The soulful cashmere brand that succeeds by paying workers fair wages

Juliet Guo’s journey to making luxury goods doesn’t read like your typical designer origin story. Take her upbringing in Ordos, a region of China’s Inner Mongolia province, where her family owned pastureland. Though it’s thousands of miles away from the fashion capitals of Paris and Milan, it has long been revered among textile insiders, thanks to the high-quality cashmere that its goats, climate, and herders produce. As a child, she remembers seeing goats grazing the ranches, many bearing tags that said “Loro Piana.”

“I had no idea what Loro Piana was,” recalls Guo, who at that stage hadn’t traveled far outside of her hometown. After studying philosophy and economics in university, she got work at a local textile factory. She also taught herself English, after taking a five-hour bus journey to purchase a textbook.

Her experiences led her to start her own cashmere brand, Sandriver, in 2012—the same year she visited Loro Piana’s flagship store in Milan for the first time. “It was beautiful, of course,” says Guo. She was struck by how intricately this costly brand was linked to her life and to her family’s finances. “The garments and the raw materials from which they are made are of the highest quality, but the payments the herdsmen receive are not so high.”

That dynamic is something Sandriver is striving to correct. The brand has grown to produce stellar men’s and women’s cashmere basics as well as more fashion-forward knits infused with traditional regional motifs. The company’s Shanghai factory now employs 80 people, but it also operates 10 workshops in country villages, which empower local women with a steady stream of independent income.

She found early fans at the Aman Group, which in 2017 commissioned Sandriver to supply bedspreads for a property in Shanghai. “When I asked why they chose our brand, [my contact] replied that a friend in Paris had told her, ‘If you’re looking for the finest cashmere in all of China, go to Sandriver.’ ” Since then, Le Bon Marché, Neiman Marcus, and Rosewood Hotels have all come calling—and seem perfectly happy to pay the premium that translates into the higher wages Guo offers employees. As for luxury brands looking to push down the price of cashmere at the source? “They need to pay much more—even double,” she says.