Peri Drysdale

Peri Drysdale is a New Zealand fashion entrepreneur and the founder of Untouched World, the Christchurch-based sustainable fashion brand and its predecessor Snowy Peak.

Drysdale grew up on a sheep station near the Rakaia Gorge in Canterbury’s high country, a background that gave her an instinctive understanding of natural fibres. In 1981, with in capital, she began selling handcrafted knitwear from a stall in Christchurch’s Cathedral Square, building the business that became Snowy Peak. In 1996 she devised an innovation that would define the brand: blending possum fur with merino wool to create a yarn she called “merinomink”, the world’s first commercial blend of the two fibres.

Untouched World grew from that foundation into a fashion brand built around sustainability, natural materials and a commitment to releasing only two collections a year, quality over quantity, in deliberate contrast to fast fashion. The brand became the first fashion company in the world to be recognised by the United Nations for sustainability and holds B Corp certification.

Drysdale was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1993 for services to manufacturing and exporting, won the South Island Businesswoman of the Year award in 2002 and received an honorary doctorate from Lincoln University in 2007. She also founded the Untouched World Foundation, which runs programmes in sustainable leadership.

Drysdale’s profile is noteworthy because she built a globally recognised fashion brand from a Cathedral Square market stall, proved that sustainability could sit Central to a commercial fashion business decades before it became fashionable to say so and turned New Zealand’s natural fibres into a genuine point of international difference.

Sources: Wikipedia · NZ Herald · RNZ