Yaks draw a plow in Gonggar county in the Tibet autonomous region. Guo Chaoying / For China Daily

Julian Wilson (left) and Aaron Pattillo founded a company that makes sportswear with yak wool. Provided to China Daily

Yak wool is the unlikely material for sportswear made by two China-based entrepreneurs. Mark Graham reports.

The main players in an unlikely new China clothing venture include yaks from the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, a British ex-army officer, a former US aid worker and the sole member of the Ghanian ski team. The disparate cast of characters are all linked to Khunu, a company formed with the ambitious intention of popularizing adventure garments made from the hardy beasts' wool.

The first task of the principals in the company, former army officer Julian Wilson and one-time American aid worker Aaron Pattillo, was to try to dispel the generally held belief that yak wool clothing is thick and itchy, not the kind of garment you would immediately think of shelling out $120 for.

Their tests so far, both theoretical and practical, have shown that wool from the hefty Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau animals is significantly warmer than lamb wool and - more importantly - softer than the much-prized cashmere sourced from the same remote areas.

Based on those findings, the duo has launched the Khunu label, producing China-made sweaters that are designed to appeal to discerning adventure lovers. It certainly has a distinctive name: Khunu is named after an ancient Mongolian dynasty.

Icebreaker, a New Zealand company, has had major success in selling fine-weave merino ski, hiking and running gear. The Beijing-based entrepreneurs are hoping that Khunu will have similar success with its yak-hair garments.

The products certainly had a memorable launch. During the Winter Olympics in Vancouver last year, the company provided the kit for skier Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong, known to his fans as the "Snow Leopard", who became the first Ghanaian to compete in the Winter Games. Nkrumah-Acheampong garnered plenty of media attention, including publicity for his yak-wool-garment sponsors.

Khunu's longer-term marketing plan is not based on such one-off gimmicks but rather on the quality, comfort and durability of yak wool, along with its pledge to donate 2 percent of the profits back to the yak-herding communities that roam along the Sichuan-Tibet border in the remote western region of China.

The founders of the company, who first met on a Beijing mountain-biking expedition, had long been looking for a business venture aligned with their concerns for the plight of poorer rural communities.

"We had been to the west part of China, where yaks come from, and realized that the community there has one commodity - the yak," says Wilson, 40, who has served in Bosnia and Northern Ireland.

"We discovered that coarse fiber from the yaks was being used for ropes and tents but the soft fiber wasn't being used at all. It was just falling off the animal and blowing away in the wind.

"On a very simplistic level, we thought, 'here is a wool that keeps animals warm at 4,500 meters during the winter in pretty tough conditions. Let's investigate how well it works and how soft we can get it. Can we make something out of it?' Broadly speaking, we are taking the wool and making it into clothing that are great to wear in cold-weather climates.

"We like to say that it comes from the mountains and it goes back into the mountains. We think that yak wool can have its own identity. People want to feel close to where their fiber comes from.

"Yak wool is softer than merino and has a more luxurious feel. We think we have a great fiber here that works. When people say you are selling yak tops, the general image is of scratchy wool that comes from a big beast in the Himalayas. They think there is no way you can make a garment from that. People's first reaction to touching the wool is usually surprise at how soft it is."