Strong wool switches manufacturing offshore to compete with synthetics

Wools of New Zealand has taken manufacturing offshore to beat the price and scale that synthetic carpet manufacturers can offer consumers.

Wools of New Zealand chair James Parsons said the company had carpets manufactured in Turkey.

The cooperative also launched a woollen tile for the flooring industry, which was manufactured by an American company at a plant based in Thailand, he said.

The woollen tiles were the only competition for synthetic tile carpets on the market, he said.

Products made overseas at scale and for cheaper could be brought back to New Zealand and sold to New Zealanders at a better price.

Chief executive of Wools of New Zealand John McWhirter said synthetic fibres took over the market in the last 20 years.

Largely wool has been “asleep” during that time, McWhirter said.

Over those 20 years man-made fibre manufacturers had time to sell the aspects that made their products viable, he said.

Parsons said another major hurdle in the manufacturing process was that it was easier to work with synthetic materials than with strong wool.

“A nice uniform length of nylon is a less complex fibre to work with than many strong wool fibres spun into a yarn, so simpler manufacturing further reinforced this manufacturing swing to synthetic,” he said.

Efficient manufacturing was integral, and it was hard to find competitively priced products in a landscape where there was a lack of manufacturing capability, he said.

Over the last three decades, many strong wool global manufacturers, including spinners, responded to falling consumer demand and switched their factories to synthetic fibres or closed, Parsons said.

Manufacturers would not suddenly switch to wool manufacturing on a whim, but needed confidence that a switch would pay off, he said.

It was not cheap to “re-gear” for wool manufacturing, he said.

“I’m hugely confident that the cycle will turn. There’s a move back to natural and woollen products, but the question is if farmers would be able to hold on until that happened,” he said.

In December Southland Sheep farmer Ben Dooley said he was losing $5 per sheep after shearing, with increased shearing costs and the low wool price to blame.

Parsons said the industry assumed everyone knew the environmental credentials of wool, but claims had to be backed up.

“Whilst it is common sense, a natural renewable woollen product is better for the environment than a plastic alternative. Increasingly, procurement tenders ask for an environmental product declaration (EPD). This provides information about a product’s life cycle assessment, including its impact upon the environment, global warming potential, smog creation, ozone depletion and water pollution, Parsons said.

In March, chief executive of T&R Interiors, a company that makes wool acoustic panels for commercial buildings, Natasha Thwaite said the rise of environmentally conscious consumers was the biggest opportunity to regain market share for wool, but the need to certify the impact of materials used during building was a new hurdle for the wool market.

Thwaite said EPDs showed wool had larger carbon footprints than synthetics materials, despite synthetic being a co-products of the fuel making industry.

But wool manufacturers said wool was part of a circular economy, trapped harmful chemicals, was biodegradable and locally sourced.

The lifecycle assessments did not take into account the carbon from burning the fuel after the synthetic material was taken from the fuel-making process, she said.

Parsons said lifecycle assessments for wool would hopefully be completed in the next year, but there was not a lot of money floating around to fund research.

Another challenge was that strong wool did not have a brand that championed it, like fine wool had.

For example, merino wool was closely associated with brands such as Smartwool, Allbirds and Icebreaker, all manufactured overseas, who built their business propositions on the characteristics of fine wool, Parsons said.

“It takes to time to build momentum in any supply chain, yet over the last 30 years the international supply chain for strong wool products has been losing momentum. In 1996, synthetic carpet made up less than 15% of New Zealand’s carpet market – with wool carpet the dominant product at 85%. In 2020, synthetic carpets were 85%. That tide is now just turning, but it is certainly well out,” he said.