2025-01-06 … Used Pieces for WarriorWool Donation … Denim Double Coat … Lynx Pattern
Yesterday, a customer wanted to donate his used Anorak to the Lending Library because his aging shoulders make a pullover uncomfortable.  I don’t remember anyone DONATING to the Lending before, but maybe it has happened.   I asked if he would be OK with donating to the WarriorWool program instead.  He said YES … And then I thought, for donations, at least, why not accept other used WeatherWool garments as WarriorWool donations?   So … we’ll see how that goes …
    
Chance Painter of History Channel’s Mountain Men Show phoned today.  Chance was wearing his Lynx Pattern Anorak in the Costco in Fairbanks (Alaska), and he was recognized – because of the Anorak – by a Mountain Man cameraman whom he’d not previously met.  Kind of nice!!
   
We are prepping the first production run of Denim Double Coats.  The DDC has roots in the North Maine Double Coat, which Debby was just not comfortable enough to green-light (although the few test pieces that are “out there” have been a hit with customers).  Debby felt two layers of FullWeight Jacquard Fabric made the NMDC shoulders too bulky.   But our (I have to say 100% Wool!) Denim is lighter and easier to work with than the FullWeight Jacquard, and solves the problems of the NMDC.  The Denim Double Coat will handle just about any weather coming at us in the Lower 48, and farther North.  And it has tested very well with Cody in Ontario already.  The DDC has a “town and country” look but also the capability and look of a serious work / serious weather coat.  We’ll get a complete product page up on the website soon, but I want to do announcements here, first.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This first run of the DDC will be Charcoal only  

The DDC has both handwarmer and cargo pockets, plus inside zip pockets.  The collar is substantial, with Slot Buttons on the rear to accept the Double Hood.  We’ll be making matching Double Hoods in Denim Charcoal.   The DDC is offered at $1375 and I expect to ship in early March.   If you want one, please phone me or send an email.  We’re making only a small number and once we put up the formal product page, the SHOP app is going to show the DDC to a great many people beyond our own list.  (I wrote about the SHOP app a couple of days ago … these tech-tentacles are hard to resist and I don’t understand how they work, either.)

 

 

 

2026-01-05 ... USA Gets Back to Work ... Even the Pros Don't Know Wool!
It’s always seemed to me that the USA goes half-on-vacation beginning a little before Thanksgiving and running all the way through the first week of January.  People have an AFTER THE HOLIDAYS mindset that won't wear off for another few days.  It’s definitely not all-bad!
   
Yesterday I read a blog post from one of my favorite writers.   Really love what this person does, and we’ve been in touch repeatedly.   But I had to take exception to this statement in the current post about avoiding synthetic clothing:

Outdoor gear: It’s near impossible to get things like rain gear, hiking gear, and snow apparel in natural fibers. That’s because synthetics are a lightweight way to get performance suitable for being in the outdoors and extreme weather.

AHEM!! … We’ll see if my response to the post gets noticed.   I mention this here only because this post comes from an industry professional who publishes and lectures about  healthy, natural-fiber clothing, and to whom I have explained what we do.   Wool-World has a whole lot of work to do!!!

   

   

   

   

2026-01-04 ... Credit Card Processing ... Tech-Tentacles
Another WELL, DUH! moment for me.   I should have known better, but I had incorrectly believed the payment processors (credit card companies) refund their fees (about 3%) when we refund a customer.   NOPE.   We're going to have to watch even more carefully for the repeated-return-refund accounts.  There are not very many, and there will be fewer.   But some of this is my fault ... with our chronically low inventory, people often try a size that is likely to prove big or small, but with such long production timelines, I don't discourage.   Also my fault, our sizing has been inconsistent across products, and that has led to confusion.   And ... my fault again, we need to continue working to present our sizing more clearly.   Sorry to all for sizing issues.   We are surely motivated to resolve, and I will keep these factors in mind when looking at accounts.

   

Another poke from the payment processors concerns sales taxes.   We are forced, increasingly,  to add sales taxes to the checkout.   We don't do any of this ourselves.   The sales tax situation is extremely complex and fluid.   The rate of tax will vary according to State, county and city and item purchased.   Keeping up with all this, and remitting the taxes, is much more than a full-time job, and so we can only rely upon various specialized software to add the charges an remit the payments to the various governments.   Some orders have FOUR different types of sales tax added ... State, county, municipality and special-purpose tax (mass-transit tax, for example).   The payment processors levy their fees on the entire transaction, of course.  And that means whenever taxes are added to an order, all of the tax and the processing fee on the tax, reduces our receipts.   This is not new ... merchants have been forced (all stick and no carrot whatsoever) to act as tax collectors for decades.  It's just new to me.   The other self-employment business I've operated were considered "professional services" and not subject to sales tax.   I think that's because the legislators are much more likely to be lawyers than bakers.

   

A couple of days ago I wrote here about how the technoids are ALWAYS trying to gain a bigger role in our lives.   And how the SHOP app has infiltrated itself into our business.   Not to say it's all bad ... some people like it very much, for various reasons.  But yesterday I rec'd this note from a new customer (boldface in original):

 

Hey Ralph --- I got an email with a link to track this order with Shop, but the only way to do so is by installing an app on my phone. I don't want to install an app on my phone in order to track an order! This is an invasive business practice designed to allow Shop to collect more data from me than they could do by providing a tracking link that opens in my browser, and it's really quite infuriating as a consumer.  Can you provide me with a tracking number for this order?  Thanks, Jake

 

For the record, when we ship, a tracking number is sent to the customer by regular email.  But anyway, INFURIATING would be my word, also, but I know some people like the idea of having SHOP track their purchases from many merchants (Millions have the app and many thousands of merchants participate.) and offer order history and tracking and "you might also like" for all of it.   There may be somewhere a switch that I can set to turn off this email.  But some people will welcome it.  AND ... the SHOP app handles all the sales tax assessments and payments to the various government agencies, of which there are hundreds ... probably thousands.

   

   

   

   

2026-01-03 ... Advisor Don Nguyen BIGTIME on YouTube.
Friend of WeatherWool and Advisor Don Nguyen is crushing it on YouTube lately.   I haven't spoken to Don in a year or so, probably, and actually still never met face-to-face, but I've known Don about 8 years and he's worn our wool and pushed it as hard as anyone ... guiding mountaineers and wilderness hunters.   Don's latest video, a tribute to his (professional) personal  rifle, has a quarter million views in 6 days.  Until viewing this video I didn't know Don was a marksman, although I'm not surprised.  Don is one of those people who is hard to get hold of ... I just phoned him, and, as expected, my call was not answered.   But every now and then he'll phone me and we'll talk for an hour.  It was during one of those calls Don  told me to rename our Ski Jacket the Mountain Jacket because of the way he uses it.  That was probably three or four years ago ... and we've been transitioning since.   One thing about Don ... every time I speak with him, he sounds like he's having the best day of his life.   HATS OFF to that!

   

   

   

 

2026-01-02 ... Donation to MARSOC ... Adverts and Links and Platforms
I just got off the phone with a very polite Marine serving in Special Operations Command.   He gave me all the info to reserve and pay for a WarriorWool Anorak, but then I remembered we already had donations sufficient to cover the $395 cost.   So ... that will be a nice surprise for a young man who should not have been spending his own money anyway.  The good cheer with which our Military people accept the fact that they frequently need to purchase their own gear continues to impress me.  Such situations are not that unusual.   My Mom was a schoolteacher and she often purchased supplies with personal funds.   NOT RIGHT!!

   

The intersection of technology and WeatherWool has gotten beyond me.   There is the whole side of production tech that has many stages and a whole lot going on and that I only understand dimly.  Fortunately, we have expert-Partners that I can count on.  But there is another side to the tech ... the sales and marketing side.   And this side of "WeatherWool tech" is moving really fast and I understand it even less.

   

YouTube is important to us.   There are something like 2 billion people who use it.   For us, it's a vehicle to help people learn about us.   We can host videos on this website, and we do some of that, but as Cody explains it to me, we want as many people as we can get watching our content on YouTube ... because the more people watch us on YouTube, the more likely it is that YouTube will offer our content to people are are not necessarily looking for us.

   

The only paid advertising WeatherWool has ever done was 10 years ago, I ran some Facebook ads in prep for a show.  Spent something like $3k and I don't think the ads did us any good.   But the platforms (search engines, social media sites, video sites, chat sites) are expensive to operate, and ads are their primary source of funding.  And I definitely appreciate them!   We wouldn't be viable without them enabling people to find us.   But of course advertising means we have to charge our customers in order to get our name out to ... our customers.   Plus, people are naturally and sensibly very disinclined to believe advertising.   So I don't want to advertise, but I also don't want to freeride on all these platforms that help us.   What to do?  Interesting question.

  

A week or so ago, Cody explained (last year Blog) about ads running on our YouTube Channel.   We didn't run the ads ... YouTube runs the ads basically in exchange for hosting our videos and perhaps also for suggesting our videos to potential viewers.  Companies that think our viewers would be interested in their products bid for the ads that are inserted into our content, and the highest bidder gets the ad placement.   In our case, I expect the bids are extremely low because we have so few viewers relative so some much more popular channels.   But everything is monitored and analyzed automatically, and the numbers are always changing.   I never liked the idea of people watching our vids to be interrupted by ads.   And people who have YouTube Premium (or whatever they call it), for around US $30 monthly, don't see any ads.   As a company, we pay the monthly fee, so I never saw the ads when viewing our content, and we really never had anything to do with the ads.   But now, we are YouTube Partners, and that means YouTube shares with us the advertising fees.  We still don't have anything to do with the ads, and we still don't advertise WeatherWool.   But now, our videos continue to be interrupted by ads for other companies, and we earn about 50 cents a day on advertising.   Many people believe this partnership makes YouTube more likely to show our content to other people.

   

Part of the reason I've resisted "partnership" with YouTube (owned by Alphabet, which also owns Google) is that once you get tangled up with these companies and their software tentacles, they want to be involved in whatever you do.   

   

The newer efforts from THE PLATFORMS are all about getting your store onto their platform.   They want you to have SHOP NOW buttons on your (channel / page / wall / account ... take your pick) and they want to HOST your store.   I'm reading that if you have a link to your own website, the platforms penalize you by showing your content to fewer people than they otherwise would.   I guess this is natural enough, but I really don't want anyone standing between WeatherWool and our customers, and I really dislike the style of little-to-no useful information that would be offered if we went along with this.   As it is, SHOPIFY, the platform upon which this website rests, is constantly reminding me that THESE PRODUCTS ARE NOT LISTED ON FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM, GOOGLE.   And I don't want them to be!   It seems like I'm fighting the tide here, but we'll see how it goes.

   

Another thing I just learned is that SHOPIFY has an APP, SHOP, that makes spending money even more convenient than Amazon.   I noticed a while back that when making online purchases via desktop browsers, various webstores that I had not previously patronized knew it was me, and had all my info, including credit card info.  They'll send a verification code to my phone, and then ... ready to spend (world's smallest YAY).  Cody tells me something like half the people using our store are also using the (cellphone) SHOP app.  YIKES!!  ... And what's more, SHOP advertises us automatically.   I think we can opt out of it somehow.   But as I understand it, people with the SHOP app have requested that SHOP notify them about products they might like, based on purchase history and probably a bunch of other stuff they collect somehow.   AND NOW, when we create a new product on our website, the SHOP APP automatically shows it to people!!  This means we can no longer do quickie-intro product pages, with casual photos, because as soon as we put up a new product page, SHOP is going to show that page to who-knows-how-many people.   

   

All this stuff is moving faster than I can keep up with, and it seems like the pace of change is accelerating.

   

   

   

   

2026-01-01 ... 15th Year Blogging Here
WOW ... I did the first WeatherWool Blog in January of 2012 ... almost 14 years ago.  And 2026 makes the 15th year with Blog entries on this site!!   It's interesting that my style hasn't changed in all this time ... And I haven't aged at all (mmmm-hmmm) ... This is what I wrote on Friday, 27 January 2012.

   

Friday, 27 January 2012
Our first WeatherWool® test clothes have just arrived!! For the very first items, they are looking good! Our first run of wool was dyed in a custom color of our own we’ve named drab … a very dark green/gray/brown/black that we expect to work well in the woods and on the streets. We’ll be adding other solid colors, camo patterns and even some plaids and checks. The wool itself is more difficult to develop and test. We’d wanted two weights of wool, one heavy and one light. These first test batches were sort of clustered in the middle range. The lighter weight wool that we used for the MidWeight Pants was a bit heavier than we’d expected, and the heavier wool, used for the All-Around Shirt, was lighter than we expected.

So we’ve got an All-Around Shirt for Alex and another for me, and a pair of MidWeight Pants for me. No pants for Alex yet. It’s already mid-afternoon Friday so we throw the clothes on quick and point the truck for The Swamp, hoping to find some deer. When we get there we realize we’ve forgotten binoculars (no big deal) and grabbed the wrong gun case. So we have my shotgun and my muzzleloader, but not Alex's slug gun. Fortunately, during the season I keep my muzzleloader charged, and we found one 209 primer cap. So, Alex hunted with my Browning Deer Stalker Slug Gun, and the muzzleloader for me … a genuine one-shot hunt in the offing. As it turned out, it didn't matter because I didn't see any deer, and I was really focused on the clothes anyway. Alex did see deer twice, but they saw him first and flagged off.

The weather was ridiculously warm for late January, but we have hardly had any winter weather so far this season. The temperature was in the upper 50s Fahrenheit (about 14C), and there was a steady breeze from the West.

Because it was so warm, I skipped long johns and wore a short-sleeve summer-weight wool Atlas (T-shirt) from Icebreaker as my base layer on top. The WeatherWool was soft and comfortable on my arms and legs. YESSIR! We are really intent on avoiding scratchy stuff, even for our outerwear, and our first batch of WeatherWool certainly passed that test.

I stillhunted for a couple of hours, and never had the feeling I was near any deer, tho obviously that doesn't mean much. The wool was quiet as a church mouse, which of course was expected. The wool seemed pretty tough. Because I wanted to test the wool, I pushed through some briers I ordinarily would have avoided . Definitely got stuck a number of times – can’t expect one layer of wool to prevent that, but the wool wasn't any the worse for wear after about 100 yards of stickers.

The deer love to lay up in these briers … in some spots they are so thick that you can’t see 10 yards. And it was in the briers I found an very interesting little area. There was a small clearing – maybe 10 or 12 feet diameter, with an 18-inch pin oak in the middle. A nice oasis in the midst of the briers. Scattered around the clearing were the bones of a buck that had died probably in 2008 or 2009. The skull still had two antlers, but one of them was chewed down to only a few inches. While I looked over the remains of the buck, I was surprised to find a nice shed antler, probably from last year, as it hadn't been chewed much. I picked up the shed, looked around a little more, and found a fox skull! I guess this would be a great spot for a treestand!!

Here are the trophies from WeatherWool’s first day in the woods, along with a few bits of raw wool, all sitting on top of a swatch from our first batch of fabric.

Souvenirs from the first day afield in WeatherWool

After clearing the briers I saw a flash of white, then a big flash of white, then I realized a couple of turkeys were having a mild disagreement which they were resolving by way of a non-serious fight. I always like having turkeys nearby when I hunt deer, because it seems like turkeys increase my chances of seeing deer. I haven’t read anywhere whether this is true or not, but I have the idea turkeys put deer at ease. Anyway, I moved in on the turkeys a little, but couldn't get much closer because the swamp was somewhat flooded and they were on the other side of some deep water.

As the sun went down I met up with Alex and compared notes. All in all we were very happy with WeatherWool’s first day in the woods!!!

   

The Fabric we wore that day did not make the grade, although the Drab Green color was pretty close right from the start.   I wasn't happy with the weather-resistance of the Fabric until late 2012, when we were working on Lynx Pattern.   And we don't intend to do checks or plaids (or stripes).  But the rest of this Blog was right on ... and I'm surprised to read I'd already been thinking about two weights.   We decided to call them FullWeight and MidWeight, and it wasn't until 2014 that we had MidWeight.   Or at least that's what I remember.   Maybe I should re-read some Blogs ...