Our Story
What We Are Building
Nogoon Nutag & Wollken Studio — an introduction. Nogoon Nutag is the mission. Wollken Studio is the business that funds it. They only make sense together.
Nandin & Zuko
We are Nandin and Zuko. I grew up with herder families in Uyanga, Övörkhangai, in the Khangai mountains of Mongolia; today we build from Berlin. We saw that global demand for ethical, sustainable products was rising — and that this demand applies directly to Mongolia's traditional pasture-land herding practices and its natural raw materials. Born and raised in Mongolia, we are proud of what this land and its people produce, and we believe that rising demand is not a threat to the rangeland but an opportunity for it: protected well, the rangeland can still be home to the traditions and culture of Mongolia's nomadic herders. That vision is what we built from — first as a project, then as an NGO, and now as the business that makes it more than a project.
Nogoon Nutag — the foundation
Nogoon Nutag ("Green Homeland") is our NGO, and it is the reason for everything else. It exists to bring sustainable, ethical products from the Mongolian pasture lands to the global market with their real added value kept in Mongolian hands — so that the culture on the land, and the land itself, can be sustained for the long term.
In practice that means working at policy level, with the Mongolian government and international bodies, toward a verified eco-standard for Mongolian natural-fibre products, and toward pasture regeneration on the steppe. We carried this argument into a COP17 side event, building it as a chain from the herder up through manufacturers, certifiers and export — showing where the value leaks out and where a standard could hold it in.
Wollken Studio — the engine
We hold one belief firmly: a project cannot succeed if it is not self-sustaining and self-funded. Grants end; missions that depend on them end with them. So Nogoon Nutag needed a business capable of funding it into existence. Wollken Studio is that business — the brand we developed to pay for the initiative and to prove the whole idea in the real market.
Why this is different
Almost every green project around Mongolian fibre works on the supply side — produce more, train the people on the land, improve the pasture. The demand side has been handed, quietly, to foreign brands. They buy the raw fibre cheap and sell the finished luxury for many multiples of it, keeping the added value abroad.
The consequence runs all the way back down to the steppe. A herder earns so little per animal that the only way to lift income is to keep more livestock, which overgrazes the very pasture the fibre depends on. The raw material moves to the middlemen — the "changers" — at a low price, and any reason to chase quality over quantity disappears with it.
Once we hold the demand, we hold the price of the raw material. From there we can contract directly with herders, pay properly for quality, and make fewer, better animals on healthy land the rational choice.
That is the loop Nogoon Nutag is built to close, and Wollken Studio is how we fund the closing of it.
Since 2023
We started in 2023 as a factory agency: opening European export routes for Mongolian SME factories making leather, cashmere and wool products, and learning the entire production network from the inside, alongside the people who run it. Three years of that taught us the hard limit — production inside Mongolia, on its own, cannot compete with the production-led countries. The cost base is simply too high to win as a supplier of raw or semi-finished goods.
So in 2026 we changed the model. The end product should reach the market as a finished, full-value piece, sold under its own Mongolian brand. Our first collection is The Wollken Studio Project, built around our hero yak (khöövör) pieces with sheep-wool socks as the complementary entry product. Yak is the right hero fibre: scarcer than cashmere, as soft, stronger, biodegradable, and it yields around five times more per animal. We launched the brand at TrendSet München, the winter ordering fair, and came back with genuine, positive feedback.
What it cost to get here
None of this has been light. For long stretches I have carried the Berlin side and the Mongolia side at the same time, held a separate job, and raised a young child through all of it — often with no space left over to rest, and with the work that once restored me turning heavy too. Three years of building the thing relationship by relationship, family by family, fibre by fibre, invoice by invoice: pasture visits and factory floors, customs and loans, late drafts and early flights. I share this so you understand the ground this stands on. Every part of it was earned by hand.
Where we're headed
Nogoon Nutag exists to make sure the value in Mongolia's fibre stays where the work happens. COP17 was one step in that; the Responsible Production Standard is the next.