Our story
A softer way to wear real fiber
SooSoft started with a simple observation: North America loves the look and feel of fur, but not what it usually costs an animal. Faux fur solved the ethics and lost the feeling — petroleum-based fibers never quite behave like the real thing.
There is a third way, and it has quietly existed for generations at fiber farms in China: comb the down out during the natural spring molt, exactly the way cashmere is combed from goats. The animal sheds it anyway. Collected, sorted, spun and knitted, it becomes a fabric that is lighter than cashmere, warmer than alpaca, and entirely cruelty-free.
We partner with a single farm-to-garment workshop that controls every step — raising, combing, washing, spinning, knitting and finishing — so we can stand behind every claim with documentation, not adjectives.
From molt to knit
01 — Collect
Each spring the animals shed their winter down. Handlers comb it out gently — molted fiber is long and intact, which is also how you can verify no shortcut was taken: fiber from harmed animals is visibly short and broken.
02 — Sort
Only the top grade makes the cut. Of every 1,000 kg collected, roughly the finest 200 kg — the longest, finest staple — is reserved for SooSoft garments.
03 — Wash & spin
The fiber is washed (the natural lanolin-like oils are recovered for cosmetics — nothing wasted), then carded and spun into yarn at the same workshop.
04 — Knit & finish
Garments are knitted, then put through a proprietary wash-and-set process that blooms the halo and locks every fiber in place. The result: plush, shed-free, machine washable.
Verified, not just claimed
“Cruelty-free” is easy to say and hard to prove. Here is what stands behind ours: farm photos and video of the combing process, third-party fiber composition test reports, and a physical tell anyone can check — molted fiber is long; fiber taken from harmed animals is short and broken. Our garments wear the difference on their sleeve.
None of the species we work with — raccoon dog, Chinese raccoon, or squirrel — is listed under CITES. Every garment is labelled with its full fibre content in English and French, as required by the Canadian Textile Labelling Act.