As a young man in New Zealand, Jeremy Moon became fond of sheep. Wait a minute, let’s start that again. As a newly minted cultural anthropologist making a living in market research, Jeremy Moon was given a T-shirt by a farmer in the Southern Alps of New Zealand and was asked what he thought of it. The T-shirt was not only remarkably soft, but it also refused to hold body odor. “It didn’t look too good, but it felt amazing. And I kind of fell in love with the feeling of it,” says Moon. The shirt was made of merino wool, and soon Moon was woolly-brained about merino.
New Zealand has 40 million sheep (“We ate the other 20 million,” he says), 2 million of which are merinos. The mountain-dwelling merinos provide the raw material for a surprisingly hot product in the world of sports apparel: woolen performance wear. At a time when highly technical synthetic fabrics rule the sports-gear business, the idea that wool can compete seems strange. Says Moon: “My purpose was to create a new category around natural-tech products. The tension has been creating something new from something very old.”
Read the full article in TIME Magazine feature article here
