Wool body is firing shots at synthetics
One of Europe’s leading carpet makers is preparing to launch a campaign promoting the virtues of New Zealand wool.
Dutch company Best Wool Carpets wants to fight back against synthetic products, which dominate the global carpet market with a whopping 96 per cent share.
It aims to counter some of what it says are falsehoods propagated by the synthetic industry, such as that wool carpet fades in UV light.
In New Zealand for talks with companies such as NZ Merino (NZM), Best Wool Carpets chief executive Yvar Monasch said the industry needed to sell the natural story of wool better.
Wool was more expensive than synthetics but people were prepared to pay.
‘‘If you want to have a beautiful product you have to pay for it but we don’t cater for the low end of the market. Wool lasts longer, carpets stay good looking for a long time, maybe 10 years, but a synthetic one loses its beauty after two or three years,’’ Monasch said.
Best Wool Carpets has a 25 per cent market share of the fine wool carpet business in Europe, making what he describes as fashionable, textured-style products.
Most of the strong, crossbred wool it uses comes from New Zealand, and the largest percentage from farmers contracted with NZM.
Best Wool has just offered growers a two-year forward contract. At present there are 260 tonnes of New Zealand crossbred wool in the company’s forward contracts – about 2000 bales.
NZ Merino marketing development manager Hadleigh Smith said his company was partnering with companies in Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States.
‘‘What we are developing with Yvar is a campaign to create wool as a hero, to differentiate it from the synthetics, we’re also able to leverage that story across all the range of products made from wool, including clothing.’’
Smith hailed the deal with Best Wool Carpets as an early success story of the W3: Wool Unleashed, a private growth partnership between NZM and the Ministry for Primary Industries. It was started last year and has a projected budget of $23 million.