Shopping for Good
This Sweater Company Is Breaking a Cashmere Cartel
In the remote countryside of Mongolia, a former financial analyst turned style entrepreneur finds the best yarn you can wear on your back.
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In 2012, Matt Scanlan, the founder and chief executive officer of Naadam Cashmere, was just a young New York University alumnus with an unsatisfying job at a venture capital firm. "After a couple years of working as an analyst—which is a pretty thankless job—I left," he says. "A week after I quit, I booked a flight" to Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia, to visit a college friend who lived in the region. The two of them met a newspaper reporter who hailed from Scanlan’s hometown of Westport, Conn., and soon happened to hit it off with a couple of the reporter’s sources, nomadic goat herders."