One evening in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, a felting artisan ended her day with a prayer. Could our companions have good well being. Could they be formidable, and profitable, and should their companies develop. The subsequent morning, sisters-in-law Chinara Makashova and Nazgul Esenbaeva, and the individuals they labored with awoke to what appeared like a miracle: Shopify orders. So many Shopify orders.
They started working. It felt like the whole lot was falling into place: The corporate they’d constructed from scratch was exporting felted slippers and artisan merchandise to wholesale companions across the globe. And with assist from USAID’s inexperienced enterprise initiative in Central Asia, they have been increasing their manufacturing talents — and at last constructing their very own trendy, direct-to-consumer internet retailer: one with the cost processing and knowledge safety infrastructure to assist them attain prospects instantly.
However simply as their new ecommerce infrastructure was coming collectively, the USAID funding vanished around the globe — leaving them with a $35,000 funding hole. In so many locations, the web makes constructing a retail enterprise simple — however on this planet’s most land-locked nation, with a banking system slowed down by sanctions in opposition to one neighbor and cybersecurity obstacles in opposition to one other, progress is a balancing act. Tumar’s path has been unconventional: bringing collectively nomadic custom, Soviet legacy, and digital commerce to construct a contemporary enterprise, even when the infrastructure round them can’t sustain. Their first problem: scaling a 5,000-year-old course of that had by no means earlier than been automated, with machines salvaged from the collapse of the USSR.
For hundreds of years, Kyrgyz nomads on the Eurasian steppe drove their flocks from the low inexperienced valleys to the snowy slopes of the Tian Shan mountains, sheared their sheeps’ lush thick wool, and used warmth, water, and friction to felt it into the sturdy shyrdak blankets that lined their yurts. Felt might have been the world’s first-ever textile. It was sturdy, dense, and sturdy. It might stand as much as bitter chilly or pouring rain. However between industrialization and the strain, below Soviet rule, to desert the previous, Kyrgyz moist felting by hand nearly disappeared. Actually this specific felting custom was just some farflung elders and hidden artifacts from extinction within the Nineteen Nineties when some ladies in Bishkek, graduating from college right into a post-Soviet world, started to hunt out, re-learn, and revive the observe.
Makashova and Esenbaeva — with assist from Makashova’s aunt Roza — discovered use this millennia-old strategy of moist felting with Kyrgyz wool to make issues like shyrdaks and kalpak hats. In 1998, they began Tumar Artwork Group. Inside a decade, Tumar had its first wholesale associate. And lately, USAID-funded packages helped them share their information with ladies all through Central Asia, reviving an historic business whereas spurring a brand new economic system.
On the felt manufacturing unit ground
Right this moment, Tumar’s Bishkek facility is a labyrinth of sunlit workspaces, some with pastel ground tiles, some with geraniums lining the windowsills, one filled with previous jelly jars and low containers filled with pigments and dyes. Employees pull big, fluffy sheets of “pre-felt” off the conveyor belt of a wool carding machine. On a switchboard that appears like a Chilly Battle rocket launch interface, they toggle dials which can be labeled in Chinese language, with hand-scrawled Cyrillic translations taped above.
Nowadays, trendy, industrial felting operations use a water-free needle-felting course of, Makashova defined. Some incorporate glue or artificial fibers. However not right here. Tumar’s engineering group hacked their strategy to avoiding all that, leveraging their customized manufacturing line to automate processes like carding (aligning the fibers), or kneading, finished with a one-of-a-kind “beating machine.”
“We take care to maintain our conventional know-how of moist felting,” Makashova mentioned. However “for essentially the most sophisticated means of moist urgent, trendy engineering doesn’t supply machines, so we now have to search for previous Soviet schemes, adapt and make these machines ourselves — or restore previous machines.”
To make one in every of their most in-demand merchandise — felted slippers — they wanted a heavy steel tub to carry water and warmth, and flywheels that might apply constant rhythmic strain and agitation to the wool. An previous Soviet wool milling machine would have finished the trick. “Sadly,” Makashova mentioned, “they’re nearly inconceivable to seek out.”
With scant monetary assets and an economic system in upheaval, it was exhausting for this start-up to seek out, purchase, and ship within the machines they wanted — partly as a result of a few of these machines didn’t but exist: Kyrgyz hand felting had by no means earlier than been automated. Makashova’s brother, an automotive engineer, organized the group’s personal small “mechanization base,” gathering, first, Soviet instruments and metalworking machines. Step by step, the corporate acquired textile processing gear from Italy, China, Russia, and past, salvaging, renovating, retrofitting, and Frankensteining gear to convey automation to an historic craft.
Then, extra success arrived: A Tumar affiliate discovered a bathtub and flywheels in “a heap of scrap steel supposed for recycling,” Makashova recalled. The corporate’s engineering group restored the discover, “and now we are able to’t think about our work with out these machines.”
As of the 2010s, Tumar was working extra with wholesale companions around the globe whereas persevering with to make items for his or her brick-and-mortar store of the identical identify, on a sunny nook in central Bishkek, well-liked with vacationers and expats.
By the late 2010s, the worldwide marketplace for sustainable, pure supplies was on an upswing, and vacationers coming via their Bishkek store took discover, together with a man in Richmond, Virginia named Barclay Saul. He beloved that you possibly can see Tumar’s entire supply chain, from discipline to manufacturing unit, in a day, and within the exploding panorama of eco-conscious “Instagram manufacturers,” he and a associate determined to launch Kyrgies out of a Richmond space for storing, and promote the slippers on-line.
In spring of 2020, when tourism got here to a halt, Tumar’s bustling retail enterprise did too. Saul’s wager was a wise one: Kyrgies’ gross sales surged. Folks have been staying house — and so they needed the correct footwear for it. However in addition they needed pure supplies. “This enterprise has taught me merely that [people want to] purchase much less stuff, high quality stuff,” Kyrgies CEO Saul mentioned. Kyrgies’ ecommerce enterprise has continued to double yr over yr, enabling Tumar to double its workers and scale their output fourfold prior to now 5 years.
That is the dream, Chinara mentioned — however there’s one dream they nonetheless haven’t been capable of manifest within the actuality of at this time’s sophisticated web: their very own internet retailer. The sale of artisan items out of the Bishkek storefront continues to be, in some methods, crucial factor they do, mentioned Makashova. It’s only a quarter of their income, however it’s a supply for his or her product innovation. Because of platforms like Shopify, Kyrgies might launch their retail enterprise within the US nearly in a single day. However for a Kyrgyzstan-based enterprise, on-line retail is not any simple feat. The price of delivery by air or land from the center of Central Asia is the primary hurdle. And one other factor: There’s no PayPal right here. Cost methods, Makashova mentioned, are “a really, very large downside.”
Nonetheless at this time, Kyrgyzstan’s banking system is intently tied to Russia’s, and Western sanctions put in place after Putin’s invasion of Crimea have made cross-border transactions difficult. Some Kyrgyz banks, wary of being blacklisted, have reduce off connections to Russian-linked cost methods, and that’s left corporations like Tumar in a lurch. One other wrinkle: With rising considerations over China’s entry to US client knowledge, platforms dealing with funds in international locations close to China — neighboring Kyrgyzstan included — are topic to severe cybersecurity hurdles. And if a cost doesn’t undergo on the primary try, usually, there gained’t be a second try. “We’ve misplaced many shoppers because of this,” Esenbaeva mentioned.
All this to say, Tumar’s old-school internet retailer shortly grew to become out of date. They discovered they wanted to rebuild their web site with ISO 27001-compliant back-end infrastructure: encryption protocols, safe socket layers, and a funds gateway able to navigating cross-border compliance from Central Asia, all in hopes of preserving worldwide prospects (and the cybersecurity platforms that defend them) from getting scared out of the acquisition circulation.
As of January 2025, the whole plan was in place. A brand new web site was launched. They’d the cash in hand to construct out the direct-sale infrastructure. However there was only one catch: The challenge was being financed by a green business grant from the now gutted and shuttered USAID.
Tumar is hoping that enrolling in Estonia’s e-Residency program will pull their plans for contemporary, international cost processing out of a loss of life spiral — however they nonetheless have a couple of $35,000 worldwide funding hole to fill with USAID’s dissolution.
On the outskirts of Bishkek, at Tumar’s new wool processing facility, the “break yurt” looks like a step again in time. Employees drink black tea and snack on puffy little squares of fried dough with clotted cream and jam. Proper subsequent door, a extra trendy scene unfolds: solar pours via the oculus within the yurt’s tunduk dome roof onto architectural drawings unfurled on a convention desk. Cabinets of binders and spiral-bound notebooks lean in opposition to the richly coloured, shyrdak-lined partitions. A flat-bed all-in-one printer, paying homage to HP circa 2010 — whirs. An identical-vintage, thick-bezeled, matte-black laptop monitor and keyboard set-up peeks out from piles of print-outs, a glue stick, an previous calculator.
At this new manufacturing unit, some 100 tons per yr after all wool that might have been burned as waste is as an alternative being cleaned and processed. Extra USAID inexperienced enterprise assist had been on the way in which — and it might’ve helped Tumar double the output. Now, they might be on their strategy to conducting that on their very own, increasing their product line to incorporate, for instance, a completely biodegradable slipper, and soundproofing and insulation panels (each “no-waste” merchandise made, partly, from slipper scraps). And, importantly to the founders, dependable shares of top quality uncooked materials that different companies throughout the area haven’t beforehand had entry to. Throughout a stretch of grass from the side-by-side yurts, the warehouse is abuzz with exercise.
“We need to open [up] potentialities [for] artisans to get new direct on-line orders,” and to learn to preserve high quality and consistency as output will increase, Makashova mentioned. And the one means they’ll do it’s to continue to grow.
There are workshops and small companies throughout Central Asia ready for this uncooked materials to return their means, Esenbaeva mentioned. Which means—except for their very own manufacturing of felted items—they’re needing to increase their partnerships with small, family-owned Kyrgyz sheep farms, and improve their capability for processing wholesale felt. To make all of it occur, they’ll must preserve gathering—and constructing—machines. Esenbaeva laughed, quoting Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “We’re liable for these we tame.”