The Wool Market

With the changes coming in 2025, and the No Buy 25 trend catching on let’s talk about wool in the US.

Many people are excited to jump onto the US Grown and produced textile market but the reality is much more nuanced.

We have our own sheep. And we do wool runs. A large wool run for us is 20-30 pounds. This is a drop in the bucket compared to what a business needs.

Lets say, we want to gross 1,000,000 in revenue at the shop. All from US grown wool. This would mean that the shop would be able to pay itself and us a living (but minimal wage). Each sheep we keep costs 500.00-700.00 a year.

To sell that amount we need to retail approximately 20,000 skeins a year. This means that we have to run 5,000 pounds through a mill, which doesn’t even account for loss at the mill.
Most sheep produce 5-10 pounds of prime fleece a year. So we need let’s say 750 sheep.

This is a huge amount of sheep, is simply unfeasible. (we have around 12). So why not buy it?

Sheep nutrition, pasture, and breed all play a part in producing correct fleece. So you’d have to locate likely 1000 fleece, or 1500 to sort the correct fleece for the fiber. Then we have to find a mill capable of running it, which means we need to find or start a mill with the top equipment.

There are answers to US Grown wool, but right now we are starting with very little infrastructure and a wool industry demoralized by tariffs in 2018. What is the answer? I don’t know, we will continue to struggle and make our small runs while I try to figure it out.