Customers want to hear more - telling the full story of Pebble Island

Craft consumers are better educated and more interested in the provenance of the products they buy than ever before. They want to understand more about the process and journey that materials and goods take before they reach them.

It is about more than yarn. They want to buy into the brand and its values, a product and its back story. They are eager to hear about the producers and designers we work with and the care we take as we develop and manufacture a product. They want to be let in on the whole process from the inspiration for a product right through to how we photograph and promote it.

Across the whole of the DMC group, we have a rich heritage that has been largely untold for many years. The DMC Group is working on various projects to tell more of these stories and include our customers giving them greater visibility of the processes we follow at every stage of product development and manufacture as well as opening up our rich history.

Pebble Island, the story behind a remarkable new yarn

Last Autumn, Rowen launched a farm to store fully traceable pure wool that demonstrated how these stories resonate with our customers.

The wool is named after Pebble Island which is the third largest of the 750 offshore islands in the Falklands archipelago, to the east of the South American Continent. Characterized by three mountain peaks to the west which are home to colonies of 4 breeds of penguin including Southern rockhopper and macaroni, and to the East, low grasslands and lakes, which attract a wide range of wildfowl and wading birds making it an important bird conservation area.

Now run by Alex and Dot Gould, along with sheepdog Betty and her offspring, the island has been a sheep farm since 1846 and produces some of the finest wool in the world. It is an incredibly beautiful location that holds a fascinating story with rich details.

For example, the 6,000 sheep and other livestock have access to the beaches, including spectacular Elephant bay, the longest sand beach in the Falklands, where they can graze on kelp, which is proven to reduce methane emissions.

Even the harvesting process for the wool is interesting because all the sheep are all blade-shorn by hand – an artisanal process, requiring dedication, patience and precision. Slower and quieter than mechanical shearing, this highly skilled technique is kind to the sheep, and also produces better wool yields.

To make the story more visual and capture the beauty and atmosphere of Pebble Island we created a video that tells this story too:

Good storytelling includes the people behind the processes

When telling the story of the production of Pebble Beach wool Rowan wanted to make sure it talked about Alex and Dot who run the island as well as the well known knit-wear designer Erika Knight who designed the collection for the launch of this unique yarn.

Rowan has always been a design-led organisation and has a good legacy of celebrating the designers it works with. The launch for Pebble Island was no exception. Renowned designer Erika Knight designed a collection of textural garments and accessory designs using the wool.?

The Rowan website has a section where you can read about all the designers they work with and get an insight into their differing styles and inspiration. It’s called Meet the Designers. Increasingly we are including behind the scenes shots in our photography too, even allowing people to peek into the marketing process as well as the manufacture and design elements for the process. Such as this video we created before Rowan's spring-summer 2020 launch.

Telling these stories is part of our belief that what we do is more than yarn and it is more than craft. We want to invite our customers in to share these stories as through their projects they become part of the story too.