Home the inspiration for a good night’s sleep
Nic Wylie is the fifth generation of her family to be growing wool at Southland’s Lora Valley, but the first to be creating an end product from “this super fibre”.
Wool products are worth a lot of money. But wool itself isn’t – as she, husband Tom and a legion of farmers frustrated by poor returns from their wool clips can attest.
“I decided that if we wanted to get a better price for this truly amazing resource, then we should probably have a go at creating an end product ourselves,” she said. “That’s where the true value seemed to be in wool.
“We knew we wanted to stay true to what our wool was. We didn’t want to compete with merino and we didn’t want to do something other farmers were already doing.”
She looked around her own home for inspiration. And found it.
Now, pillows and duvets, filled with the wool from their own sheep, are being sold online and shipped daily from their farm under the brand Lora & Flok.
The farm’s clip has high bulk characteristics which, enhanced by a process called knopping, creates a lightweight, resilient wool filling.
In early 2022, she began working with Christchurch factory Fibre Tech NZ and their wool was eventually engineered into what is being marketed as Flok Fill.
It’s tiny soft clusters of wool that stay “springy and cloud-like, night after night”.
The first product was an all-natural pillow, that comes with an extra bag of Flok Fill to let sleepers add or remove as much as they need to get the perfect fit.
They were set to launch this at the end of last year but then, Nic said, “I became hooked on the idea of adding a duvet to our initial range”.
She saw a key advantage in finding a “Goldilocks” just-right sweet spot between the advantages of wool duvets and the feather-and-down option.
Wool duvets were great to sleep under because they wicked moisture away from the body and stopped the buildup of humidity in bed, which was a leading cause of sleep disturbance.
Trouble was, many people didn’t like the heaviness.
Feather and down was pleasingly light, but trapped heat.
So for the couple’s line of duvets they took the Flok Fill used for pillows and blended it with other Lora Valley wool to crest Flok Web – a web of soft yet slightly more structured filling that was highly lightweight but still insulating and breathable.
It is being marketed as ideal for both cold and hot sleepers.
The couple struck more than a few challenges getting this far.
The initial clip they sent for processing in Christchurch was too long to undergo the second scour (clean) necessary for bedding products – so they needed to wait for their sheep to grow more.
Problems also arose sourcing sufficiently high-quality cotton for the duvet, with a weave tight enough to prevent fibre migrations, until a supplier was eventually found.
Last month brought profound satisfaction as their products were at last launched.
“My family has been here for 150 years and put a lot of work and love into this property,’’ Nic said.
“Creating something with the beautiful wool grown here is my chance to put my stamp on things.”■