Fix­ing Wool

New Zea­l­and wool is in lux­ury yachts, private planes, the White House, Air Force One and, para­dox­ic­ally, the doldrums. Brian R Richards is work­ing to reverse farm­ing fortunes.

Brian Richards may have a long ped­i­gree in the brand­ing busi­ness but his New­mar­ket offices exude a clean, white, con­tem­por­ary feel. Here, the hos­pit­al­ity is gen­er­ous, green tea flows like water and crisp fruit fea­tures on the menu (the recently released ‘Jazz’ apple — a new cross between Royal Gala and Brae­burn that Richards and his team at BRR have had a hand in branding).

We’re not talk­ing fruit today, though. We’re on to the more mam­malian sub­ject of sheep and, more pre­cisely, wool, and, even more pre­cisely, Laneve — a brand­ing strategy devised by BRR for Wool Part­ners Inter­na­tional (which owns the Wools of New Zea­l­and brand), with the goal of elev­at­ing wool from a gen­eric, auction-reliant com­mod­ity to a niche, lux­ury ingredi­ent brand.

Laneve began for BRR two years ago, when Richards was asked the ques­tion “can we repos­i­tion wool?” The answer, he says, “cer­tainly wasn’t about a logo or an ad cam­paign”. And the answer cer­tainly wasn’t about the “gen­eric and almost overly romantic” brand­ing that was con­spicu­ous in the past.

“When we observed what went on in the mar­ket­place we found a his­tory of magazine ads and tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials but little activ­ity where it really coun­ted, at retail. When buy­ers actu­ally get into a car­pet show­room and are con­fron­ted by many dif­fer­ent car­pet swatches, most of which are syn­thetic, they’ve got to decide why they would pay more for wool. The fact is that if the pro­mo­tional mater­ial at the point of sale isn’t com­pel­ling enough, or doesn’t answer the ques­tion you want to ask, then it’s just too hard. The big com­pan­ies that are into syn­thetic fibres have been pro­mot­ing the mer­its of syn­thetic mater­ial since the 60s. They’ve almost dis­in­formed the world about the val­ues of wool.”

To put things in per­spect­ive, Meat & Wool New Zealand’s 2009 report, A Com­pen­dium of New Zea­l­and Farm Facts, puts sheep num­bers in New Zea­l­and (at 30 June 2009) at 32.4 mil­lion, down 27% on the fig­ure from 10 years ago, and down five per cent less on the num­ber in 2008. Farm­ing wool is clearly not as luc­rat­ive as it once was. A Feb­ru­ary 2010 report by the Wool Taskforce states “rais­ing demand for products made from strong wool requires a trans­form­a­tion in the way that the wool sec­tor inter­acts with man­u­fac­tur­ers and ulti­mately con­sumers. This trans­form­a­tion to a new mar­ket focus should be the long-term goal of the sector.”

Defin­ing that new mar­ket focus is some­thing BRR was already doing. Mark Bense­man, senior cre­at­ive at BRR, describes New Zea­l­and strong wool as a niche product being traded as a com­mod­ity (strong wool is wool that is primar­ily used in car­pet and rugs). Our wool, he says, should “sit in a lux­ury fibre space” and as such, it’s about clearly pos­i­tion­ing it there.

“We’re never going to be able to make this work by pro­du­cing more wool; the fun­da­mental driver is to get more for the wool that we do pro­duce. We are talk­ing about wool that’s quite spe­cial. We have dis­cussed the product with car­pet design­ers and tex­tile design­ers, and they all say that New Zea­l­and wool is the Rolls Royce of wools. It’s the whitest, bright­est, strongest wool in the world, yet we’re just trad­ing much of it through a price-driven auc­tion system.”

And the prob­lem with auc­tion sys­tems, says Richards, is that they tend to keep prices rel­at­ively low. The product itself is also too gen­eric, “you’re not buy­ing it from a spe­cific farm or a clip; there’s no oblig­a­tion to build a rela­tion­ship at all.”

Hence Laneve, which is designed to be dif­fer­ent: “If a car­pet mill in the States decides that it wants to buy a par­tic­u­lar class of wool, it then turns to export­ers in New Zea­l­and, such as Wool Part­ners, who then will source that wool. As we’ve dis­covered, these mills are pre­pared to pay slightly more for cer­tain things like trace­ab­il­ity, qual­ity con­trol, and whiteness.”

And this is the crux of the Laneve concept: branded car­pets and rugs that are 100 per cent wool and trace­able back to iden­ti­fi­able farm­ers who meet a com­pre­hens­ive range of envir­on­mental, social respons­ib­il­ity and animal wel­fare stand­ards. The integ­rity of this “value chain” is crit­ical, says Richards.

“When you talk about a value chain, as opposed to a sup­ply chain, you’re really talk­ing about a set of rela­tion­ships that take you through to the mar­ket­place, whereby the intel­lec­tual prop­erty is respec­ted and built upon. The IP of the farmer is how well he grows the wool and how care­fully he classes it and skirts it and pre­pares it for use. When you’re deal­ing with nature, you’re deal­ing with imper­fec­tion. That’s what nature does, so look­ing after nature all the way along the value chain is really very important.”

BRR did their home­work in the States, the first mar­ket where Laneve has been released. The research included a series of recor­ded inter­views at major car­pet mills.
“We asked, ‘how do you feel about New Zea­l­and wool?’ They said, ‘it’s bet­ter than Aus­tralian wool, and we like it for all these other reas­ons too.’ Inter­est­ingly, they all said that they would be pre­pared to pay more for it, so long as every­one rose on the same tide. So I said ‘good­ness me this is amaz­ing’. I came back home and said here’s the mar­ket say­ing that the per­cent­age of cost to increase the rev­enue to the farmer isn’t that great in rela­tion to the end-use of the car­pet. And if we work together with these people, and look after the clip for them, and take it through the gate and on the jour­ney with them, then they would sup­port an ingredi­ent brand, which is what Laneve is.”

The concept of the “ingredi­ent brand”, to which Laneve aspires, is not new. Julian Smith, BRR senior strategist, says that Dupont products such as Gore-Tex and Lycra, which are often ingredi­ents in other pro­pri­et­ary products, figured in the company’s research. In this instance, Wool Part­ners doesn’t make car­pets but they sup­ply the main ingredient.

“You’re try­ing to get the fibre iden­ti­fied right through to the end use. Our fibre name is Laneve, which is a registered name, and with it comes a series of pro­to­cols and link­ages. We can use
Gore-Tex as an example of a fibre brand that’s worked very well — you pay a lot more for a jacket that has Gore-Tex than one that doesn’t — and that’s kind of where we are sit­ting in terms of a
car­pet that has New Zea­l­and wool in it. It’s bet­ter, and there are many reas­ons why.”

Another out­come of Richard’s trip to North Amer­ica, was a dis­cov­ery that retail­ers were say­ing that they don’t know how to sell New Zea­l­and wool, “they don’t know the story, don’t know what’s spe­cial about it.”
Mark Bense­man led the BRR design team that developed the brand iden­tity for Wools of New Zea­l­and and Laneve. The key com­mu­nic­a­tion task was to clearly and eleg­antly com­mu­nic­ate the nat­ural attrib­utes of New Zea­l­and Wool. “The know­ledge and wis­dom regard­ing the attrib­utes of wool exis­ted, but not in one cohes­ive form. We cur­ated and col­lec­ted this inform­a­tion and wrapped it within a clear brand envelope”.

BRR developed this ‘wool wis­dom’ into an inter­act­ive present­a­tion to be used as a sales tool within car­pet show­rooms. The present­a­tion runs on a touch-screen com­puter through which poten­tial cus­tom­ers can eas­ily nav­ig­ate through four clearly defined areas: nat­ural health, nat­ural beauty, nat­ural integ­rity and nat­ural comfort.

“When you sit down and talk about why New Zea­l­and wool is bet­ter than a syn­thetic car­pet then there are plenty of nat­ural attrib­utes. A wool car­pet absorbs up to a third of its own weight in mois­ture, so it nat­ur­ally humid­i­fies your home; it doesn’t melt and burn like a syn­thetic fibre. Wool has all these nat­ural attrib­utes that are not well known and that, I sup­pose, is the first major step for­ward for New Zea­l­and wool, it’s remind­ing people that wool is nat­ur­ally clever, this is a nat­ural product, we haven’t enhanced it, we’ve just taken nature’s clev­erness and spun it into a car­pet. This is very dif­fer­ent from a syn­thetic product — wool grows nat­ur­ally on a sheep’s back.”

As Richards sees it, the brand­ing task requires ‘re-introducing a lux­ury fibre to a changed world’.

“There’s no short­age of people who are inter­ested in New Zea­l­and as a coun­try, but when you get into a car­pet show­room, you’re swamped with enorm­ous advert­ising cam­paigns by the cheaper syn­thetic guys. So we need to cut to the chase with very suc­cinct, com­pel­ling reas­ons why they should opt for car­pets made from our New Zea­l­and wool. We do, after all, have the right answers for people look­ing for a lux­ury nat­ural product.”

Using the skills of their newly acquired digital team, BRR and Wool Part­ners, in con­junc­tion with Hew­lett Pack­ard, are plan­ning to role out 400 pro­mo­tional touch screens to selec­ted car­pet retail­ers through­out the US. Richards is the first to recog­nise that turn­ing the industry’s for­tunes around wont hap­pen overnight. But he’s con­vinced that adopt­ing a mar­ket mind­set, cre­at­ing a well-positioned brand, explain­ing wool in clear, enga­ging ways at retail and build­ing integ­rity along the value chain are the right mech­an­isms to once again give New Zea­l­and wool the price points it deserves.

– Michael Bar­rett

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