Why

Wool is a natural fiber that insulates, breathes and lasts for a long time. Producing wool, however, is a resource-intensive job. It requires vast amounts of land for grazing sheep, water to clean the fiber, chemicals to treat the wool and dyes to color the finished product. We use recycled wool to extend the life span of fiber that has already been produced. As a result, we can make clothing with the same great qualities as virgin wool at a fraction of the environmental cost.

Where We Are

Recycled wool has been used in European textiles for hundreds of years. We get our recycled wool from both pre-consumer sources, such as factory scraps, and postconsumer ones, such as returned garments. Once we collect the wool, we sort it by color and mechanically shred the fibers so they can be respun into new yarn. Most of our recycled wool is blended with recycled polyester to increase the length of the fibers we use to create the yarn. Over the years we’ve used more and more recycled wool, but we’re still limited in the diversity of products we offer due to the limited yarn size and blend.

For the Spring 2021 season, 12% of our wool materials are made with recycled wool. As a result, we reduced our CO₂e emissions from those fabrics by 83% compared to virgin wool; that amounts to more than 90,000 pounds of CO₂e.

What’s Next

Recycled wool is becoming a vital part of our fleece category, and we’re developing ways to use it in other products as well. Our goal is to expand the diversity of products using recycled wool.