Two wool jackets, stitched from the same animal fiber, can end up in distant price galaxies once invisible inputs are counted. The cheaper one absorbs minutes of labor, standardized patterns and anonymous factories. The other is saturated with human hours, slow handwork and a supply chain tuned to minimize variance and maximize narrative control.
At the top end, each stitch encodes labor economics. Pattern making, hand padding and finishing compound into a high opportunity cost per hour. Instead of scale, these brands pursue deliberate diseconomies of scale, trading unit efficiency for signaling power. Here, marginal utility overlaps with marginal cost: buyers pay not for incremental warmth, but for incremental status and precision. The jacket becomes a vehicle for price discrimination as much as insulation.
Ultra‑controlled sourcing tightens this equation. Herd selection, fiber grading and traceable milling compress informational entropy and reduce variance in texture and drape, while marketing converts that lower uncertainty into perceived rarity. Scarcity is manufactured not only through limited runs but through narrative curation, turning inventory into a managed asset. In this world, wool is constant; what compounds is brand equity, until the price tag reflects a market in desire rather than a market in cloth.
