2027-07-23 ... Sourcing Trend ... "Make It Cheaper"
Clara Parkes, via her wonderful Wool Channel, tells me Canada and Scotland have launched wool-sourcing guides that allow tracing of wool to its source.  Clara wrote "I live for the day when we can flip the tag on any garment and see not only the fiber content but the precise origin of those fibers."   Our customers can do exactly that.  Since our purchases of greasy wool in 2018, sewn into every garment is a Batch Tag that identifies the Ranches (or Ranch) where the fiber in that garment was grown.  

Batch 9, first Fabric completed in 2023, was our first Batch made 100% from top, with our own worsted yarn, and with zero superwashed fiber.  (Previous to Batch 9, we had purchased commercial top for spinning worsted.)

I occasionally search the web for complaints about us.  Mainly, people don't like our prices.  There are a whole lot of ways we could make our products less expensive.  But we focus on quality and on service and anything we might do to lower our costs would also reduce our quality or service.  Sourcing is an example.  We could save a bunch of time and money if we bought processed fiber on the open market.   But we buy all our fiber (sometimes through an auctioneer) from Ranchers that we know personally.  If we didn't buy in this way, we wouldn't be able to specify the Ranch-sources for our Fabrics.  This type of source tracing is important to us and to our customers.  But it's probably most important to the Ranchers.  Generally, people sell their wool to a broker and have no knowledge of where it goes or what is done with it.  Seeing and wearing garments made with their own wool is very meaningful to the Ranchers.  It's also quite rare, and virtually unprecedented in the experience of the Ranchers we work with.

Currently, the first photo displayed on our landing page (WeatherWool.com home page) carousel is from our visit to the Innes Ranch during shearing in 2024.  The sheep in the photo are wearing fiber that is now Batch 11 (Batch Innes-1) Fabric.  We've been shipping Innes-1 garments for about a year.

AND ... THANKS CLARA PARKES!!!

   

   

   

 

2026-07-21 ... "Everybody Calls me SunDog" ... "NO THEY DON'T"
Friend of WeatherWool and Super Photographer Richard Mills spends a lot of time in Winter in Yellowstone National Park, where Winter is WINTER.  Richard was in Yellowstone for Christmas of 2022.   The temp at Sunrise was -31F/-35C, and Richard wrote to tell me how the wool was working for him.  Plus, he sent this splendid photo of a SUNDOG:

   

   THANKS FOR THIS SUPER PHOTO, RICHARD!
And ... THANKS for my new name!

I had never heard of a SunDog ... it seems like they are only visible when it's cold, although (looked it up) they can supposedly be seen anywhere during any season.  I've never seen one.  I have been very taken with the SunDog (officially "sun dog" or "sundog" but I enjoy my eccentric caps) ever since Richard sent this photo.  About a year ago, I decided SunDog would be a great nickname, and would occasionally intro myself with "Everybody calls me SunDog" to which Debby would say "NO THEY DON'T!".   I amped it up some at the Sheep Industry Convention six months ago, and I wrote SunDog on my badge.  Everyone except Debby seemed good with it.  

It's important to have fun, and Debby will get used to it.

   

 

2026-07-19 ... Confluence
A couple of days ago, Todd, a new customer, spent the afternoon with us, and we talked about many thing, both wool-related and not.  Todd has connections to several people with whom Debby and I have been connected, which was startling.  And now that he is getting close to his senior years, he's interested in doing something new.  One of the reasons Todd visited is because he wants to find out about launching a line of vests.  I told him a bunch of stuff about our experiences, and I just sent a note introducing Todd to JR (whose Factory8 makes almost all our woven products) and Anya (Factory8 Production Manager).

In particular I told Todd how a clothing line is a great way to burn money!  

A recent priority of mine is making sure our products are not harmful.  Author and columnist Alden Wicker is the one who really got me focused on this aspect of our manufacture.  Alden publishes a substack to which I subscribe, and, from her latest, is a para that I just sent to our aspiring vest-maker (THANKS, ALDEN):

 

The man I’m currently dating absolutely loves cooking and preserving, and early on in our relationship, he floated the fantasy of quitting his job to sell preserved food full time and I yelped, “Noooooooo!” The same way when some starry-eyed young woman says she wants to be a sustainable fashion designer I want to take her by the shoulders and tell her to just get a good enough job and keep her sewing and design sacred. It’s just so hard to make it today when companies steal your designs and undercut you with cheap fabrics and outsourced labor, while the tech companies bury your product online. The fashion industry is brutal.

 

For a few years, Military Vets who've served in the Middle East have been asking us to make Shemaghs.  I felt a little funny doing this, because I'd never worn a Shemagh.  But conversation with Todd was partly about building supplies, and I asked him if he knew of the brick yard where I used to work in '76 and '77.  It turns out he was very-well acquainted, and we had a few laughs about one particularly wild character who used to work there.

My work in the brickyard was in the summers of '76 and mostly the summer of '77, which had some brutal-hot days.  I was there because of a couple of my old friends, one of whom had served in the US Military in the Middle East.  We were stacking bricks in the intense July sun, about as hot and humid and hazy as New Jersey gets.  My friend showed up with a couple of keffiyehs, which he said he'd worn in the desert.  I don't remember what those things were made of, but we soaked them in water every half-hour or so and wore them over head and neck and they made a huge difference.  We couldn't have stacked bricks in the direct sunlight without them.  More recently, I remember walking around in August in the daytime in Abu Dhabi, VERY BRIEFLY, and reflecting that, even if my life depended on it, I might not be able to last a half-hour in that sun.  Thinking about the brickyard, I was startled to realize that, not only had I used a shemagh (pretty much the same thing as a keffiyeh), but I'd absolutely relied upon it.  Now I need to update the Shemagh page ...

 

 

 

 

 

2026-07-18 ... American Denim Manufacture, Esquire Magazine
On 29 June 2026, Esquire published The Rise, Fall and (Maybe) Return of American Denim.  We very much appreciate this piece.  Thanks, Esquire.

The article more or less assumes Denim is cotton (we are not mentioned), but, that's just the way people think and I suppose a lot of the people in Denim-World want to keep it that way.   But the American Denim Story echoes, or parallels, the American Wool story almost exactly.   And I am sure it's the same with some other completely unrelated industries.   And I'm sure this is also a very old story, maybe going back even before the USA.

There is a lot of good and interesting info in the piece.  Some history, small-town Americana, nostalgia for the glory-days of American manufacturing.

The basic conclusion was that American Denim was ended by lower-cost labor in other countries.  I agree with that.  But the article also quotes author Steven Kurutz that 1970s executives pulled the plug because "you could take the savings and pocket the difference".   Maybe that was true in the 1970s, but not now.  Now, the consumer makes the choice, and industry can respond, or not.   I just bought a pair of ROUND HOUSE jeans, $60, plus $10 shipping.   Near as I can tell, made in USA of 100% American cotton.  I never heard of these guys, but I'm pulling for them.  We'll see.  Maybe if the cotton-crew can do it, the wool-crew can do it too!   It's going to take a big investment, but there is big money around.   

    

    

    

2026-07-16 … California’s Responsible Textile Recovery Act … Economic Sclerosis
NEWS TO ME … I was just informed by Landbell, an agent of the State of California, that WeatherWool needs to start paying now.   We have customers in California, and apparently that means we need to comply with the California Responsible Textile Recovery Act of 2024, which is being gradually implemented.

The idea is that companies selling clothing and textiles in California will pay the costs of disposal of their offerings.   The actual charges for the costs of disposal won’t be determined for another few years, but will be based on the volume, value and composition of the products sold in California.  Landbell will calculate the costs and charges based on regular, required reports from the merchants.    

Implementation will not be complete until 2030, at which time companies will have to start paying the disposal costs.   But starting now, companies must pay $1000 per year, or potentially pay big fines, or refuse to ship to California.  Before coughing up the cash (bank transfer only!), I’ll investigate a little more, but this looks mandatory.  The $1000 annual fees will be used to set up the program, and will continue after full implementation.   From what I’ve seen so far, there is no hint of what the “eco-modulated” fees will be.  But the fee will be assessed on every item sold in California.  

The study of red tape has never interested me.  I used to work with a guy who absolutely loved being an accountant.  He loved talking about the different ways an accounting situation could be argued and he loved following the different laws in different jurisdictions, and figuring what corporate structure would work best where.  There are people devoting their careers to the details of tariff codes, and I’ve worked with them a little for WeatherWool.   But stuff invented by people just doesn’t float my boat.   (And there is a lot of stuff related to WeatherWool that bounces off me, unfortunately.)   The study of Nature, YAY!!  The study of bureaucracy is for someone else.   I was never interested in economics mostly because econ is man-made.   But way back in the mid-1970s, there was an afternoon when I had an hour to kill, and the only thing I had to read was a paper on Economic/Institutional Sclerosis by Mancur Olson.     

Olson suggested that as democracies age, they create more and more red tape, resulting in Economic and Institutional Sclerosis which can drastically inhibit growth and efficiency.   It made sense to me, and I remembered it.   Olson’s thinking was influential, and people figured he’d be a top guy in econ, but he passed away at age 66.  Others built on his ideas, and eventually won the econ Nobel. 

As WeatherWool grows and I become more of a conscripted government bureaucrat, I think more and more of Olson’s Sclerosis.   Everybody running a business is in the same situation.  And it’s easier for WeatherWool than most because, as businesses go, we are still Lilliputian.   But the red tape / sclerosis has a big impact on us.   We spend a bunch of money on agents to help us deal with this stuff, but nevertheless we still also spend a bunch of time (my time) on federal income tax, state income tax, corporate structure, mandatory insurance, sales taxes for American States and Canadian Provinces, government registrations and the bookkeeping required by all of that.  And now, California Textile Recovery.  Doubtless, a bunch of other States will follow suit.  

When I was doing financial work (hoo boy, not my cup of tea at all, but it paid the bills!), I was fortunate to spend some time with a guy who won an appointment as an Adjunct (?) Professor of Econ at University of Chicago.   We were doing hedge fund research and part of the focus was the regulatory environment … not at all my natural interest.   I asked him if he thought the rules, regulations, reporting requirements -- and the army of professionals necessary to implement it all -- was truly useful.  He thought “NO.   We’d be better-off having none of it … instead having people interact based on carefully built and protected reputations.”   Definitely a U of Chicago-style stance.   But WOW, the bureaucracy is inarguably crazy-expensive!   And overall counter-productive from this corner.  Sorry for politics, but … no escape.

   

   

   

   

   

 

2026-07-15 ... Batch Tags and Ranch Labels
We've been adding BATCH TAGS -- tags that enable source-tracing of our fiber -- since the purchases of Batch 5 in 2018.  Currently, the Batch Tags simply show a number, whether 8, 9, 11 ... People have confused these Batch Tags with size tags.  This is not surprising, and in fact, the Batch Tags we use are readily available because they are industry-standard size tags, although that is not how we use them.  But I've decided to start using Batch Tags that actually include the word BATCH.  Such as "BATCH 11".  Batch 11 is also Batch Innes-1, and we'll continue to add the INNES RANCH label to Batch 11 pieces.  Batch 14 will be INNES-2 ... So it will have the same INNES RANCH label as Batch 11, but the tag will say BATCH 14 and our WeatherWool Fabric Batches page will highlight the differences, and link to the page with details on each specific Batch.

   

Near as I can tell, we were among the first (perhaps THE first?) makers of woolen outerwear to include Batch Tags (industry calls it "source tracing") at the garment level, and I'm glad about that!   And I'm glad some of our customers are keen on it.  For some reason, we decided to minimize the tags and labels we added to Blankets, and so our Batch 11 Blankets had only our standard WeatherWool label.  But a customer asked me if his Blanket was Batch 11,which it was, and then asked for an Innes Label, which he sewed onto his garment himself!   And sent me a photo!

Future Blankets will have Batch Tags.  And if the Blanket is made from a Batch that was sourced from a single Ranch, the Blanket will also have the "Ranch Label".  Innes is the only Ranch Label we have made so far, but we have already purchased half the fiber for Batch Geis-1 (Batch 16).

   

2026-07-14 ... Expensive (Victimhood!) ... Urban Wildlife
About the only thing people really hold against us is our pricing.  We actually are not expensive compared to some other companies, and in particular to "fashion" companies.  And I'll happily have us tested against anything else out there.  But this is on my mind now because I'm working on getting us in compliance with the sales tax authorities in the American States.  And suddenly, much to my surprise, it seems Canadian Provinces also want us to be their tax collector.  I'm spending a lot of (extremely aggravating to me!) time trying to get this going.  Beyond my time, the tax guys add another layer of costs (around $1000 per year for each jurisdiction).  Plus the payment processors take their ~3% cut of the sales taxes, but the jurisdictions demand full payment on their side.  So ... we have to remit more than we collect.

   

COMPLIANCE, in thousands of ways, is a typical cost of doing business.   I used to work in the financial industry, and their costs of compliance were astounding to me.  I also used to work in telecom, in the 1980s, before all the reporting went electronic.  In those days, we had to print out literally truckloads (as in 18-wheeler trucks) of paper reports that were sent to the government.  (What did they actually DO with all that paper?)  WeatherWool's costs of compliance are an amazing annoyance and chore and a significant expense, but completely ordinary for an American business.  I'm writing about it now because I just updated our Expensive page with some info about sales tax.  PLUS, I just read somewhere that in the USA of today, CLAIMING VICTIMHOOD IS VALUABLE!!  ... HAHA, no, not here, but funny, and on the overall scene, probably true.  Better ... NOBODY CARES, WORK HARDER ...

   

Early morning is a great time of day, particularly in summer!  So this is probably the best time of year to be an insomniac.  I started working this morning at 3:30, and I'll hopefully get some more sleep before long, but WOW ... what a perfect night.   The air is so great I opened all the doors to get that good stuff circulating through the house.  But a couple of raccoons were out front making a commotion.  OK, they are part of the night crew, and usually aren't a problem.  But when I heard them on the porch, I chased them away.  Then I figured I'd better close the doors out back, else they come in there.  Returning from closing those doors, the coons were already back on the front porch, entering the front door.  I'm going to have to trap those trash pandas, and relocate them to the nearby park.  Speaking of which, WeatherWool Advisor David Alexander, who is Senior Naturalist for the local government, tells me Black Bears are all over our area this year, which is impressive because we're only a short drive from New York City.  A blackie broke INTO the local zoo a few days ago, and there are BEWARE OF BEARS signs at the entrances to the park.   It doesn't seem like dealing with urban wildlife should be an issue here, but it is.  It's kind of great, but also kind of awful.   We had to raise the fence around our back yard up to about 7.5 feet (229 cm) to stop the deer from jumping in and eating our fruit trees, grape vines, vegetables.   On June 29, below, I posted a pic of CURLY, the Big Buck in the neighborhood, looking at me through my office window.  A couple of days ago, I was sitting on the front porch, and I heard plucking sound only a few feet away.  I was puzzled for a min, and it was dark.  It took a little bit, but I realized I was looking at Curly helping himself to the flower-stalks on Debby's Hostas.  I tried to scare him off, but he stared me down and then strolled away very slowly.   I hope Curly doesn't see that video of the bison tossing a Granpa in Yellowstone a couple of days ago.

2026-07-13 ... Colors ... WarriorWool Sales ... Fad, Trend, Paradigm Shift? ... Since!
I realized a couple of days ago that the page about our COLORS was outdated.  I try to keep website pages current, but there are a lot of them and there is a lot else to do.  Some pages get stale.  I did some updates to the Our Colors page this morning, but didn't do it well enough to be satisfied.  Better than it was, tho.  And I was a little startled to see that the page is nine years old ... first added to the website in July of 2017.  And actually, the page is probably older than that because we put a website up in 2012, and migrated to Shopify (this site) in 2017.

   

WeatherWool is 16 years old now, a legal entity since 2010.  We may have made our first sale in 2012 -- not sure -- but I did record that in January of 2013, our sales totaled $141.  So ... we were ON THE BOARD 13.5 years ago, at least.   I guess you could claim SINCE begins when you start spending (time and money), 2009 in our case, even before we came up with the name and registered the company.   So we are SINCE 2009?  Google says less than 1-2% of clothing brands survive 15 years.  "Since 2009" doesn't sound like anything much to me, though, in that my frame of reference is still the 1970s.

   

Anyway, updating the color page made me think about SINCE.  And instead of simply changing the date on the page, I added a PAGE CREATED line above the UPDATED line.  And it seems like that's a good general practice.

   

Yesterday, I started to write about WarriorWool Sales.  (WarriorWool is a way for us to offer Anoraks to Military and First Responders at a subsidized price.)   I never made an attempt to track it, and I should have.   I was fiddling with the Shopify AI tool and found that I commented WARRIORWOOL when discounting about 200 Anoraks.  That was good, knowing there are a couple hundred documented, but I would guess that would be less than half of all WarriorWool shipments.  I didn't start using that comment until kind of lately, and we began to ship WarriorWool in 2015 or earlier ... before we were on this website.

   

I've been talking and writing a lot lately about the public's focus on clean, healthy clothing.  Is it a fad?  Or a trend?   Or is it a paradigm shift?   Right now, it is all of those things, but I believe it will last.  I don't think the public will again be as oblivious to unclean and unhealthy clothing as we have been in the recent past.   And we have made a commitment to PARADIGM SHIFT.

Shopify, the platform upon which this site rests, is a huge commercial success ... it hosts around 5 million stores.  Shopify is always pushing automation, and I will admit the automation is getting better and better.

Shopify has an app they call SHOP, and they are pushing it hard.  I know SHOP has become popular with our customers because so many orders come to us via SHOP.  What's troublesome about SHOP is that I don't control it directly.   It will pull things from our website and present its own version to potential customers.   (Maybe I should pay more attention to, and try to learn from, the SHOP presentations?!)  Somewhere in our webstore's backend settings, there is probably a switch that would let me opt out of SHOP entirely.   But I don't want to do that because it suggests us to people who might otherwise not be aware of us, and a lot of people really like it, including Cody.  SHOP also offers the sort of 1-click purchasing  pioneered by Amazon (?) that is so popular with consumers.  Still, the loss of control makes me uneasy, and I feel like this is just the beginning of the march of the robots.

On the other hand, as a consumer, I do appreciate the convenience of SHOP.  I don't know how I got tangled up with it, but the one-click checkout is nice.  When I visit one of my own product pages, though, it's still startling to see SHOP:

   

Here, the SHOP app will let me zoom through checkout (on our own website), and will charge to my VISA card ending in -2569.

   

   

I meant to write this a couple of weeks ago, but ... still pretty neat ... Advisor Don Nguyen moves around a lot, often far off the grid, and it's usually tough to get through to him.  I last heard from him via a very short text on June 22nd ... he was on the Summit of Mount Denali (McKinley) in Alaska, the tallest mountain in North America ... somehow, a very appropriate place to be for the Summer Solstice.  Don is a mountaineering guide, and has done a lot of summits.   Denali more than once, I know, because he sent me photos a while back of WeatherWool on the top of Denali (20,000+ feet / 6100+ meters).  I'm trying to reach him to verify his address to send a pair of our Cargo Shorts that he will test.  He is a VERY hard tester!  His waist size is either 28 or 30.  But we're out of 30 and only one in 28.  So I'll send him 32 which will be way big but sometimes that's what he wants anyhow.

2026-07-10 ... HoodOrak Video
Cody is working on a bunch of things for us, including a series of videos, one for each of our products.  Here is a sneak-peek at the HoodOrak video.   Unless someone tips us to something that really needs changing, this is the video Cody will post to YouTube, etc., in the next day or so.

   

As far as I can tell, the HoodOrak is unique in having a full-front zip AND side-zips.

 

We will continue to present any WeatherWool news here first.

2026-07-09 ... GUILTY! (Followup from Yesterday)
Yesterday's entry ragged on people who don't offer or link to info that they teased.  Well, thinking about it, I can see that I did exactly that myself.   I wrote about another company and what I thought they should have presented on their website, but did not specify the name of the other company.   FILSON.   I mostly avoid naming other companies because I don't want to create antipathy with other companies or with the people who like their products.   We very much welcome comparison to any others, but generally avoid it ourselves.

   

But several times weekly, people will ask me about the weight of our Fabric or tell me some other company "has 22-ounce wool".   People usually do not know what this means, and it seems like some companies want it that way.   If a company does not give the weight of its fabrics in opsy (ounces per square yard) and/or gsm (grams per square meter), they are hiding important info and, I think, deliberately attempting to mislead.

   

   

We strive for clarity and full disclosure, and if we fall short (I just realized I need to update our COLORS page!), please let me know.

   

Yesterday's entry referenced Filson's Spokane Insulated Cruiser Jacket in Navy.  And while I don't like that they said the product is imported but did not specify WHERE it was imported from, I was mostly focused on the way they present the weight of their wool.

  

A couple of years ago, one of our customers decided to contact several companies about the weights of their fabrics.   He found:

• some customer service reps didn't understand that saying "22 ounce wool" means nothing without units of area
• some of the customer service reps didn't understand the difference between a linear yard and a square yard
• some of the reps didn't know the width of their linear yard
• and at least one company said the width of their linear yard was confidential/proprietary!!

On the above-linked Cruiser page, Filson states once that the fabric is "8-oz./LY" and twice that the fabric is "8-oz."  And not at all that it's really 5.3 opsy because a little web-searching says their LY is 54 inches (1.5 yards).   And while I'm at it, Filson is plenty big enough to show some respect to their customers who use metric.  But, they don't.  Why would that be?   Maybe because metric is typically expressed in gsm and not merely grams.

  

In the late 1970s, SYMS Clothing advertised widely "An educated consumer is our best customer."  The Bawl Street Journal, published annually since 1919, is a parody of the Wall Street Journal, and is published by WSJ.   In '77 or '78, when I first started working with financial journos, Bawl Street headlined "An educated consumer is a threat to the entire industry."  We're with Sy Syms.

   

2026-07-08 ... Free Ship to Canada and Fine Print ... Distracting Info?
Debby was looking at a purchase from a Canadian company, and she noticed they offer free shipping within Canada, EXCEPT ... they might charge $50.  Canada is a big place, and the great majority of Canadians live in Southern Canada, within an hour or so of the border with the USA.  Which means that some Canadians live in remote areas, and those folks are probably used to paying extra for delivery.  Similarly, American companies will often except Hawaii and Alaska from a general Free Delivery policy.  We -- mostly me -- really want to avoid/minimize FINE PRINT.  We avoid EXCEPT.  So we offer free shipping to Canada and USA, without exceptions, and for those customers in remote areas, we do take a hit.

   

We're always trying to figure out how to grow our business, how to communicate more effectively, how to avoid presenting extraneous and/or distracting information.  Something that always annoys me (Debby will note I'm always annoyed about something.) is when a commercial operation doesn't make things convenient or easy for its customers.  Classic example is a newscaster saying something like ONE OF BASEBALL'S BIGGEST NAMES ANNOUNCED RETIREMENT TODAY.  DETAILS AFTER THE BREAK.  The newscaster could have said JOHN SMITH ANNOUNCED RETIREMENT.  DETAILS AFTER THE BREAK.  But of course they want you to sit through the commercials and withholding the name makes it more likely (most?) viewers will wait.  In the garment business, I see product pages -- the pages where you would order a jacket or whatever -- that offer limited information but no links to the info that a lot of people would want.

   

For example, I'm on the website of what some people see as our primary competitor (I don't think we have a direct competitor.), and they say the MATERIAL is "8-oz./LY 80% wool/20% nylon ..." plus polyester and cotton linings and insulation.   Well, how wide is a LY (Linear Yard)?  You don't know the weight of the wool in ounces per square yard (opsy) or grams per square meter (gsm) without knowing the width of their LY.  A linear yard is however wide the loom and finishing equipment make it, and there is no standard, no way to know.  They ought to give the opsy/gsm.  Or at least a link with details.  To me, this is an annoying obfuscation that presents an investigative chore to anyone considering a purchase of this US $449 jacket.  Of course, it could be that they hope their customers are not fully informed.  Some investigation shows that their bolts are normally 54 inches (1.5 yards).  So, their LY is actually 1.5 square yards, and their opsy is 8/1.5=5.3 opsy (181 gsm).  These guys have at least lately taken a step in the right direction though, because they used to just say "8-oz" and not even "fess up" to the still-inadequate LY.

2027-07-04 ... EXTREMELY!
Mostly, it seems appropriate to be mum here on The Big Days.  But we had a bit of a problem with our landing page (our home page, the WeatherWool.com page) this week.   I wanted to commemorate THE FOURTH without commercializing it.  I had wanted to show only the American Flag, but we had trouble with the formatting, so we used an image of Debby and me and a loom, with some MADE IN USA text.  But I felt that was too commercial, so Cody put up another American Flag image.  I panicked a bit when I saw it, because at first it didn't format correctly on my desktop, and came up short one of the stripes!!  But it was perfect on my phone, and when I looked at the desktop again, it was a lot better.  

   

Images can always be a bit of a problem.  People view the website on different physical displays, using different browsers.  A lot of variables.  So, the Flag displayed on the home page now may not display exactly what I wish, but it will stay for another few days.

   

The news keeps asking Americans about pride.  ARE YOU PROUD TO BE AMERICAN?  ... ARE YOU PROUD OF AMERICA?

   

My one-word answer is EXTREMELY.   Extremely proud of USA.   What we have here is a great achievement for mankind.   The history of the world has an awful lot of rough spots, to say the least.   The most reasonable perspective, at least for me, is the comparison of what we have now, to what has been.  And that comparison is wonderful.   Comparison to what could be, or what should be, is valuable and aspirational, but don't form the proper basis for answering the PROUD questions.

   

But also, the two questions are somewhat different.   ARE YOU PROUD OF AMERICA is an easy, instant answer.  EXTREMELY.   The second question, ARE YOU PROUD TO BE AMERICAN, leaves me looking for a word I can't find.   My Dad, in particular, always told me how LUCKY we are to have been born in the USA.  YES.

   

But PROUD is for ACHIEVEMENT.   If you're a piano virtuoso, or even pretty good, you've achieved that, and pride is not misplaced.   But PROUD TO BE AMERICAN?  My nuanced answer is that my American Citizenship is a wildly fortunate circumstance of birth.   I didn't earn it at all.   And hopefully I haven't done much damage, but if I'd never been here?  I don't feel like I've had any significant part on MAKING the USA a Country TO BE PROUD OF.   

   

But the USA offers everyone opportunity to make the Country better, to close the circle.

  

(Clumsy words.  But I feel like I had to address the Flag formatting, and that backed me into the rest of this post.)

2026-07-02 ... Bugs ... Processing Losses ... Isle of Man
I forgot to mention yesterday that LOSSES complicate the allocation.  The wool goes through many processes between the sheep and the shirt.  And actually, the losses begin before we get involved, because we buy only a portion of each fleece.  Our losses include:

   

• Scouring:  About 40-45%, by weight, is gone.  But this loss is not actually wool (dirt, lanolin, sticks ...), and theoretically we did not pay for it
• Carding and combing into WOOL TOP:  Anywhere from 10% to 20% is removed in the form of short fibers (noils) neps (tangled fibers), vegetable matter
• Spinning Worsted Yarn:  About 7%
• Spinning Woolen Yarn:  Anywhere from 2% to 8%
• Dyeing:  Anywhere from 2% to 7%
• Scouring (again):  2% to 3%
• Dressing:  1% to 3%
• Pre-Treatment:  0.5% to 1%
• Weaving:  Anywhere from 3% to 10%
• Finishing:  2% to 3%

Overall, from WOOL TOP to Finished Fabric, we are going to lose anywhere from 12% to 24%.  In the case of Batch 13, our loss going from greasy wool to TOP was 44%, which is very good (we started with clean, high-quality greasy).

As the processing continues, the losses we experience are subtracted from smaller and smaller quantities (weight) of fiber.  So, in a sense, the loss at each step is not as great as much be expected at first glance.  In very round numbers, our processing will hopefully result in Fabric weighing 35% to 40% the weight of the greasy.

After all these years, it doesn't seem like I should be hearing about new stuff.  But I didn't hear about losses in Additional Scouring, Dressing, Pre-Treatment and Finishing until yesterday, in emails from Arthur at American Woolen.  And I don't know anything about these steps, except for Finishing.  A bunch more to learn, as usual.

A few people have lately contacted me with appreciation that mosquitoes and other nasties cannot bite through the wool.  The Fabrics in reference here were Jacquard (FullWeight, MidWeight) and Denim.  I don't know about Whipcord or Heritage.  I think Whipcord will be OK with bugs.  But Heritage is much thinner ...

I always like hearing from people who have our stuff.  And actually, I am grateful for any bad news, which is thankfully rare.  Yesterday, Debby and I got a call from a gent living on the Isle of Man.  He wanted us to know he's been wearing his Blazer for rugged outdoor play and work and to indoor-office meetings.   Temperatures down to -35C (-31F), fly-fishing in the snow and rain.  Said the Blazer still good as new.  THANK YOU.

I've been aware that there are numerous islands around Great Britain, and that some of them are politically and governmentally separate from England and UK.  So, I just looked it up.  The Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey -- we have customers on each of them -- are all independently governed ... separate from each other and from the United Kingdom.  Although still associated with Great Britain, they function like their own countries.  I'd like to visit some day.

 

2026-07-01 ... Medium Blankets ... Allocating Batch 13 ... MADE IN USA ... 2026 Fade?!
We have a few Medium Blankets on hand now in FullWeight Drab and FullWeight Lynx.  These just came in yesterday, and we'll fill the remaining Medium Blanket pre-orders today.  But there are a handful of extras.  Also going out today will be the FullWeight Lynx King Blankets.  We did have one extra FullWeight Lynx King, but that disappeared overnight, shortly after I put it on the website.  More Blankets coming later this month.

   

Main thing I need to do today is make the Batch 13 Fabric allocations.  That is, we need to decide how much of each Fabric, and each color, we will make.  Or, at least, try to make.   We make five different Fabrics (five different weaves), in ten different colors, woven by two different companies, with three different types of yarn spun by two different companies.  All of the companies upon which we rely have their own timetables and limitations.  And we need to think about what garments we want to make before we know what Fabrics to make.  It gets complicated quickly.  My planning will be assisted a whole lot by Lorelei and Arthur at American Woolen.

   

MADE IN USA ... I'm glad that, more and more, people want to know where things are made.   Many American companies are offering some products that are made in USA and some/most that are not.  And even among the "Made in USA" products, there is a lot of wiggle room.   Such as "Made in the USA of imported materials."  There are a lot of ways to finesse and obfuscate origins.   It's important to us to be forthright about everything, and we are always 100% USA.  This does not seem complicated.  But how we express it actually is a little complicated, at least from my POV.   Patches (her WeatherWool-name, and she is too shy to actually be intro'd properly on the website!) has been working on reformatting our product pages, along with Cody.   They had suggested a format that follows along with some of the big-company websites.  But I am concerned that a product page with a sub-heading such as:

   

ORIGIN:  USA

MADE IN:  USA

SOURCING:  USA

  

will cause some people to infer that we might offer products that are not Made In USA, or are not 100% USA.  So, I've been difficult to deal with regarding these few words.  Our product pages did not previously have this type of sub-head, we'd just say something about 100% USA somewhere in the descriptive text.   But we're trying to streamline, and present the info in a more-accessible format.   As of this morning, I'm leaning toward a declaration in the form of a sub-heading:

   

WeatherWool is always MADE IN USA 100%

   

Today is July 1st ... half of 2026 is already in the books.  WOW!

2026-06-30 ... Ask AI If We Should Use AI
Well, this is amazing.  I asked perplexity.com (freely available to anyone):

Yes — WeatherWool should use AI, but as a support tool, not as the voice of the brand. Ralph already says he’s seeing customers guided by AI in clothing purchases, and that people have even called because AI answered WeatherWool for questions like “who makes the best wool jacket?”weatherwool+1

Why it helps

AI can help WeatherWool reach people who would never otherwise search for wool, especially as the brand tries to introduce wool to a broader audience beyond existing wool buyers. Ralph also notes that his own recent focus is expanding beyond hardcore users and into style, fit, fashion, and broader education about wool’s benefits.weatherwool+1

It can also improve discoverability and shopping decisions. WeatherWool’s own blog says AI is already affecting buying behavior, and its 2026 posts show the company thinking about automated promotions, collaborator discovery, and how web platforms may increasingly route customers through machine-driven recommendations.weatherwool+1

Best uses

• • Product recommendation help, such as matching a customer to ShirtJac, All-Around Jacket, HoodOrak, or another piece based on climate, activity, fit, and budget.

  • A conversational shopping assistant on the site that answers “what should I wear for X?” and “which WeatherWool piece is best for me?”

  • Search and content help, so customers can quickly find the right blog post, fabric explanation, size guidance, or care info.

  • Customer service triage for common questions, while keeping final answers human when needed.

  • Internal help for drafting product descriptions, summarizing customer feedback, and spotting repeated questions that should become FAQ content.

How to do it

Start small with a website assistant trained only on WeatherWool’s own content: product pages, FAQs, blog posts, and policies. That fits the company’s style because Ralph is wary of handing the brand over to robots, while still being open to using AI where it helps customers find the right wool.weatherwool+1

A practical rollout would be:

1. 1. Add an AI shopping guide on product pages.

   2. Feed it a controlled knowledge base from WeatherWool pages only.

   3. Use it to recommend products, sizes, and use-cases.

   4. Route uncertain questions to a human.

   5. Track whether it increases conversion, fewer returns, and more email/phone leads.

What to avoid

Do not let AI write the brand’s public voice, invent product claims, or automate ads without review. WeatherWool’s blog shows skepticism about fully automated promotions and “robots” making decisions about where ads go, so the safer approach is human oversight with AI assistance in the background.weatherwool+1

Do not use generic AI copy for technical clothing claims either, because WeatherWool’s differentiation depends on specificity: fabric, sourcing, durability, climate performance, and service. If AI is sloppy there, it would weaken trust instead of building it.

Good first experiment

The best first project is a WeatherWool fit-and-use advisor. It could ask three or four questions — climate, activity, layer preference, and whether the buyer wants shirt-like, coat-like, or hardcore outerwear — then recommend 1–3 pieces with reasons pulled from WeatherWool’s own site content.weatherwool+1

Would you like a concrete AI rollout plan for WeatherWool, including the exact chatbot prompts and site pages to connect first?

Perplexity needed about two seconds for this response.  People who are used to AI will not be surprised.   And even ancient-old-me is only half-surprised.   But that doesn't mean I'm not amazed!

   

People can always phone me, but I know a lot of people would prefer to interact with a chatbot, at least initially, at least sometimes, knowing a human is also always available.   I suppose that's where we start.

   

I'm still far from ready (I think I am!) for the AGENTIC STOREFRONTS that can be implemented on this site with the click of a switch (Blog of 2026-01-13), but it seems time to offer a chatbot ... along with our phone number.

   

   

2026-06-29 ... Sunburn / UPF ... Smuggling Dirty Textiles ... Djibouti ... Desk Deer
Summertime is when people focus most on sunburn, and how to prevent it.  Yesterday, I saw a claim that all UPF (Ultraviolet Protection Factor) fabrics are synthetic.  Near as I can determine, this is NOT so.  Wool is believed to offer significant protection against ultraviolet radiation.   I have not looked into this much.   And I'm actually more on the side of the benefits of sunshine (even though I burn easily) than the dangers.   I'm also not at all convinced the sunscreen lotions are benign.  But again, I don't claim to know anything.  I will offer that we have done some grade-school level research, and we did get approval of the content of our SUNBURN page from a customer who also is a dermatologist.   I know this gentleman a little, and believe his sole focus is the welfare of his patients.

   

Being from Jerseyland, this should not surprise me.   But I'd never thought about mislabeling textile waste in order to enable lower-cost disposal!!  Europe has some strict laws regarding recycling and disposal of textiles.   Authorities in Italy and Turkey have uncovered large-scale trafficking/smuggling of mismarked waste textile.   About 4200 tons of textile waste with a high percentage of non-biodegradable acrylic was mislabeled and sent to Turkey, where it it could be disposed of cheaper than in Italy.  ... Gee, a surprise-reason to be happy we are working with wool!

   

Last night I was speaking with a Navy Vet who ordered an Anorak for himself.   He told me he'd become familiar with WeatherWool in about 2018, when he was stationed in Djibouti (a new country on our list!) on anti-piracy operations.   Some guys from the 5th Special Forces Group (Green Berets) reco'd their own WarriorWool, and let him try it out. 

I've mentioned occasionally that Nature always responds, and adaptation is a big part of that.   When I was a boy, 1960s, seeing a whitetail meant you were in a truly rural area.  But the whitetails have expanded their range into suburbs ... bigtime.  WeatherWool HQ is in South Orange, NJ, which has been fully developed for something like 100 years.  Deer were absent from here for a long time.  When we moved into our house in 1984, there were no deer in the neighborhoods.   But they are here now.   While I was doing this blog entry, I noticed a buck nibbling the shrubs about, literally, four feet (not much more than 1 meter) from my nose:

We do have a DEER IN JERSEY page ...

2026-06-28 ... NEVER MIND THE PREVIOUS ENTRY ... WeatherWool Story
Cody and Debby gave me an earful -- two earsful -- regarding my previous entry about AI.  I'll follow up on this subject, but for now ... disregard the previous.   Way back in my Bell Labs days, we were supposed to keep a record of all our meetings and ideas in the official Bell Labs Notebooks.  Even though my notes weren't RESEARCH, and had little or no value at the corporate level, management wanted all of us to use those notebooks.   And one of the rules was DON'T DELETE.  DON'T ERASE.  DON'T PULL PAGES, no matter how wrong or foolish you think the entry might be.  If you decide something is wrong, make a note of that, or draw a single line through whatever you think is bad.  SO ... the previous entry will sit here.

   

Cody has decided it's time to do The WeatherWool Story.   We'll put it on YouTube, and there will be footage of me talking, plus some stills with text and excerpts of other videos.  We'll probably even badger "volunteers" into participating.  If anyone has an idea for content, please LMK.

  

WOW, Enjoy the last Sunday of June.   July is almost here, and WOW, USA is about to turn 250 years old.

   

2026-06-26 ... AI or NOT AI?
It's very important to me to present clear and complete information here.  Sometimes I feel like that results in TMI (Too Much Info), which is a separate, related issue.

  

This morning I was looking at the photo below, which was part of a real estate listing.  

   

The geese look fake to me.  I think this is an AI image.  Maybe there is a way to be sure, and I'd like to know how.  I asked grok.com if the image was real, and grok thought it was.  Then I told grok the geese looked fake, and grok said something like YEAH, ON CLOSER EXAMINATION, THE GEESE LOOK FAKE.  Grok explained that real estate agents frequently "enhance' photos by inserting images of animals.  My guess is that nothing in this image is real.  Maybe they started with a photo, and had AI touch it up in various ways.  The grass looks too lush and too perfect.  I feel like it's been touched up or faked entirely.  And the tire tracks in the foreground?  The reflections in the water?

   

I've already decided that we WILL use AI-generated imagery because it's >99% cheaper and 1000 times faster than using an actual model and an actual photographer on a real location.  (Apologies to the models, photographers and travel industry!)  But when we use artificial images, we'll add an AI label in the corner of the image.

   

This real estate photo, and the rapidly growing use of AI imagery has me thinking we will also need to add a "NOT AI" label in the corner of actual photos.  That seems kind of crazy, and I expect it's not going to sit well with Cody, but I don't want people wondering if we've faked stuff.  This exact situation has already come up, and I was the one who thought real imagery was fake.  In a month or two, we will release a video with some extreme content that is real, and some routine-filler imagery that is AI.  We've added explanatory text to the video to make clear what is real and what is AI.

   

2026-06-25 ... Stridewise Photo ... DOs and DON'Ts ... Debby Strikes Again!
Nick (pls see entry from yesterday) reminded me he's sent a flock of great photos that we are welcome to use.  AND I really should have used a photo yesterday ... so ...

ALSO ... Nick and Troy are smiling!  Hooray for that!  I don't understand it, but for clothing, anyway, somehow the idea is that models should not smile.  Cody tells me it's because a smiling model distracts from the clothing.  Well, maybe a smiling model would attract attention of people who might not otherwise notice.  But also, I hope people LIKE wearing our clothing.  One customer actually wrote me that he feels like he is wearing HAPPINESS.  What could be better than that!!??  For us and for anyone in our clothing?  We're planning on more and more smiles ...  Along these lines, I updated our DOs and DON'Ts page, which describes some of our contrarian ways.

My Sweetheart loves machines, having worked with her Dad in his factory since childhood ... and she is a lifelong knitter ... AND ... there is a long-established, very friendly, very flexible knitting factory a short drive from our home.  So, Debby disappears herself to Fleck Knitwear pretty often.  Matt and Peter have done a bunch of custom and experimental work for her on their many machines.  (This is how Debby was able to replace the synthetic shock-cord with our own wool yarn on the pulls for the Anorak Hoods.)  One of the latest is a knitted scarf with a sort of sliding color scale.

Weaving our Jacquard Fabrics requires an astounding (to me!) array of cones holding the thousands (literally) of warp yarns that run lengthwise through our bolts of Fabric.  When the weaving is done, there is inevitably leftover yarn.   Maybe not much on each cone.  But there are A LOT OF CONES!   And generally, the remaining yarn would be waste.  But Debby is using the leftover warp yarn to do various things, and the scarves in the photo above are an example.  I love the way the colors/contrasts shade from one end of the scarf to the other.

Knitting is so different from weaving, and offers so many additional possibilities.  In many ways, getting into knitting is like starting a new company.  But the possibilities, including a great outlet for (expensive!) yarn that we could otherwise not use, is irresistible.   GREAT WORK, DEBBY, PETER, MATT.

2026-06-24 ... Instagram / Stridewise ... Three Generations ... Transatlantic Wool
Several months ago, we hosted Nick English (Founder) and Troy Barmore of Stridewise.  Nick and his team scour (and travel) the globe looking for serious footwear and apparel.  They purchase and test the objects of their attention, and publish reviews on their website as well as social media.  Today, the Stridewise Instagram account posted a video of their interview with me.  They really picked up on the concept that I think is key to wool:  Wool is clothing made by Nature.  We use wool for the purpose intended by Nature.  It was great meeting you guys!  Thanks for the time and efforts to get to know us and what we do.  Hope to see you again. ... Lastly, Nick just bought a Chore Coat, which he had us ship to him in Australia, where Winter is just getting started.  (I love our wool being in the Southern Hemisphere!)   THANKS AGAIN and All the BEST to Troy and Nick and the Stridewise Team!

   

Tracy Machle (names used with permission!), once-and-future owner of a Women's Chore Coat, on Monday decided she needed to exchange for a smaller size.  Yesterday she told me that her daughter commandeered the Chore Coat and that her Dad, Barry Richmond, would buy another for Tracy.  Barry has some of our wool for himself, also.  Except for people inside WeatherWool, I don't remember any other families with three generations in our wool.  HUGE THANKS for this!! 

    

About an hour ago, David from Yorkshire, England, sent an interesting note:

In the mid 1970s, an adventurer called Tim Severin decided to try and demonstrate that a 6th century Irish monk called Saint Brendan the Navigator really could have sailed to North America, as folkore claims.  He and his team built a traditional, 32 foot curragh - think long and broad birch bark canoe, but with an oxhide skin and carrying masts and sails.  The vessel departed from County Kerry, Ireland in May of 1976, intending to follow Brendan’s most likely route Westwards via the Hebrides, the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland to Newfoundland.  They successfully reached the Faroes where they “acquired” a storm-hardened fisherman, Trondur Patursson, as an additional crew member.  The account of the next leg of the voyage records the following: 

Trondur would emerge bear-like from the forward shelter to take his turn at the helm, and on the first windswept evening he taught us another useful trick.  From his pocket he pulled out a pair of shapeless oiled wool mittens.  To our astonishment, before he put them on, he leaned over the side and dunked them, warm and dry, into the water, squeezed them out, then put them on half-sodden.  “It’s better,” he said. ’Not so cold later.”  He was quite right; the gloves acted like wet-suit gloves and reduced the wind’s chill.

I thought you might find the above interesting.  Neither Trondur's behaviour, nor its recounting were influenced by the high-tech fibre vs. natural-fibre wars, and nobody was trying to plug a product!  It was just a man guided by tradition, upbringing and direct personal experience.  By-the-by, in June of 1977 the Curragh made landfall at Peckford Island, Newfoundland.  They had some “scrapes” along the way, but made the journey unaided.  Naturally their feat did not prove that the Irish reached the New World before the Vikings, but it brought the possibility into the realm of proper debate rather than wild imaginings.

   

From the wool perspective, I definitely find Brendan and Trondur interesting!!.   Before WeatherWool, when we were distributors of woolens made by others, one customer bought a crazy amount of socks.  They told me a group of them would be trekking a long way in the Canadian Winter, without boots.  They would wear layers of wool socks.  They said their technique was to dip the socks in water, so they froze, and layer them.  (??? I know, but that's all I remember.)   Trondur-style gloves are not unbelievable to me, particularly because they probably had plenty of lanolin still in the wool.  The Vikings routinely used wool for sails.

I'd never heard of Saint Brendan or of Tim Severin, but I am a big believer in the possibilities and the achievements of long ago, and this wonderful Irish folklore is believable to me.  Built into us is a strong drive to test limits, to see the unknown, to leap without knowing where we will land.  Only a little bit ago, Artemis II/Integrity and her crew returned from a voyage to the Dark (far) Side of the Moon.   A bit of searching turns up claims that Columbus relied on Brendan's logs for his own plans to travel West by a Southerly route and East by a Northerly route, to take advantage of favorable winds and currents.  I loved Thor Heyerdahl's Kon Tiki, and wish I'd known about Severin at the time!  I have no doubt that huge numbers of voyagers made all sorts of land and sea voyages through the ages.

Debby and I had a wonderful day or two in York/Yorkshire in 2009.  One highlight was the locals, and Debby, having good sport with me because I'd driven the wrong way down a somewhat congested parking lane that was full of pedestrians.  All in slow-motion and all in good fun.  I was off-balance keeping left and driving from the right side of the vehicle.  I did find it easy to shift left-handed, and it was a good way to help Debby learn to drive a four-on-the-floor ... she could just rest her right hand on top of my hand while I shifted.   That evening, at the hotel, I wanted to order blood pudding at dinner.   The waiter saw Debby's reluctance, so they brought the blood pudding at no charge.  I remember the kindness, and don't remember the pudding.