Evidence that Basalt residents Bill Infante and Betina Moreira Infante are growing their business can be found on Widget Street off Willits Lane. The street, the location of unmistakable blue and yellow warehouse-type buildings, is where the Infantes have chosen to open a showroom for Hangai Mountain Textiles, a wholesale company supplying luxury blankets and throws made in Mongolia.

Betina got the idea for the business shortly after the couple’s move to the Roaring Fork Valley in the summer of 2015. While entertaining guests outside, some became chilly and were thinking of going back inside the house.

Instead of allowing that, Betina went inside to find throws and blankets that she purchased in Mongolia during the time she and Bill lived there.

“We had been setting up our house, hanging up art,” Betina said. It was a cool, late summer evening. Everybody was outside on the deck — nobody wanted to go inside — but it started to get really chilly. I said, ‘No, no. In Mongolia, you don’t go inside for the summer. The blankets come to you.’

“So I pulled out the Mongolian blankets we had at that time, the camel, the cashmere, and gave them to everyone. And the next day, everybody’s talking about the blankets.”

And that, as Betina tells it, was when she had a “Eureka!” moment.

“I thought, ‘I bet people around here would like to have these blankets.’ So we started to look into why Mongolian fibers aren’t in the United States,” she said.

Bill, who recently was elected to the Basalt town council, is a former U.S. diplomat and was once stationed in Mongolia. Betina is a marketing and PR specialist who also has worked in the public and private sector in other countries. After getting the house set up in the midvalley three years ago — and following Betina’s “Eureka!” moment — they returned to Mongolia part-time, for work-related reasons.

At the same time, they began conducting side research into the Mongolian textile supply chain with an eye toward starting a new venture that would market and distribute textile products made from the hand-combed hairs of yak, camels and cashmere goats.

“And so we started to build the brand,” she said. “Hangai is the area of Mongolia where the yak roam free. It’s where we get the bulk of our yak fiber.”

The blankets and throws are knitted in Mongolia to specifications outlined by the Infantes. Their primary focus is yak, which supplies all-natural fibers — undyed, unbleached — that come in three colors: platinum, medium brown and chocolate. Yak rivals cashmere in terms of softness, Betina said, and it’s not as hard on the customers’ pocketbook as cashmere.

Bill said that while they were working full-time in Mongolia and elsewhere, starting a wholesale business was not in their future plans.

“Frankly, we knew nothing of textiles, we worked in the foreign service for 20 years, more or less. [Starting a business] was a product of seeing an opportunity and then learning a lot real fast,” he said.

“When we started working with [the Mongolian suppliers], they weren’t even knitting yet,” Betina said. “We decided to produce in Mongolia, despite the management headache. We’re the only internationals producing in Mongolia, everyone else gets the raw fiber shipped to them. We figured, we know them well enough, and if we are able to do this and grow, then they are going to grow with us. They’ll benefit from partnering with us.”

“All of the ‘value-added’ remains in Mongolia,” Bill said. “None of it is being exported to China or Italy or Scotland or anywhere. That is important to us.”

Betina returned to Colorado in the fall of 2015 to do more research and to test local markets, to see if anyone was interested in the Mongolian-produced blankets and throws. They found a client quickly and then plunged into the business.

“We spent two years getting insight into the national market,” Bill said. “We began in Aspen, then covered the Roaring Fork Valley, then we expanded to the Rockies, places in our eco-region. And then we traveled out East, the West Coast. To make a long story short, we’re now selling from South Hampton to Santa Barbara.”

Customers include high-end interior design firms and boutique hotels. Locally, the Hotel Jerome and The Timbers Club are clients, he said.

The Infantes say they are committed to environmental and social sustainability. They are working with companies to provide support to the herders and setting up systems to ensure “traceability” of their products.

“We want to know where the fiber is coming from. Is it coming from younger or older animals? We want to make sure that we can represent fairly and accurately to our customers what they’re buying, and what region it comes from. We want them to know that the animals are being combed, not sheared,” he said.

“We want to make sure that the process doesn’t place undue pressure on the ecosystem,” Bill continued, “and we are working with cooperatives to make sure that the herders are getting a fair price for a commodity that is driven by world market prices.”

The showroom, which encompasses 1,000 square feet, was purchased by the Infantes, not leased. The couple also recently launched a website to promote their business, hangaimountaintextiles.com.

andre@aspendailynews.com

Andre is a reporter for Aspen Daily News. He can be reached at andre@aspendailynews.com.