Paka:he met a Peruvianweaver, andflew back to build it
In 2015 Kris Cody was backpacking through Peru when he met a grandmother in Cusco selling sweaters she had handwoven from alpaca. He could not stop thinking about the wool. He flew back, lived with her family, and built a collective of Quechua women weavers around her craft. Then a Kickstarter blew past its goal by 1700%.
Paka started with a sweater Kris Cody did not expect to care about. In 2015 he was a young guy backpacking through South America when, in Cusco, Peru, he met a grandmother named Gregoria selling sweaters she had handwoven from alpaca. He bought one, put it on, and could not get over how light and warm it was at the same time.
Alpaca fiber is not an accident. It is the product of thousands of years of animals evolving to survive the high, cold, punishing Andes, and thousands of years of Quechua people learning to weave it. Gregoria taught Cody the ancient Inca practice of turning that fiber into clothing. He went home with the sweater and a quiet obsession.
Then everyone who saw the sweater asked the same question: where do I get one. He realized the answer was nowhere.
Most people would have let it go. Cody flew back to Peru, found the same grandmother, and stayed, living with her family, the Mamani weavers, and learning the craft from the inside instead of importing it. The first Paka hoodie was made by their hands, not by a factory he found online. He put his college studies on hold to do it.
What he built was not a supplier relationship, it was a collective. Paka grew into a team of Quechua women weavers in Peru, people for whom weaving is not a job description invented for an industry but something woven into the culture itself. The brand was designed from the start to keep the value, and the craft, in the place it came from.
What Paka's 2017 Kickstarter did against its own goal.
The whole point was that the people who made the thing should be the people who benefit from it.
That Kickstarter, which hit its $20,000 goal in under a day and finished above $350,000, proved the demand Cody had felt back home was real and large. Paka used it to grow the weaving team in Peru rather than offshore the work somewhere cheaper. In 2021 the legendary Quechua master weaver Nilda Callanaupa joined to help oversee the women weavers and protect the Inca techniques, and in 2024 Paka opened a flagship store in Cusco, where the whole thing started.
Today Paka is a certified B Corp making natural, traceable alpaca clothing for people who love the outdoors, sold direct and built on materials it argues are healthier for both people and the planet. The grandmother's sweater turned into an entire supply chain that runs back to her village.
The hoodie that started in Cusco
The alpaca hoodie, the grown-up version of the first piece the Mamani family wove for Cody by hand: spun from the same Andean alpaca fiber he found on a grandmother's table, light and warm at once, made to be worn outdoors and to keep its value in the village it comes from. It is the sweater that would not leave him alone, turned into a brand.
The romance of the story hides how hard the model is to run. Cody dropped out of his neuroscience degree at the University of Virginia and moved to Peru to do it, and the choice he made then is the one that keeps costing him: a brand whose value lives in handweaving cannot simply press a button to make more. Demand scales in a week, a weaver's skill does not, and every order pulls against the promise to keep the craft and the wages where they came from instead of offshoring to a faster, cheaper line.
That tension shows up in the numbers Paka publishes. The collective grew from 200 to more than 300 women artisans in 2024 alone, supporting some 7,450 alpaca-farming families in the rural Andes, which is the kind of growth most apparel founders would have solved with a contract factory. Doing it the patient way means the company's ceiling is partly set by how fast a real craft can be taught, not by how fast a machine can run. Cody has chosen to treat that as the point rather than the problem, but it is a genuine limit, and a competitor with no such promise can always move faster.
Paka, in five moments
The arc
- 2015Backpacking through Peru, Kris Cody meets a grandmother, Gregoria, selling alpaca sweaters she handwove in Cusco.
- The questionBack home, everyone who sees the sweater asks where to buy one, and Cody realizes there is nowhere to send them.
- He returnsHe flies back, lives with the Mamani weavers, learns the craft, puts college on hold, and they make the first Paka hoodie by hand.
- 2017A Kickstarter hits its $20,000 goal in under a day and finishes past $350,000 in 30 days with no paid ads.
- TodayPaka is a certified B Corp with a Quechua weaving collective, a flagship store in Cusco, and traceable alpaca clothing sold worldwide.
Most apparel founders find a cheap factory first and a story to sell over it second. Cody did it backwards on purpose: he found a real craft, moved onto a weaver's rooftop, learned it from the family who held it, and only then built a company around what they already knew how to make. The cost of that order of operations is a brand that can only grow as fast as it can teach. The reward is that nothing about it is reverse-engineered marketing, the supply chain is the story, which is exactly why it is so hard to copy.
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