Wool, water, Wi-Fi: modernizing an ancient business at the final frontiers of e-commerce

One night in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, a felting artisan ended her day with a prayer. May our partners have good health. May they be ambitious, and successful, and may their businesses grow. The next morning, sisters-in-law Chinara Makashova and Nazgul Esenbaeva, along with the people they worked with, awoke to what seemed like a miracle: Shopify orders. So many Shopify orders.

They got to work. It felt like everything was falling into place: the company they had built from scratch was exporting felted slippers and artisan products to wholesale partners around the globe. And with help from USAID’s green business initiative in Central Asia, they were expanding their production abilities and finally building their own modern, direct-to-consumer web store — one with the payment processing and data security infrastructure to help them reach customers directly.

But just as their new e-commerce infrastructure was coming together, USAID funding vanished around the world — leaving them with a $35,000 funding gap. In so many places, the internet makes building a retail business easy. But in the world’s most landlocked country, with a banking system bogged down by sanctions against one neighbor and cybersecurity barriers against another, growth is a balancing act. Tumar’s path has been unconventional: bringing together nomadic tradition, Soviet legacy, and digital commerce to build a modern business, even when the infrastructure around it can’t keep up. Its first challenge: scaling a 5,000-year-old process that had never been automated before, with machines salvaged from the collapse of the USSR.

For centuries, Kyrgyz nomads on the Eurasian steppe drove their flocks from the low green valleys to the snowy slopes of the Tian Shan mountains, sheared their sheeps’ lush and thick wool, and used heat, water, and friction to felt it into the durable shyrdak blankets that lined their yurts. Felt may have been the world’s first textile. It was strong, dense, and durable. It could stand up to bitter cold or pouring rain. But between industrialization and the pressure under Soviet rule to abandon the past, wet felting by hand almost disappeared. In fact, this particular felting tradition was just a few far-flung elders and hidden artifacts from extinction in the 1990s when some women in Bishkek, graduating from university into a post-Soviet world, began to seek out, relearn, and revive the practice.

Makashova and Esenbaeva — with help from Makashova’s aunt Roza — learned how to use this millennia-old technique of wet felting with Kyrgyz wool to make things like shyrdaks and kalpak hats. In 1998, they started Tumar Art Group. Within a decade, Tumar had its first wholesale partner. And in recent years, USAID-funded programs helped them share their knowledge with women throughout Central Asia, reviving an ancient industry while spurring a new economy.

Today, Tumar’s Bishkek facility is a labyrinth of sunlit workspaces: some with pastel floor tiles, some with geraniums lining the windowsills, and one full of old jelly jars and coffee containers of pigments and dyes. Workers pull giant, fluffy sheets of “pre-felt” off the conveyor belt of a wool carding machine. On a switchboard that looks like a Cold War-era rocket launch interface, they toggle dials that are labeled in Chinese, with handwritten Cyrillic translations taped above.

These days, commercial felting operations use a water-free needle-felting process, Makashova explained. Some incorporate glue or synthetic fibers. But not here — Tumar’s engineering team hacked its way to avoiding all that, leveraging its custom manufacturing line to automate processes like carding (aligning the fibers) and kneading, done with a unique “beating machine.”

“We take care to keep our traditional technology of wet felting,” Makashova said. But “for the most complicated process of wet pressing, modern engineering does not offer machines, so we have to look for old Soviet schemes, adapt and make these machines ourselves — or restore old machines.”

To make one of Tumar’s most popular products — felted slippers — a heavy metal tub to hold water and heat, as well as flywheels that could apply consistent rhythmic pressure and agitation to the wool, are necessary. An old Soviet wool milling machine would have done the trick. “Unfortunately, they are almost impossible to find,” Makashova said.

With scant financial resources and an economy in upheaval, it was hard for this startup to find, acquire, and ship in the machines it needed — partly because some of those machines didn’t exist yet: Kyrgyz hand felting had never been automated before. Makashova’s brother, an automotive engineer, organized the group’s small “mechanization base,” first collecting Soviet tools and metalworking machines. Gradually, the company acquired textile processing equipment from Italy, China, Russia, and beyond, salvaging, renovating, retrofitting, and Frankensteining equipment to bring automation to an ancient craft.

Then, more good fortune arrived: A Tumar associate found a tub and flywheels in “a heap of scrap metal intended for recycling,” Makashova recalled. The company’s engineering group restored the find, “and now we can’t imagine our work without these machines.”

As of the 2010s, Tumar was working more with wholesale partners around the world while continuing to make goods for their brick-and-mortar shop of the same name, on a sunny corner in central Bishkek, popular with tourists and expats.

By the late 2010s, the global market for sustainable, natural materials was on an upswing, and travelers coming through their Bishkek shop took notice, including a guy in Richmond, Virginia named Barclay Saul. He loved that you could see Tumar’s entire supply chain, from field to factory, in a day, and in the exploding landscape of eco-conscious “Instagram brands,” he and a partner decided to launch Kyrgies out of a Richmond storage space, and sell the slippers online.

In spring of 2020, when tourism came to a halt, Tumar’s bustling retail business did too. Saul’s bet was a smart one: Kyrgies’ sales surged. People were staying home — and they wanted the right footwear for it. But they also wanted natural materials. “This business has taught me simply that [people want to] buy less stuff, quality stuff,” Kyrgies CEO Saul said. Kyrgies’ ecommerce business has continued to double year over year, enabling Tumar to double its staff and scale their output fourfold in the past five years.

This is the dream, Chinara said — but there’s one dream they still haven’t been able to manifest in the reality of today’s complicated internet: their own web store. The sale of artisan goods out of the Bishkek storefront is still, in some ways, the most important thing they do, said Makashova. It’s just a quarter of their revenue, but it’s a source for their product innovation. Thanks to platforms like Shopify, Kyrgies could launch their retail business in the US virtually overnight. But for a Kyrgyzstan-based business, online retail is no easy feat. The cost of shipping by air or land from the heart of Central Asia is the first hurdle. And another thing: There’s no PayPal here. Payment systems, Makashova said, are “a very, very big problem.”

Still today, Kyrgyzstan’s banking system is closely tied to Russia’s, and Western sanctions put in place after Putin’s invasion of Crimea have made cross-border transactions tricky. Some Kyrgyz banks, wary of being blacklisted, have cut off connections to Russian-linked payment systems, and that’s left companies like Tumar in a lurch. Another wrinkle: With growing concerns over China’s access to US consumer data, platforms handling payments in countries near China — neighboring Kyrgyzstan included — are subject to serious cybersecurity hurdles. And if a payment doesn’t go through on the first attempt, often, there won’t be a second attempt. “We’ve lost many customers for this reason,” Esenbaeva said.

All this to say, Tumar’s old-school web store quickly became obsolete. They figured out they needed to rebuild their site with ISO 27001-compliant back-end infrastructure: encryption protocols, secure socket layers, and a payments gateway capable of navigating cross-border compliance from Central Asia, all in hopes of keeping international customers (and the cybersecurity platforms that protect them) from getting scared out of the purchase flow.

As of January 2025, the entire plan was in place. A new website was launched. They had the money in hand to build out the direct-sale infrastructure. But there was just one catch: The project 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 modern, global payment processing out of a death spiral — but they still have about a $35,000 international funding gap to fill with USAID’s dissolution.

On the outskirts of Bishkek, at Tumar’s new wool processing facility, the “break yurt” feels like a step back in time. Workers drink black tea and snack on puffy little squares of fried dough with clotted cream and jam. Right next door, a more modern scene unfolds: sun pours through the oculus in the yurt’s tunduk dome roof onto architectural drawings unfurled on a conference table. Shelves of binders and spiral-bound notebooks lean against the richly colored, shyrdak-lined walls. A flat-bed all-in-one printer, reminiscent of HP circa 2010 — whirs. A similar-vintage, thick-bezeled, matte-black computer monitor and keyboard set-up peeks out from piles of print-outs, a glue stick, an old calculator.

At this new factory, some 100 tons per year of course wool that would have been burned as waste is instead being cleaned and processed. More USAID green business support had been on the way — and it would’ve helped Tumar double the output. Now, they may be on their way to accomplishing that on their own, expanding their product line to include, for example, an entirely biodegradable slipper, and soundproofing and insulation panels (both “no-waste” products made, in part, from slipper scraps). And, importantly to the founders, reliable stocks of high quality raw material that other businesses across the region haven’t previously had access to. Across a stretch of grass from the side-by-side yurts, the warehouse is abuzz with activity.

“We want to open [up] possibilities [for] artisans to get new direct online orders,” and to learn how to maintain quality and consistency as output increases, Makashova said. And the only way they can do it is to keep growing.

There are workshops and small businesses across Central Asia waiting for this raw material to come their way, Esenbaeva said. That means—aside from their own production of felted goods—they’re needing to expand their partnerships with small, family-owned Kyrgyz sheep farms, and increase their capacity for processing wholesale felt. To make it all happen, they’ll need to keep collecting—and building—machines. Esenbaeva laughed, quoting Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “We are responsible for those we tame.”