Dalle Piane Cashmere
Our story
We are a family, the Dondini family, and we have been in the same trade for three generations: taking a thread and making something you can wear out of it. It started with a spinning mill in Prato, in Tuscany, and over time it led us to cashmere.
Prato and its textile district
Dalle Piane Cashmere comes from Prato, a Tuscan city twenty minutes from Florence that has made cloth since the year 1200 and still does. Wool came in by mule, cloth went out across Europe, and eight hundred years later the looms and the knitting machines are still here. Wearing something made in Prato means wearing a piece of that.
Curzio Malaparte, who was born here, wrote a line everyone in this city knows: "if I were not from Prato, I would rather not have been born at all." It is an exaggeration, as he was. But it says well what it means, for someone born here, to work in textiles in this town.
Our pieces carry the 100% Made in Italy certification. It is worth more than a label, because it certifies the work: our knitwear is designed and made in our own factory, in Italy, from yarns we choose one at a time from mills that do nothing else.
The family
Our family's story is the story of a trade. It began with raw fiber and it goes on today with the finished piece.
It starts in the 1960s, with grandfather Valter's spinning mill, where wool became yarn and cones. His sons, Roberto and Massimo, went to work there as soon as they were old enough. It is also, and maybe above all, a love story: it was the two brothers' wives, Luana and Lorella, who had the idea of knitting. It began almost as a game, but the first sweaters sold well enough to turn it into a real business. In 1988 Maglificio Angorelle opened its doors.
The third generation
In 2001, after years of knitting for luxury labels that came back for more, the Dondini family started Dalle Piane Cashmere: the same knitwear that came out of Maglificio Angorelle, sold directly, at close to what it costs to make it.
In those same early 2000s, out of school, Leonardo joined the company — Roberto and Luana's son. As a boy he wanted to go to "wool school" and spent his afternoons playing in his grandfather's spinning mill. He runs the business today alongside his parents, his uncle and his aunt.
From the factory to the world
For years the factory knitted for luxury labels: pieces that left here carrying someone else's name. With Dalle Piane Cashmere we went the other way, and in 2015 we took the step that decided everything — selling straight to the people who wear the knitwear, with no middleman and no luxury markup on top.
Today our pieces go all over Europe, and to the United States, which is why this store exists: prices in dollars with duties and shipping included, and free returns with a prepaid UPS label.
The yarn starts on the high plateaus of Asia, the piece is made in Prato, and from Prato it goes anywhere: a very short supply chain and a very long reach.
100% Made in Italy
Yarn we select, knitted in our own factory in Prato. Our Factory