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F  Fashionable, Fun

R  Responsible, Renewable

E  Ethical, Essential

S  Sustainable, Soft

H  Holistic, Healthy

These are my first thoughts when trying to find words to fit FRESH. No doubt you can think of many more. This is not a competition or anything like it, just me playing with ideas.

For me the key word among all those above is ESSENTIAL. If we are to really bridge the gulf here in the UK between the high end, expensive market which already exists for wool and the ordinary, less affluent consumer, we have to make wool a “must have”, not just an optional extra. What’s the best way to do that? It’s a tough call to find something that is absolutely categorically only good if it’s made from wool. All things that used to made from wool have alternatives these days and those alternatives are often cheaper. How do we re-establish wool as the best/only choice? Waiting for the oil to run out is not an option. Despite the best efforts of the green lobby to persuade us that this is imminent, (I remember being told this 40 years ago!) those pesky oil companies just keep on going finding more of the stuff. So we need to outcompete synthetics and yet, (and this is crucial), be affordable.

It’s this affordability and ordinariness which has been missing so far I think in the renewed push for more wool use. I have no doubt that we can regain some of the middle and lower ground lost to synthetics and cheap wool imports but we need a strategy. What products do you all feel we could reasonably go into battle over? What fairly ordinary, everyday thing used to be available in wool and now is sold mainly as a synthetic?

Obviously our best bet is to make wool aspirational  which is largely what marketing has already been doing and very succesfully too. But perhaps it’s time to target popular culture and its icons more directly? Strictly Come Dancing wearing Merino perhaps?  Sounds daft but actually perfectly possible.  And what about Premiership football (soccer to my US readers!)? Ok maybe the team kit on the field might be best in synthetics but the track suits/jackets they wear onto the field could surely be made from wool fabric? I’m sure many players wear incredibly expensive wool suits but these are already covered in marketing – I’m talking about the things the things fans will want to buy. If their team’s “uniform” was made using wool then fans too would flock to buy it.

Football and Strictly Come Dancing – what a combination! But they could be the perfect vehicles for a new push on wool. Or I could of course be talking out of my (woolly) hat! What do you all think?