Warm and Wooly

We use the finest wool from Merino sheep for your VAUDE products. Wool provides pleasant warmth, wicks away moisture and regulates your body’s microclimate naturally. It is a sustainable and renewable resource and is also wonderful soft on the skin. keeping you snug, warm and feeling simply great.

Sheep protect their bodies with a wonderfully warm and water-repellent coat – wool. Virgin wool, such Merino, is usually used for clothing. Virgin wool is shorn from healthy, live sheep, washed, sorted and processed directly into felt fabric (boiled wool) or spun into yarn and then knit or woven.

Wool has a high natural content of fat (lanolin). The less the wool is treated, the higher the water repellency of clothing due to the oils in the wool.

Merino wool fibers are naturally curly and perfect for fluffy yarns. The warm air within the fabric provides an insulation effect. Wool products are cozy and warm even when they are wet.

Products made of wool or fiber blends with wool sometimes have small nodules on the fabric. This is completely normal. If they bother you, just roll over them with a lint roller.

Many of our wool products are dyed with an environmentally friendly process.

The Responsible Wool Standard (RWS) is a voluntary international standard in the interest of animal welfare for sheep and the land that they graze upon.

Our entire supply chain for wool is working on the implementation of the standard. This is taking place not only at VAUDE, but also at our

• manufacturers who sew clothing

• fabric suppliers who weave/knit the wool

• yarn suppliers who make the yarn

• wool processing plants that buy the wool and prepare it
  
• farms where the sheep are raised

The first milestone has already been reached and VAUDE itself is RWS certified. You can find our RWS certificate here.

Unfortunately, the production of wool sometimes has a darker side.
Many Merino sheep, particularly in Australia, have been bred to have deeply wrinkled skin to increase the wool yield per animal. Moisture gathers in the folds. This attracts flies, which then lay their eggs there. The hatched larvae bore into the skin of the sheep which results in infections. 

To prevent this, the farmers remove large areas on the sheep without the use of anesthesia, which is associated with pain and inflammation for the sheep. This procedure is called mulesing. VAUDE uses mulesing-free wool exclusively. Animal welfare organizations have been criticizing this practice for years, and the wool industry is under pressure to finally create a credible remedy with the new Responsible Wool Standard.

Now we are working hard to be able to offer RWS certified products. In addition to RWS certified wool, there is also recycled wool certified in accordance with the GRS Global Recycling Standard, or GOTS certified wool.

The great advantage of recycled wool is that it does not use new resources and therefore has a more positive ecological footprint than new wool. Used wool products are collected, the material is processed and then reprocessed into new fabrics.

GOTS certified wool comes exclusively from controlled organic animal husbandry and is used in our Women's Altiplano LS T-shirt, for example. Find out more about GOTS here.

Next page