One night time in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, a felting artisan ended her day with a prayer. May our companions have good well being. May they be formidable, and profitable, and should their companies develop. The subsequent morning, sisters-in-law Chinara Makashova and Nazgul Esenbaeva, and the folks they labored with awoke to what appeared like a miracle: Shopify orders. So many Shopify orders.
They started working. It felt like all the things was falling into place: The firm 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 had been increasing their manufacturing skills — and at last constructing their very own fashionable, direct-to-consumer internet retailer: one with the fee processing and knowledge safety infrastructure to assist them attain clients straight.
But 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 straightforward — however on this planet’s most land-locked nation, with a banking system slowed down by sanctions towards one neighbor and cybersecurity limitations towards 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 centuries, 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 robust, dense, and sturdy. It might stand as much as bitter chilly or pouring rain. But between industrialization and the stress, underneath Soviet rule, to desert the previous, Kyrgyz moist felting by hand virtually disappeared. In reality this explicit felting custom was only a few 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 follow.
Makashova and Esenbaeva — with assist from Makashova’s aunt Roza — realized the best way to use this millennia-old strategy of moist felting with Kyrgyz wool to make issues like shyrdaks and kalpak hats. In 1998, they began Tumar Art Group. Within a decade, Tumar had its first wholesale associate. And lately, USAID-funded applications helped them share their data with ladies all through Central Asia, reviving an historic business whereas spurring a brand new financial system.
On the felt manufacturing facility flooring
Today, Tumar’s Bishkek facility is a labyrinth of sunlit workspaces, some with pastel flooring tiles, some with geraniums lining the windowsills, one filled with outdated jelly jars and occasional containers filled with pigments and dyes. Workers pull big, fluffy sheets of “pre-felt” off the conveyor belt of a wool carding machine. On a switchboard that appears like a Cold War rocket launch interface, they toggle dials which can be labeled in Chinese, with hand-scrawled Cyrillic translations taped above.
These days, fashionable, industrial felting operations use a water-free needle-felting course of, Makashova defined. Some incorporate glue or artificial fibers. But not right here. Tumar’s engineering staff hacked their solution 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 stated. But “for essentially the most sophisticated technique of moist urgent, fashionable engineering doesn’t supply machines, so we’ve to search for outdated Soviet schemes, adapt and make these machines ourselves — or restore outdated machines.”
To make one in all their most in-demand merchandise — felted slippers — they wanted a heavy metallic tub to carry water and warmth, and flywheels that would apply constant rhythmic stress and agitation to the wool. An outdated Soviet wool milling machine would have finished the trick. “Unfortunately,” Makashova stated, “they’re virtually unattainable to seek out.”
With scant monetary assets and an financial system in upheaval, it was laborious 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,” accumulating, first, Soviet instruments and metalworking machines. Gradually, the corporate acquired textile processing tools from Italy, China, Russia, and past, salvaging, renovating, retrofitting, and Frankensteining tools to convey automation to an historic craft.
Then, extra luck arrived: A Tumar affiliate discovered a bathtub and flywheels in “a heap of scrap metallic supposed for recycling,” Makashova recalled. The firm’s engineering group restored the discover, “and now we will’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 title, on a sunny nook in central Bishkek, standard with vacationers and expats.
By the late 2010s, the worldwide marketplace for sustainable, pure supplies was on an upswing, and vacationers coming by means of their Bishkek store took discover, together with a man in Richmond, Virginia named Barclay Saul. He cherished that you could possibly see Tumar’s complete provide chain, from discipline to manufacturing facility, 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 cupboard space, 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 sensible one: Kyrgies’ gross sales surged. People had been staying residence — and so they wished the appropriate footwear for it. But additionally they wished pure supplies. “This enterprise has taught me merely that [people want to] purchase much less stuff, high quality stuff,” Kyrgies CEO Saul stated. Kyrgies’ ecommerce enterprise has continued to double yr over yr, enabling Tumar to double its workers and scale their output fourfold previously 5 years.
This is the dream, Chinara stated — however there’s one dream they nonetheless haven’t been capable of manifest within the actuality of in the present day’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, stated Makashova. It’s only a quarter of their income, however it’s a supply for his or her product innovation. Thanks to platforms like Shopify, Kyrgies might launch their retail enterprise within the US nearly in a single day. But for a Kyrgyzstan-based enterprise, on-line retail is not any straightforward feat. The value of transport by air or land from the guts of Central Asia is the primary hurdle. And one other factor: There’s no PayPal right here. Payment techniques, Makashova stated, are “a really, very massive drawback.”
Still in the present day, 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, cautious of being blacklisted, have reduce off connections to Russian-linked fee techniques, and that’s left corporations like Tumar in a lurch. Another wrinkle: With rising issues over China’s entry to US client knowledge, platforms dealing with funds in international locations close to China — neighboring Kyrgyzstan included — are topic to critical cybersecurity hurdles. And if a fee doesn’t undergo on the primary try, usually, there gained’t be a second try. “We’ve misplaced many purchasers for that reason,” Esenbaeva stated.
All this to say, Tumar’s old-school internet retailer rapidly turned out of date. They found out they wanted to rebuild their website 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 conserving worldwide clients (and the cybersecurity platforms that defend them) from getting scared out of the acquisition stream.
As of January 2025, the complete plan was in place. A brand new web site was launched. They had the cash in hand to construct out the direct-sale infrastructure. But there was only one catch: The challenge was being financed by a inexperienced enterprise 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 fee processing out of a dying 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” seems like a step again in time. Workers drink black tea and snack on puffy little squares of fried dough with clotted cream and jam. Right subsequent door, a extra fashionable scene unfolds: solar pours by means of the oculus within the yurt’s tunduk dome roof onto architectural drawings unfurled on a convention desk. Shelves of binders and spiral-bound notebooks lean towards the richly coloured, shyrdak-lined partitions. A flat-bed all-in-one printer, harking back to HP circa 2010 — whirs. The same-vintage, thick-bezeled, matte-black laptop monitor and keyboard set-up peeks out from piles of print-outs, a glue stick, an outdated calculator.
At this new manufacturing facility, some 100 tons per yr in fact wool that will have been burned as waste is as an alternative being cleaned and processed. More USAID inexperienced enterprise help had been on the best way — and it might’ve helped Tumar double the output. Now, they could be on their solution to undertaking that on their very own, increasing their product line to incorporate, for instance, a wholly 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. Across a stretch of grass from the side-by-side yurts, the warehouse is abuzz with exercise.
“We need to open [up] prospects [for] artisans to get new direct on-line orders,” and to learn to preserve high quality and consistency as output will increase, Makashova stated. And the one means they will 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 stated. That means—apart from their very own manufacturing of felted items—they’re needing to develop 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 maintain accumulating—and constructing—machines. Esenbaeva laughed, quoting Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “We are chargeable for these we tame.”
