Goat-to-coat provenance — a concept to source family-linked cashmere / yak down / camel wool from the Mongolian steppe, private-label through a Ulaanbaatar mill, and fulfill D2C from The Villages, FL. This is a planning console, not a live business — no inventory, no orders, no revenue yet. Use it to pressure-test the unit economics and track what has to be true before a first order.
🅿️
Parked — validating
No product has been sourced, imported, or sold. Jim revisits this in November 2026 (post-FL-move) alongside standing up WeareWorks LLC and reactivating the Shape Mongolia Facebook channel as the top-of-funnel. Until the gates below turn green, everything here is a hypothesis to test — not a plan of record.
Parked
Venture stage
validating — no capital committed
0 / 3
Blocking gates cleared
all open until proven
$0
Capital committed to date
FOB · MOQ · inventory
Nov 2026
Revisit target
post-FL-move
⛓️ The one unlock
Everything below is illustrative until Anna's brother returns a live UB mill quote — FOB per SKU, MOQ, lead time, grading. That single number turns the calculator from a placeholder into a go / no-go, and flips the pending route stops green.
This is a planning scaffold, so nothing here is validated. But if the venture ever clears its gates, these are the three places an edge could come from — stated as hypotheses to test, not facts.
🧬 Family-linked sourcing
provenance / cost hypothesis
Anna's family network reaches herders in the Khangai & Gobi aimags. A shorter, trusted chain to the mill could mean a cost or authenticity advantage commodity brands can't copy — but "could" holds until a real FOB quote proves it.
📖 Provenance as the product
positioning hypothesis
Goat-to-coat traceability and a named-region story are the one thing a price-floor rival like Quince can't undercut on a spec sheet. It only matters if customers actually pay for the story — a demand test, not an assumption.
🌐 A warm audience to test on
channel hypothesis
Tengri Reach and the Shape Mongolia channel are a low-cost way to put the story in front of a Mongolia-affinity audience before buying inventory. Reach isn't revenue until someone checks out.
Supply route
🐐
Herders
Khangai & Gobi aimags · raw cashmere / yak down / camel wool
No inventory exists. These are candidate SKUs, not stock. Real per-unit costs are unknown until Anna's brother gets a live OEM quote from a UB mill (FOB + MOQ) — so instead of asserting a margin, model it yourself below.
Per-SKU landed-cost & margin calculator
Same landed-cost approach as the car-export matrix: build up the true per-unit cost, then see what margin the retail price actually leaves. Every field is editable — defaults are illustrative placeholders (Naadam/Quince-tier positioning + air-freight ranges from the import-cost research), not quotes. Swap in a real OEM number the moment you have one.
$
mill ex-works, per garment — needs a real UB quote
$
MNT→US air, no direct route (~$9–15/kg via Asia hub)
%
cashmere knit apparel ≈ 4% — verify HTS per SKU
$
outbound from The Villages, FL
%
Etsy ≈ 6.5%+; Shopify+Stripe ≈ 2.9%+30¢
$
what the customer pays before tax/shipping
Landed cost / unit
$0
FOB + freight + duty + fulfillment
Gross profit / unit
$0
after platform fees
True gross margin
0%
on retail price
Read it honestly. Cashmere D2C is a thin-margin game once real freight, duty, fulfillment and platform fees stack up — a "58% margin" only survives if FOB is very low and retail is premium. If the number below comes out thin at a defensible retail price, that is the finding, not a failure. The moat (if any) is authenticity/provenance + the diaspora audience, not raw price.
Customer & order tracker · local scratchpad, this browser only
0
Leads / contacts logged
—
0
Open "orders"
—
0
Total entries
saved in this browser only
$0
Real revenue to date
pre-launch
Name
Product
Status
Added
No customers yet — add your first lead above. Tap a status pill to advance Lead → Order → Shipped.
Validation gate — what must be true before launch
Every gate is open until proven. No money is committed and no SKU ships until the top three clear.
🏭
Real OEM quote in hand
Anna's brother secures a live UB mill quote: FOB per SKU, MOQ, lead time, authenticity/grading. Plug the FOB into the calculator above.
open · blocking
🧮
Unit economics clear a threshold
With the real FOB + verified freight/duty, the calculator shows a defensible margin at a retail price the market will bear. If it's structurally thin, stop here.
open · blocking
🧑🤝🧑
Demand signal, not assumption
A small pre-sell / waitlist test (Etsy <$15k crafts channel or a Shape Mongolia post) converts real interest before inventory is bought. "Diaspora affinity" is a hypothesis until someone pays.
open · blocking
🏢
Legal wrapper: WeareWorks LLC
Business entity + EIN + import-of-record + reseller/sales-tax registration stood up. Targeted alongside the Nov 2026 revisit.
Nov 2026
📣
Top-of-funnel: Shape Mongolia channel
Reactivate the Facebook page as the audience funnel (see the reactivation plan) — warm it up before any commerce, per the 30/60/90 play. Cashmere is introduced only in the day-61+ "heritage angle" phase.
Nov 2026
🛡️
Clearance guardrail cleared
If Jim is still in a cleared role when this formalizes: FSO notification first. Commercial/community only — no foreign-government or funding ties.
Where this goes next. This stays a planning scaffold until the blocking gates clear. The single unlock is Anna's brother's input on the UB mill/OEM (FOB, MOQ, authenticity, live pricing) — that real number turns the calculator from illustrative to decisive and is what flips the "pending" route stops green. Revisit target: November 2026 with WeareWorks LLC + the Shape Mongolia funnel warmed up. No inventory, orders, or revenue exist today.