Creating a new spinning mill from scratch is difficult, expensive and slow. In this series of blog posts, we’re taking you behind the scenes to show you exactly what goes into the journey to spinning our very own yarn in our very own mill. In this first instalment, we’ll try and answer the biggest question of all: why on earth are we doing it?!

This has been by far the hardest start to writing that I’ve faced. I’ve already written parts two and three to this series, in comparison they’re simple; they’re about the what, but this one, well, it’s all about the why. Because there isn’t a simple answer. It’s ingrained in everything we’ve always done and been, the way I’ve been brought up. Having said that, there are a whole host of practical reasons we made the big decision, so I’ll try and illuminate that process slightly.

Back in 2020, in the height of a Covid lockdown, we were sitting in the sun and like most businesses, wondering where on earth we go, and what we do. The entire world had stopped, and that had completely changed the way we made and sold yarn. No yarn shows, most mills closing their doors indefinitely, and absolutely no clue what we’d be able to do over the coming weeks and months.

A couple of big things happened within a few of days of each other. Firstly, one of the mills with whom we’ve worked for years disappeared from the public database of the Global Organic Textile Standards, meaning they were no longer certified to spin organic yarn. Later that week I had a phone call from a mill in Central Europe that they were closing their doors as the owner was retiring, and he wished for all the machinery for spinning yarn to be packed up and go to a new mill as one lot.

As it turned out, neither of these directly impacted what we were doing. The database issue was a simple admin error, the member of staff who needed to sign a piece of paper was off work due to Covid, and the European Mill wasn’t suitable for spinning our kind of yarn. But together, they’d sparked something: maybe we should build our own mill. Whilst this ignited the spark, it wasn’t anywhere near enough to make the final decision!

How do you actually make yarn?

Next came the really big questions. We’d had the idea, but was it actually possible? How much would it cost? How much space would we need? What machines are needed to spin yarn? Is it feasible, long term? Where could we even do it?

The enormity of this project started to dawn on us when it came to working out some of these answers. Stay tuned for part two, where we’ll go way back 25 years to how we started, and how in hindsight, opening a mill was inevitable since day one.