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Oct 7 - Kyrgies Profile

Oct 7 - Kyrgies Profile

David Shuck
October 07, 2024

Kyrgies – The Best Wool You’ve Ever Felt

Slippers from the high mountains of Central Asia

David Shuck

If there’s one thing you should take away from reading this, it’s that the Kyrgyz people make some of the most incredible slippers I’ve ever had on my feet. You don’t have to know where it is on a map to know quality, and the processes they’ve developed over centuries of raising sheep and felting wool are obvious the moment they hit your skin.

If you take away two things, it’s pronounced keer-ghees.

Central Asian Innovation

Some context before we get too deep here. Kyrgyzstan, the home of Kyrgies slippers and the Kyrgyz people after which they are named, is a small country of about 7 million people sandwiched between China and Kazakhstan in the east and Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in the west.

If that doesn’t give you a solid sense of it, if you were to draw a giant X across all of Eurasia, Kyrgyzstan would be right smack in the center.

It’s an extremely mountainous area, which made the upper highlands an ideal place to graze sheep with herding in the area dating back to at least the Bronze Age.

A bit more recently, and relevantly to slippers, Kyrgyzstan was annexed as a part of the Russian Empire in 1876 and continued on as a member state of the Soviet Union, who used the region primarily for agriculture.

Rosa and Chinara in 2022.

When the USSR dissolved in the early 1990s, the Kyrgyz people had a rough introduction to free trade capitalism as they no longer had central planning to provide for what they didn’t produce in country. This is where we find Chinara and Aunt Rosa,a PhD economist and an electrical engineer, who were burning coal to heat their freezing apartment in Bishkek.

Many Kyrgyz people lost their state-sponsored jobs and the country developed a cottage-industry economy of small makers creating their own wares in their homes. Chinara and Rosa had the idea to start making slippers for their (and their friends and neighbors) cold feet. The sheepherding business didn’t require much infrastructure to continue in the post-Soviet world, so Kyrgyz wool remained plentiful.

Their business started booming and they cobbled together a small factory full of wooden lasts and other equipment from flea markets. Soon, their slippers got picked up by a German distributor and in 2017, they began working with an American company who developed the Kyrgies line and brought Kyrgyz slippers in front of a much larger audience.

What’s in a Slipper?

The Kyrgies slipper you can buy today could’ve been made a hundred or a thousand years ago. The materials are almost completely natural: wool felt, veg-tanned leather or natural rubber soles, cotton thread, and a little bit of synthetic glue (which they’re working to replace with a natural one).

One of the local small farms Kyrgies uses to source their wool.

The production process is fairly straightforward as well. The materials are all Oeko-Tex certified and the sheep are non-mulesed (if you don’t know what that means, trust me, you’ll be glad the sheep don’t experience it).

Sheep grow the wool on local Kyrgyz farms.

The wool is felted by basically pressing and poking it together until it forms a dense, thick sheet.

The felt is then either sewn into a slipper for Kyrgies slides, or it’s wet and stretched over a last to make their molded slippers.

Then they stitch on a veg-tanned leather or natural rubber sole.

All of this is done in Bishkek, largely by hand, by their own workforce.

Then they’re matched up left and right and shipped in a recycled paper envelope to your door.

Kyrgies Models

Longtime readers will know I’ve been a booster of the L.L. Bean Wicked Mocassin for many years on this site. I must say that since my pair of Kyrgies slides arrived, my feet have yet to return to the Moc. The felted wool breathes better, is lighter on my feet, and is more comfortable to stand in.

They have a few models (in both men’s and women’s styles) to choose from.