Interview Pier Luigi Loro Piana
“We don’t follow trends or fashion”
From the down of Mongolian baby goats to the fleece of near-extinct South American vicuñas, the quest for rare fabrics has taken Pier Luigi Loro Piana across the globe. Erik Jaques discovers how the Italian textile tycoon – and intrepid traveller – has managed to stay a cut above the rest
A
fter a 15-hour drive, much of which has been spent being queasily jolted and bumped across rudimentary dirt
roads, Pier Luigi Loro Piana is thrilled when the moment finally arrives.
Standing on a steppe between the dramatic,
jagged majesty of Mongolian and Northern Chinese mountain ranges, he watches as nomadic herders assiduously comb the under- fleece of baby Hircus goats. Several bolt away from the pack. The herd- ers give chase, but it happens again. And again. And again. Loro Piana is here to collect their precious furry fibre as a crucial, singularly soft component in his baby cashmere clothing line, but the irrepressibly relentlessly gambolling kids are having none of it.
Much bleating later – from both goats and their herders – and a beaming Loro Piana, flanked by an entourage of security guards, steps forward to hand over bags of cash in return for bags of gathered goat-down. It is a bizarre transactional scene, and one he has repeated annually since the mid-1990s when he first convinced the breeders to sepa- rate the baby goats’ extraordinary bounty from that of the adults.
“This fibre is a new frontier in cashmere, a new standard of quality,” says a proud Loro Piana, co-CEO of his namesake luxury tex- tile-and-clothing brand. “It possesses an aver- age of 13 to 13.5 micron per fibre, against the 14.5 micron of the best traditional cashmere.” It is also incredibly rare – each baby goat produces a mere 30 to 40 grammes of usable down once in their lifetime.
The resultant collections are only available in extremely limited quantities – hardly sur- prising when you consider it took Loro Piana a full decade to gather enough of the fabric to launch the baby cashmere line. A single pullover requires the fleece of 19 goat kids, while an overcoat is painstakingly assembled from a staggering 58. The strategy of embrac-
18 | Sustainable Business | January/February 2012
ing rare fabrics has been a constant for the 2,200-strong Loro Piana, which was founded in Trivero, and has been supplying the fin- est cashmere and wool fabrics to couture sophisticates and demanding clients for six generations (though the present incarnation of the company began life in 1924).
For the past 20 years, Loro Piana has been catering to the lifestyles of the same consum- ers with exclusive lines for men, women and children, along with home furnishing, acces- sories, and gifts. Since pursuing an aggressive retail expansion in 1998, business has boomed, with turnover increasing from €243M (£201M in 2000 to €479M in 2010.
Today Loro Piana boasts 136 stores world- wide covering all the usual geographical sub- jects, as well as emerging markets like Russia, the United Arab Emirates and China – the
“We want to find the best ways to obtain the finest raw materials without compromising animals’ and environmental safety”
latter welcoming two outlets this December in Nanjing and Hangzhou. “Loro Piana is not a fashion company, we don’t follow trends or fashion, we offer to our very demanding clientele the best solutions for their everyday life,” explains Loro Piana. Loro Piana has run the company in fraternal harmony with his brother Sergio since the 1970s, both taking on the co-CEO mantle in the 1980s with chairmanship alternating every three years (Sergio currently holds the post). The Loro Piana brothers are passionate and intrepid travellers, committed to person- ally studying and locating textile raw ingre- dients from some of the remotest and most extreme environments on the planet, before shipping them to their headquarters in the small Northern Italian town of Roccapietra.
“My brother and I are complementary for each other, there is no doubt about this,” says Loro Piana. “It is nice to share such an impor- tant position having the chance of making positive changes, important innovations thus contributing to the company’s growth sharing the same ideals and values.”
Central to this shared philosophy is a strong commitment to the ecosystems from which they extract their exiguous textile ingredients. The tale of the vicuña is hallmark of the Piana’s conscientious ‘tread carefully’ approach. Once worn by Incan kings, the rarefied fleece of the South American camelid is warmer than wool and, with an average of only 12 microns, incredibly fine. Selling for up to $250,000 (£160,000) for a bespoke suit, they are an irresistible lure for poachers. By 1976 there were only 5,000 animals roaming around in
the wild. Extinction
loomed, until Loro Piana came to the rescue. “We signed an agreement with the Andean communities [to teach them how to shear vicuña for their fleece instead of killing them], followed by an agreement with the Peruvian government in 1994 to halt the poaching and preserve these marvellous animals,” he says. “Now, the vicuña population in Peru has increased and totals more than 150,000.” Loro Piana even acquired a property of more than 2,000 hectares and converted it into a private reserve, aiming not only to safeguard the species, but also to keep the animals in their natural habitat for scientific research. The animal kingdom is not the company’s treasure trove, however, as evinced by the recent addition of the Burmese Lotus flower to the company’s raw materials roster. “The story started with a scarf given to me by a friend,” enthuses Loro Piana, eyes aglow at the memory of the discovery. “I was so amazed by the fact that the scarf was made from this fibre that I decided immediately to go to Burma.”
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