JOIN THE WOOL PACK

Our wool industry has been unravelling in past years – we speak to the entrepreneurs who are keen to make it cool again

When wool prices fell last year, Stuart Fletcher, a farmer in Sussex, threw 600 fleeces on the compost heap. In Wales, a farmer burnt his. Both calculated that it was cheaper to throw out the wool than sell it. The price of wool has been steadily unravelling since the 1950s, when synthetic fibres flooded the market. But the industry took a hefty hit during the pandemic, with prices plunging from 60p to 32p a kilo.

“Our wool is almost worthless,” says James Rebanks, the Lake District farmer and best-selling author of The Shepherd’s Life.

“I find that heartbreaking. Our dark slate-grey fleeces are worth about 40p – if I paid someone to clip them, it would cost me more than £1 per sheep.” Things may have bounced back slightly, but the future of British wool remains uncertain. As Prince Charles, the founder of The Campaign for Wool, has said: “We seem to have rather lost sight of the much bigger contribution that wool could, and should, be making in our lives.” Last year, the Prince even launched a clothing collection to promote the benefits of this “extraordinary and versatile” material.

We do, after all, have 30 million sheep in the UK. They’re an underused resource. “People may favour synthetic fabrics because they’re made more quickly and cheaply, but nothing beats wool,” James says. “We have a Herdwick carpet on our stairs and in the bedrooms. Someday I’m going to have a stylish grey overcoat made of tweed from our Herdwick wool, so I can look like a Cumbrian version of José Mourinho.”

Happily, there’s a growing bunch of talented craftspeople using wool for everything from high fashion to hardwearing furnishing. Here, we ask four frontrunners in the field why we should all consider buying more wool this winter.