Yes — and the answer goes further than a certification label. Our wool sourcing is built around a direct, operational partnership with the farming families who raise our sheep, the land they graze, and the traditional way of life that has sustained both for generations. Here is what that actually means.
Where Our Wool Comes From
Our wool is sourced through a partnership with Agrestal Organic Living, in which Avocado holds a minority ownership stake, across two states in the Indian Himalayas.
Himachal Pradesh is where our wool sourcing began. More than 520 farming families manage approximately 247,600 sheep across 29,000+ hectares of rotationally grazed Himalayan grassland. These flocks are not confined to commercial feedlots.
They graze as part of a traditional, generations-old way of life — seasonal migrations along routes their flocks have traveled for centuries, tended by families whose livelihoods are inseparable from the health of the land beneath them. This model is called transhumance: the seasonal movement of livestock between fixed summer and winter pastures, a tradition of Himalayan pastoralism still practiced today.
In Uttarakhand, a neighboring state, Agrestal expanded in 2025, taking over management of a new project covering approximately 77,900 sheep across 9,150 hectares of wild-harvest area.
Combined, our wool sourcing partnership now spans 325,500+ sheep across 38,000+ hectares of managed and wild harvest land in the Indian Himalayas.
How the Animals Are Treated
Our flocks are sheared twice annually, following the dual-season transhumance model — a practice aligned with the natural rhythm of the land and the traditional knowledge of the farming families who manage it. Each ICS (Internal Control System) unit in our partnership operates with its own dedicated office, veterinarians, and pharmacists — infrastructure managed and fully funded by Agrestal, even though the projects are technically farmer-owned. This ensures consistent animal welfare, health monitoring, and traceability across every flock.
Our wool sourcing is certified under the Responsible Wool Standard (RWS), which independently verifies progressive land management practices and the Five Freedoms of Animal Welfare across our sourcing operations:
Freedom from hunger and thirst
Freedom from discomfort
Freedom from pain, injury, and disease
Freedom to express normal behavior
Freedom from fear and distress
Mulesing — the practice of removing strips of skin from around sheep's buttocks — is prohibited. Tail docking shorter than the caudal fold is prohibited. Synthetic hormones, conventional pesticides, and organophosphate parasiticides are not permitted. Our sheep have year-round outdoor access. These are not aspirational policies — they are conditions of certification, independently audited.
Organic Certification
The majority of our Himachal Pradesh flock — approximately 224,800 sheep across three certified Internal Control System units — already holds full certified organic status under the Canada Organic Regime (COR), a standard recognized as equivalent to USDA organic requirements under the U.S.–Canada Organic Equivalency Arrangement. To our knowledge, we are the first wool operation in the livestock production category to receive a COR certificate for sheep fleece wool.
The remaining approximately 24,400 in-conversion animals in Himachal Pradesh are scheduled to achieve full organic certification in October 2026, per COR requirements. The Uttarakhand project is currently in in-conversion status.
Our wool is processed at our co-owned GOTS-certified facility in northern India, where the same GOTS organic standard that governs our finished mattresses governs the processing of every fiber.
The Land and the Climate
The grazing landscape itself is part of the story. Improved rotational grazing across our managed pastures in Himachal Pradesh is estimated to sequester approximately 32,000 tCO₂e annually — nearly twice Avocado's total verified annual emissions from a single sourcing region. This estimate is based on a conservative literature-based factor and is subject to future baseline soil carbon sampling; we will refine and report it as the methodology matures.
Our wool sourcing across 38,000+ hectares operates entirely on rain-fed pastoral agriculture — no irrigation infrastructure. The land is managed to support biodiversity alongside agriculture, not in opposition to it. As we expand our impact reporting, we are evaluating alignment with regenerative agriculture frameworks that go beyond input restrictions toward measurable outcomes for soil health and biodiversity.
Operational Accountability
In an industry where supply chain ethics are often described but rarely verified, we chose a different structure: direct operational partnership, minority ownership, and independent certification at every stage. We don't purchase wool on the open market. We don't outsource the accountability.
The farming families who tend these flocks are not anonymous suppliers. They are partners in a system designed to be traceable, verifiable, and better for the land and the people on it — from the Himalayan foothills where the sheep graze, to the certified facility where the wool is processed, to the mattress that arrives in your home.
Our finished mattresses are certified under GOTS at the finished-product level — which means the wool inside them, and every step it traveled to get there, has been independently audited against the same standard.