Suit sales rush good news for wool industry

Fine wool prices have rebounded from a pandemic low of $8 a kilogram, but is the suit-buying rush enough to revive the industry? 

Alex Sinnott 
May 5, 2022 - 12:10PM 
The Weekly Times 

New wool innovation is ‘saving the... 

New ways of using wool offcuts might help reinvigorate the industry, with the previously unwanted parts of a sheep’s wool finding a new use. Traditionally, wool buyers have only taken the highest quality part of a sheep’s fleece to make yarn and the rest is thrown away. Planet Protector Packaging is changing this, using the fleece from a sheep’s belly as packaging material. Planet Protector Packaging’s CEO Joanne Howarth says the wool will replace polystyrene packaging. “We’re in a race to become the market leader in sustainable thermal packaging that doesn’t harm the planet,” she told Sky News Australia. “Not only are we saving the planet and the oceans, we’re supporting Australian sheep farmers, we’re strengthening rural communities, we’re creating jobs, we’re reducing wool from landfill.” 

Four rescheduled weddings and a downsized funeral.  The past two years have been a boon for medical mask makers and a bust for formal fashion. 

And it’s not just the lack of celebratory matching and sombre dispatching that has put a dampener on the suit trade with conferences, cocktail parties, fundraisers — all happy hunting grounds for the suit — cancelled due to coronavirus. When funerals were capped at 10 people, the future of the suit was equally funereal. 

For months, the only sightings of the endangered sartorial species were on political leaders and chief medical officers as they read grim coronavirus numbers.  And the numbers were hardly better for the wool sector. 

The price of fine Merino wool plummeted from pre-pandemic levels of about $20 a kilogram to an $8 nadir.  Australian Wool Innovation chief executive John Roberts says it was a tough time for the sector. 

 Demand for super fine Merino wool fluctuates with global suit consumer trends. Picture: Nicole Cleary 

Today’s tailors are fighting to win back consumers with more casual styles after sales plummeted during the work-from-home period of Covid lockdowns.  “The global suiting market dropped by half in 2020 because of extensive lockdowns brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic,” he says. 

The coronavirus-induced casualisation of clothes wasn’t contained to Australia. Some of the biggest names in international menswear went bust. 

TM Lewin — a UK high street by-word for office wear — went into receivership within weeks. Across the Atlantic, Brooks Brothers — the outfitter of US presidents and creator of the “sack suit” style — filed for bankruptcy protection.  Long-term market watchers couldn’t believe their eyes. 

Worsted woven apparel sales fell 45-50 per cent by the end of 2020 while knitwear sales were down 25-30 per cent.  The woeful retail figures were reflected in the commodity market, Elders national wool selling centre manager Simon Hogan said at the time. “Buyers were bearish and thought the market might be a bit cheaper … but the size of the fall surprised some,” Hogan told The Weekly Times.  The start of the 2020s have been dark days for Australia’s wool growers. But they’ve seen challenging times before. 

Suit trends by decade

Pictured: Robert Menzies

1950 

Australian wool’s golden decade. The Korean War demand for overcoats drives the “pound for pound” boom. At home, boxy double-breasted suits are de rigueur in the boardroom and halls of power. At leisure, Australian men snap up Fletcher Jones flannel trousers.   In the 1950s and ’60s, Victoria’s Western District clothed the nation. 

The region’s two largest centres — Warrnambool and Hamilton — were the manufacturing and commercial hubs during the wool boom. 

Prices famously reached a “pound for a pound,” (that is to say, pound sterling for a pound of fleece) and the district’s graziers became fabulously wealthy. 

Fleece didn’t travel far to be processed and manufactured. 

Fletcher Jones and Staff pumped out thousands of Plus 8 trousers from its Pleasant Hill factory. Warrnambool Woollen Mills produced miles of colourful tartan cloth, much of which was made into blankets that featured in bedrooms nationwide. 

Hamilton proudly declared itself “The Wool Capital of the World” and even erected some novelty wool bales on the edge of town as a tourist attraction.  But the golden fleece no longer rules the once wool-dominant region. 

Equidistant between Warrnambool and Hamilton, sheep still graze in the sparsely populated district of St Helens. It’s the locality where David Rowbottom has worked as a wool grower for the past five decades, producing some of the world’s finest fleece — used in the very top tier of Italian suiting. 

Wool grower David Rowbottom produces super fine Merino wool on his St Helens property, Rowensville. Picture: Nicole Cleary 

David Rowbottom with his flock and wool shed. Picture: Nicole Cleary 

“There’s been enormous change to the industry since I started in 1972,” Rowbottom says. 

“Back in the 1970s, we had a couple of hundred members of the superfine (wool) association in the Western District — now there’s about five.” 

Rowbottom and his wife, Susan, have been two of the great wool industry survivors, specialising in ultrafine wool.  But he didn’t start off as part of the Western District wool establishment. 

Rowbottom’s father bred prime lambs and as a young farmer in the 1970s, he ventured into superfine wool “by accident”.  “We leased some land and there were Merinos there. Superfine wool was very low-priced at the time. It was a question of supply — there was too much of the stuff but that all changed as the years went on.” 

While Melbourne and further afield still view Victoria’s Western District as a wool-producing powerhouse, it’s due to historical memory rather than current day fact. 

The wool price crash of 1991 pushed most wool growers in southwest Victoria to try something new — beef, cropping, dairy. In the district where the Rowbottoms farm, bluegums cover vast hectares where sheep previously grazed.  “Many wool growers got out pretty soon after the wool price crash,” Rowbottom says. 

“Some stayed for a few years but found they could make money with lower labour costs through beef or cropping. We decided to really go down the ultrafine (route).”  And years later, it has paid off. 

The Rowbottoms’ non-mulesed Merino wool sold for up to 9000 cents a kilogram from bidders just 10 months ago, achieving some of the highest Australian auction prices paid for several years. 

The only other time his Rowensville clip sold wool at auction for a higher price was back in 2008 with a specially prepared 14.3-micron bale going for 12,600 cents a kilogram. 

“We’ve continued with ultrafine over the years, even when there’s been a string of lower price years, because demand does come back. It often has,” Rowbottom says. 

For the uninitiated, ultrafine wool is a marked difference from the fleece usually seen in Australian woolsheds. The strong strands of natural fibre appear like spider webs to the naked eye, but are woven into some of the best suits money can buy. 

Originally, the Rowensville flock’s fleece averaged above 19 micron and through years of hard-work and breeding, it now averages closer to 14 micron. 

Sheep on the Rowbottoms’ property. Picture: Nicole Cleary 

Rowbottom with son Aaron. Picture: Nicole Cleary 

“We worked at (reducing the micron average) because the market demands it,” Rowbottom says. “Even in the past few years, with lockdowns in all the larger cities around the world, the ultrafine price has been pretty stable, all things considered.” 

The time-sapping coronavirus lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 had many curious by-products. One that was less remarked upon was the impact on the average Australian’s waistline.  Some previously outgoing office workers piled on the pounds thanks to calorific takeaway orders and a lack of incidental activity. 

Others used their designated hour of exercise to great metabolic effect, taking inches off their chest and waist circumference.  This collective fattening and thinning went largely unnoticed until late last year, when the last of the long lockdowns in Victoria and NSW finally concluded.  Eager engaged couples began flinging out wedding invitations for the summer. 

Recently and not-so-recently bereaved families, having held perfunctory funerals in the interim, decided to hold more fitting commemorations for their dearly departed.  Australian men returned to the dusty end of the wardrobe and found their faithful suit didn’t pass muster anymore. 

“Since the start of the year, we have found our customers are buying back into the suiting category at a pleasing rate,” David Jones menswear general manager Chris Wilson says. “This increase has meant David Jones suit sales are in fact ahead of pre-pandemic levels.” 

One of Australia’s leading male outfitters — Peter Jackson — has also witnessed an influx of customers since the winding back of work-from-home orders. 

“We have seen a real uptake since November,” Melbourne-based director Nick Jackson says. 

Jackson says many businesses and corporations still required their staff to be suited in the CBD — even if they were spending their work hours divided between home and the office. “Quite simply put: suits are back again,” he says. 

“There was a lot of chatter pre-pandemic about casualisation of the workforce and even weddings becoming more casual. We are seeing the opposite to both of these.” 

A trend gaining traction pre-pandemic, which accelerated in the lockdown era, is the rise of online sales of made-to-measure suits.  Internationally, Proper Cloth and SuitSupply are among the brands taking on the tailoring old guard and suiting men from Wall St to main street in the US. 

In Australia, James Wakefield and Robin McGowan founded Institchu in 2012 as an online retailer but now have showrooms across all state capitals as well as a New York outlet.  Wakefield says the past few months have been a flurry of activity with demand not just contained to grooms and groomsmen. 

“We have had some of our strongest months ever since Australia came out of lockdown,” he says. 

Wool is embracing more casual fashion to win consumers. 

Casualisation

It’s a phrase that strikes fear into the hearts of tailors based in London’s famed purveyor of pinstripe — Savile Row — to retailers closer to home.  After two years of lockdowns, a casual observer only has to walk down Melbourne’s Collins St or Sydney’s Pitt St to witness a distinct sartorial switch among those still pounding the pavement back to the office. 

The sea of dark grey and navy suiting is less ubiquitous; ties are not as commonplace and highly-shined shoes have in some cases traded in for sneakers.  The worldwide phenomenon has even been lamented by The Times. The London newspaper wrote in a March editorial that: “the uniform that has served the professional man for a century is falling out of favour.” 

“Several factors are to blame. The decline of social hierarchy, and the formality that accompanied it, did its bit. The rise of tech moguls. Working from home persuaded some men that leisurewear was suitable apparel for the pursuit of a profession.” 

Eric Musgrave, British menswear writer and author of Sharp Suits, a photographic history of men’s tailoring, says it’s nothing new. 

“Casualisation of working clothes has been going on for about 60 years since the fashion revolution of the Swinging Sixties,” Musgrave says. 

But in professions where a formal suit was the expected daily work “uniform,” Musgrave says casual Fridays of the 1990s were the first sign of the changing daily thread. 

“Law, finance, property, medicine — tailored suits were, and to a large degree still are, the expected dress standard of this group,” he says. 

“At a lower level, many other roles, such as travelling salesmen, general office staff and customer-facing roles, such as bank cashiers, followed suit.” 

Back at Australian Wool Innovation, Roberts says this calendar year is looking a lot more stylish for the sector compared to the drab grey trackpants period of 2020. 

“The good news is that the recovery is well underway with a 75 per cent bounce back in 2021 and is expected to continue a further 21 per cent increase forecasted in 2022,” he says. 

“This recovery is the result of many people returning to work and the opportunity for events such as weddings that were delayed because of the lockdowns related to the pandemic.”