Ten years ago, this business didn't exist yet. There was just a phone call from my dad, a folding table at a Christmas market, and a fibre so soft that people would touch it once and stop asking questions about the price.

That's still the whole story, really. It just has more chapters now.

Where It Began

My dad had been building an alpaca business with my brother and his wife, and it hadn't quite come together the way they'd hoped. So he came to me with an idea: what if I took it on?

At the time, I was deep in the early days of building The Art of Business, and taking on Meraki felt like a leap into the unknown. But it was a leap I wanted to make — for my dad, and because there was something about this fibre that felt worth building around.

He fronted the money for our first stock. I did the marketing and worked the Christmas markets myself, standing behind a folding table in a community hall, handing scarves to strangers and watching their faces change the moment they touched one.

That's still the best way to describe what we sell. You don't really sell this fibre. You put it in someone's hands and let it speak for itself.

The online store came in 2017. Wholesale followed soon after. Nine years later, we're in homes across Canada and the US, and on shelves in independent shops from British Columbia to the UK — and it still traces back to that one folding table.

How We've Grown

What started as me, a folding table, and my dad's first stock order has become something much bigger, and it's one of my favourite parts of this whole story.

My mom is now a core part of our team — a role I don't think either of us saw coming back at that very first Christmas market, but one that feels exactly right today. We've also built out a business development side of Meraki, and The Art of Business, the agency where this whole thing began for me, still helps drive our marketing to this day. In a lot of ways, this business has come full circle: the same skills that got Meraki off the ground are still powering it forward, just with a much bigger team behind them now.

And the Christmas markets never stopped being part of who we are. We now have a whole team of people who run our market booths each season, and it's genuinely become something they look forward to every single year — the regulars who come find us, the first-timers who touch a scarf and go quiet, the whole rhythm of it. It's the same magic from that very first folding table, just multiplied across a lot more tables now.

Why Alpaca Fibre Is So Rare

Here's something most people don't know until they own their first piece: an alpaca is shorn only once a year.

Not twice, not on demand. The animal needs its full coat to get through the cold, and shearing early produces shorter, weaker fibre. One animal, one harvest, once a year.

It narrows even further from there — the softest fibre comes from the back and sides, while the coarser fibre from the legs and belly is used elsewhere. So a finished blanket draws only from the best part of an already limited harvest.

And here's a nice bonus: alpaca fibre has no lanolin, the grease in sheep's wool behind most wool allergies. If wool has ever been off the table for you, alpaca is worth a second look.

The People Who Make Every Piece

We've worked with the same families for over ten years. Our socks come from artisans in Peru; everything else is handmade by families in Ecuador. These aren't suppliers we found in a catalogue — they're people we know, and people we've come to love.

We've been back to Ecuador more than once now, and every trip deepens the same feeling: this is a craft carried by generation after generation, each one learning at the loom from the one before, until the skill is less something they were taught and more something they simply are.

One of our longtime makers, a man whose family has poured generations of expertise into this work, welcomed us like family every time we visited — meeting us, inviting us in for a meal, making us feel like part of the family for the afternoon. He has since passed, and it means everything to us that the next generation of his family has picked the work back up exactly where he left it, carrying forward skill that's been handed down for as long as anyone can remember.

When you bring home a Meraki piece, you're holding a small part of that lineage — generations of hands, patience, and pride, still at work today.

What Fair Partnership Looks Like

Our makers are thriving in their own communities. They run their own businesses, they're skilled and in demand, and the relationship we have with them is built on mutual respect, not dependency.

What that partnership creates, at the community level, is opportunity — more work, more families supported, and a shared sense of craft and pride passed down together. It's a relationship we're proud of, and one we intend to keep for a long time.

Designed in Canada, Made With Care in Ecuador

Every design starts on my end, long before it ever reaches the loom. I'm usually sketching and thinking about a collection six months to a year before it exists — colours, patterns, the mood I want a piece to carry into someone's home.

From there, it goes to our makers as a full presentation, and that's where the real collaboration happens. They tell me what will and won't work on the loom, how a pattern will behave, what needs adjusting to do the fibre justice. Some of our favourite pieces — like Metro Plaid — exist because of that back-and-forth.

And once a design is settled, the making itself is remarkably fast. A large blanket comes together in less than a day, start to finish. Not rushed — just the kind of speed that only comes from a lifetime of skill.

We're also always looking ahead to what's next, and we genuinely love hearing from customers about it. If there's a colour, pattern, or piece you wish existed, tell us — some of our best ideas have started exactly that way.

The Thumbprint Collaboration

A few years ago, the promotional products company Thumbprint chose our handmade alpaca blankets as a meaningful gift for their top clients and suppliers — each one finished with a custom logoed leather patch, and paired with a short video sharing the story of the family behind it (Thumbprint).

That campaign went on to win a Gold Pyramid Award at the PPAI Awards in Las Vegas, one of the biggest recognitions in the promotional products industry — a genuinely proud moment for us, and proof that when you lead with a real story, people feel it.

Why We Choose Quality Over Shortcuts

We could make production faster and cheaper. We choose not to, because doing so would mean trading away the craftsmanship, the relationships, and the history that make these pieces what they are.

That doesn't mean we lack ambition — quite the opposite. We want Meraki to keep growing, but the same way it started: through relationships, with our family, our makers, the shops that carry us, and the people who bring these pieces home.

If you're curious about the full cost breakdown behind our pricing, we wrote about it in Yes, Our Products Cost More. Here's Exactly Why.

A Note for the Shops That Carry Us

If you stock Meraki in your store, your customers will sometimes ask why it costs what it does. That's not a hard question to answer — it's usually someone looking for a reason to say yes.

Three facts tend to do the heavy lifting:

• Shorn once a year — there's a hard limit on how much fibre exists.

• Generations at the loom — the person who made it learned the craft from the generation before them.

• Built for a decade, not a season — it won't pill, flatten, or fade after one winter.

After that, let them touch it. That's what worked at a folding table in 2017, and it still works on your floor today.

Oh — And Alonzo

If you've read our emails, you already know Alonzo, our Official Spokespaca — and if you haven't, it's about time you did.

Alonzo showed up early in our story and never really left. He's opinionated, a little dramatic, endlessly proud of his own fibre, and somehow always in the middle of some new adventure — sneaking into shipments, weighing in on new designs, causing just enough trouble to keep our inbox interesting. Customers write in asking about him the way you'd ask about a friend, and honestly, that's exactly what he's become to a lot of people: the familiar, funny voice that makes Meraki feel like more than just a brand.

You can follow his antics in Alonzo's Diary, and yes, he's since been immortalized in his own keychains — which has done absolutely nothing for his humility.

What We Hope You Feel

Whether Meraki reaches you in a box on your doorstep, a bag from a market table, or off a shelf in your favourite shop, we hope the feeling is the same: cosiness, a little bit of luxury, and something warmer underneath it — a kind of nostalgia for a way of making things that's slower, older, and more human than most of what we buy today.

We hope you feel the generations of hands behind it. The families in Ecuador we've come to know and love, trip after trip. The relationships that have quietly held this business together for ten years, long before there was ever a "brand" to speak of. The skill that's been passed down so many times it's stopped being taught and started being who these families are.

That's the whole story. A phone call from my dad. A folding table in a community hall. A family that's grown alongside the business — my mom now part of our core team, a whole crew who look forward to Christmas markets every year, and a marketing partner in The Art of Business that's been with us since day one. Years of returning to Ecuador and falling more in love with it every time. Generations of makers carrying a craft forward, one loom at a time. And a blanket that will still look perfect on your couch a decade from now.

Every piece we make carries a piece of somebody's family legacy out into the world, and we take that seriously.

Now you know the story. Come find your piece.

Every alpaca blanket, scarf, and beanie we make carries it all — the once-a-year harvest, the generations at the loom, and ten years of friendship.

Pick yours, and it becomes part of your story too. Shop the collection →

Run a shop? Wholesale with us — we'd love to get these onto your floor.