Fieldnotes
What the word strong means, why it is the right fiber for a floor, and the route it takes from the shed to the loom.
Wool is not one material. The fiber that goes into a lightweight suit and the fiber that goes into a clubhouse floor come from different animals bred for different purposes, and the distance between them is greater than most people outside the trade assume. Fieldmark uses New Zealand strong wool. This is what that means and why it is the correct choice for a woven floor.
Wool is graded by the diameter of the individual fiber, measured in microns. Apparel wool sits around 25 microns and finer. Strong wool, sometimes called crossbred, runs coarser: the range Fieldmark works in is 35 to 38 microns.
Coarser sounds like a compromise and is the opposite. A thicker fiber is a stiffer fiber. It resists bending, it resists crushing, and it stands back up when the load comes off. That is exactly wrong for something worn against skin and exactly right for something walked on. New Zealand's crossbred flocks have been selectively bred for interior textiles for generations, which is why the fiber arrives suited to the job rather than adapted to it.
Pick up a staple of strong wool and you can see the argument without any instrument. The fiber is not straight. It runs in a natural wave along its length, and that wave is called crimp.
Crimp spacing is itself a rough reading of micron. A fine apparel wool shows a dense, tight crimp along the staple; a strong wool shows a longer, more open one. What crimp gives a carpet is a spring. Every fiber in the pile is a small compression member that deflects under a foot or a chair leg and returns when the load lifts.
This is the single most consequential property of the material for a specifier, because it governs what the floor looks like in year ten rather than in week one. A traffic lane in a wool carpet is a lane the pile has been walked across, not a lane the pile has been permanently flattened into. Furniture marks lift out. The floor recovers from being used, which is the difference between a carpet that ages and one that simply wears.
Several of the reasons wool belongs in a clubhouse or a principal residence are properties of the fiber itself and do not depend on how it was made up.
None of the above is unusual. What is unusual is being able to describe where a particular batch of it came from, so here is Fieldmark's chain as it stands today, in the terms the trade actually uses.
Wool is shorn and sorted at the shed. As the shearing goes on, the clip is separated into lots and filled into fadges, the tall sacks you see standing in a steel frame on a shearing-shed floor. The fadges feed a press, which compacts the wool into bales. A bale is the industry's standard unit and runs about 175 kilograms.
Fieldmark buys those bales through a New Zealand wool broker. The broker acts for the farmer: testing the clip, cataloging it by description and lot, and selling it at auction. Buying by description and lot is what makes the wool identifiable on the catalogue, and it is the reason the chain can be described honestly at all.
The bales go to a New Zealand scour, which washes the fiber and then dumps the dried wool into larger bales of about 400 kilograms. That is the form in which it leaves the country. First-stage processing happens in New Zealand, before the fiber is exported, which is a deliberate decision and not the industry norm.
From there the wool is spun to Fieldmark's specification by long-established commission spinners in the United Kingdom, and the yarn is woven into finished carpet by our American partner mill. Three countries, four named stages, and nothing that happens anywhere else.
Fieldmark buys through the broker and auction system. That means we can tell you the region, the season and the class of the clip, and we cannot tell you that one floor came from one farm. A shipping container carries eighteen tonnes and blends the clip of several growers. Single-farm attribution would be a tidier story and a false one.
The Farm Footing Programme is the framework for changing that: contracted supply from a standing group of New Zealand family farms, measured on animal husbandry, environmental stewardship and fiber production at the point of clip. It is in development. It is not a completed audit and we will not describe it as one until it is. We will not name a grower before we can offer that grower a contract, because a promise made to a farmer and then withdrawn is not recoverable.
The claim, exactly as it stands
100% New Zealand strong wool, 35 to 38 micron, bought through a New Zealand broker, scoured in New Zealand, spun in the United Kingdom, woven in America. Every stage named, none of it inferred. Formal testing runs at the next production sampling and results will be published with the issuing body and date as they are issued.
That is a shorter list than most manufacturers print. It has the advantage of being checkable, which in a category built on unverifiable sourcing language turns out to be the more interesting position to hold.