Building consumer awareness

The UK is the largest user of British wool, taking approximately 50% of the British wool clip and therefore is a key market for British Wool. Graham Clark, Director of Marketing explains “With our licensee scheme now well established in the UK, with over 50 brands on board, we have been working on increasing consumer awareness about British wool. Our digital strategy has really evolved over the past 2 years and our total social media following now exceeds 100K and this continues to grow. This gives us an excellent platform to help push our licensee’s brands and sales of British wool rich products. It also allows us to educate consumers on farming matters in general in such areas as why sheep need to be shorn and how sheep support the UK countryside.”

Clark continued, “Our website also plays a crucial role in targeting end users of British wool products and our consumer traffic to the site over the past 12 months has increased significantly. We have a number of exciting plans for new developments to the consumer side of the site in the coming months.”

As part of their push to increase consumer awareness, British Wool have also started to increase their in-store collateral, Clark commented. “The residential carpet market in the UK is one of our most important and it was crucial that the brand had more of a presence in the showroom environment. Our British Wool Collection stands give us just this. Assuming the initial trial across 10 stores is a success we will launch this to a wider number of retailers over the next 12 months and hopefully make some real impact. Our digital channels are also helping to support this initiative and push footfall to retailers. ” As well as reaching out to the consumer, British Wool are also working on a number of new product development projects in the UK. Haldi Kranich-Wood, Product Manager at British Wool explains, “We are working with leading UK universities and also a number of private companies on a wide range of what we would describe as blue-sky new products. These initiatives are looking for brand new uses of British wool in a number of innovative areas. As well as this, we are also working on a number of new products in the carpet sector. We are very excited about the product development projects and, although it is very early days and they will take some time to evolve, we are confident that over the long term they will increase the demand for British wool.” Clark concluded, “Despite extremely difficult trading conditions we have managed to make some good progress with our marketing strategy in the UK and the product development projects give us real hope for the future.”