lanolin, temperature regulating, discarded because no system exists to use it.
UNWONTED is that system. We aggregate fiber from dozens of farms into volumes large enough to process. We provide guaranteed purchase and professional shearing to farms that couldn't access either. We turn what was waste into what we believe is the best duvet you can buy.
Established January 2025