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"  I&amp;#039;m standing at the border of Peru and Bolivia, midway through a South American itinerary so punishing that when a teenage German backpacker is informed of the many stops we&amp;#039;ll be making, she simply gasps in response. But my traveling companion, Kristy Caylor, cofounder of the clothing brand Maiyet, is not only unfazed, she&amp;#039;s trying to figure out if our schedule will accommodate a side trip to Ayllu, an electronic dance music festival in the Bolivian salt flats. One of the few airlines that flies there is Amaszonas, whose primitive website suggests that its fleet might be fictitious, or made from balsa wood. Caylor is undeterred, looking up flights on her iPhone whenever an iota of service penetrates our remote Andean route. After all, being the company&amp;#039;s president and creative director requires antipodean travel aplenty. (&amp;quot;Welcome to life on the road with Maiyet, where four days feels like 14,&amp;quot; Caylor tells me after we&amp;#039;ve covered approximately 1,500 miles.) The two-year-old luxury brand draws from the native crafts of artisans all over the world and shows the resulting designs during Paris Fashion Week. A garment might be the product of three or four continents: &amp;quot;It could be that a button comes from Mexico; the fabric came from Varanasi, India; and it was sewn in New York,&amp;quot; Caylor says. The resulting collections conjure a bohemian world traveler&amp;#039;s wardrobe, where vibrant Varanasi silks nestle next to Mongolian cashmere. The fall 2013 collection was heavy on knitwear, including a degrade sweater-and-skirt combo\u2014and somewhat counterintuitively, Peru and Bolivia are ground zero for such wintry knits. Caylor&amp;#039;s mission on this trip is twofold: checking in with the label&amp;#039;s artisans, while taking a detour to explore the techniques of local craftspeople (and to nab some souvenirs, which she stows in an oilcloth bag that becomes more engorged with each passing day). Our first stop is a sun-drenched courtyard outside Juliaca, Peru, where knitters chew coca leaves to alleviate the heat. Caylor and a member of her design team, Beth Anne Caples, immediately dive in, correcting the number of cables on a sample knit for fall. Caylor tells one knitter admiringly, &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re much faster than I am! Good thing, or we&amp;#039;d never have enough sweaters.&amp;quot; The following day, the team boards a small motorboat and heads to ultraremote Taquile Island, located on the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca. Even though it&amp;#039;s a tad out of the way, the stop is a must for learning about local crafts; the artisans there are UNESCO sponsored. As women in vividly patterned traditional skirts work at their looms, Caylor and her team pore over a few of the finished products, in particular some bright woven belts. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m minorly obsessed with them,&amp;quot; says Caples. Into her bag the belts go; later, they&amp;#039;ll find their way to Maiyet&amp;#039;s brand-new store in downtown New York City. Last stop: two workrooms in La Paz, Bolivia, where, apart from some confusion about the Spanish translation of warp and weft, Caylor makes plenty of headway on the meshlike sweaters the women are working on. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a lot of problem solving on the fly,&amp;quot; she reflects later. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s something that exchanges when you look someone in the eye and you see if they&amp;#039;re understanding or not. I get my hands dirty.&amp;quot; (Caylor is nothing if not process oriented, holding a bachelor&amp;#039;s degree in industrial engineering from Northwestern University; her fashion training came on the job at Gap and Banana Republic.) It doesn&amp;#039;t sound like Caylor&amp;#039;s frequent-flier lifestyle is going to decelerate anytime soon: &amp;quot;I wish we could be everywhere all the time! To sit there and solve a tension problem in the room\u2014meaning the tension in the fabric\u2014will change the way we work with [our suppliers] for the next two years. Had we done it over e-mail, we probably never would have gotten there.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/travel-food/a14380/kristy-caylor-from-maiyet-trip-to-peru-and-bolivia/>