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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Forgive my ignorance but isn't there an obvious solution here? Stop selling the raw fibre. Build local industry and sell the finished product. Or is 99% of the value added after the raw fibre step?

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This looks like a artificial scarcity means of creating value. Vicuna wool is not particularly finer than alpaca wool, but the rarity of the former means a cost increase in the exclusive luxury market, so the owner can say, "it's vicuna" at social gatherings. It's probably no more difficult to raise alpacas and vicunas then Cladoir sheep, the latter being a fine-wooled local Irish breed.

So if you start paying the Andean villagers a lot of money for vicuna wool, all their neighbors will start raising vicunas, because who doesn't want to get rich raising sheep in the mountains? Then the market would be flooded and nobody would pay top dollar for not-so-exclusive vicuna anymore (the villagers probably know all this, but don't have access to direct-to-consumer marketing for more competitive pricing - get them a Starlink Terminal and ah, err, Tiktok account?

Fashion is a funny business, more about social science than economics. Incidentally wool demand might be rising due to microplastic concerns over synthetic fleece clothing.

>So if you start paying the Andean villagers a lot of money for vicuna wool, all their neighbors will start raising vicunas, because who doesn't want to get rich raising sheep in the mountains?

Vicuñas are dromedaries, they're not closely related to sheep. You can't just raise them. They're the wild animal that was domesticated into the alpaca. They're not a domesticated animal, they are a wild animal with very poor temperament and locals do not keep them, they capture wild vicuñas to shear. There's no realistic way to flood the market, the supply is limited by nature.

It states in the article that it is indeed a fiber fiber than the alpaca.

They need to buy specialist equipment to do that, and it sounds like they can't afford it?

What specialist equipment? Incas managed to make fabric out of the wool without advanced equipment. I think garments are still made (by hand) from the wool around the regions where the animals live, though I assume they aren’t as consistent as what you get from Loro Piana, and maybe they aren’t exported (if I remember correctly, this is to try to allow those goods to be used by locals in traditional ways, rather than being made for export, though I’m not confident in that claim)

In the article, it states that the fibers are shorter and thinner (13 microns) than other wools, which gives them the desirable properties, but also makes them very hard to spin into a wool. Admittedly, I had assumed spinning by hand wouldn't scale to the level that the comment above intended.

That is what the government should do. Buy it for them.

Isn't this where capitalism comes in and someone with money steps in to take a chunk out of literally "the richest person in the world's" margin.

That is not the goal of capitalism.

Or just stop selling it altogether and focus on some other more profitable industry. LVMH can find another supplier or tend Vicuñas themselves.

As the article explains, LVMH does tend vicuñas themselves, on fenced lots and at an industrial scale the villagers can't compete with.

Parody?

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