Knitwear company Norsewear was born in the small town of Norsewood more than 60 years ago, and continues to champion New Zealand wool in its creations, writes Molly Codyre.
Halfway between Palmerston North and Hastings on State Highway 2 sits a small town with a cafe, a pub,
This small town of just 150 residents was first settled in 1872 by 750 Norwegians brought to New Zealand to work in the logging industry – hence the flags. But it was this reminder of home that attracted Ola Rian, a former Norwegian army captain turned keen skier.
Rian was first drawn to New Zealand in the late 1950s by the mountains. Taking to some of the country’s best peaks, he spent an extended period down under navigating pistes and couloirs of the Southern Alps, picking up a few trophies along the way. Upon his return to Norway, a stroke of fate saw Rian cross paths with Shirley, a New Zealander on her OE. They quickly fell in love and moved back to New Zealand, where Rian worked in selling insurance before going on to serve as Acting General Consul for Norway. In their spare time, the pair set up Norsewear, a Scandi-style sock and hat company using New Zealand wool, in their front room in Wellington.
As part of his official role, Rian travelled to Norsewood’s annual Scandinavian festival – which still takes place to this day. This little slice of Norway in the heart of Hawke’s Bay happened to be home to an empty general store and a disused dairy factory. Drawn in by the similarities to home and proximity to the mountains, Rian took a leap and moved his family and the production of Norsewear to the fittingly named town.
Sixty years later, Tim Deane bought Norsewear in a bid to revive and futureproof this iconic Kiwi brand. Norsewear has had a front row seat to some of New Zealand’s most epic adventures: Sir Edmund Hillary’s traverse of Aoraki/Mt Cook in 1971, Chris Womersley’s stint at the 1972 Winter Olympics, Graham Dingle’s 1975 summit of Everest and, now, as the supplier of socks for the NZ Defence Force’s frontline personnel.
In the early 2000s, many “New Zealand” brands took their production offshore, benefiting from the much lower labour costs that production in regions like Southeast Asia offered. Factories slowly closed, cutting down a once-thriving clothing manufacturing industry. Now, the fact that Norsewear produces most of its products in New Zealand is almost revolutionary – something it’s taking one step further in partnering with PGG Wrightsons Wool Integrity programme to buy its wool directly from farmers in the South Island, creating a fully traceable supply chain.
“Changing the way we buy wool and source yarn from that wool is really interesting because it’s been very hard to do; it goes against the way the whole industry is set up,” Deane tells me. “It’s not easy, and it continues to be a challenge, but what we’ve noticed is that the actual yarn we’re getting is much better quality through exactly the same spinning mills, and that’s because there’s no blending of inferior quality wool with good wool on the way through. Which means you can actually show off what decent New Zealand wool is like.”
It means that the wool going into the Norsewear products is some of the finest produced in New Zealand. From a product perspective, that wool is going to perform better and last longer, creating technical socks that will deliver performance and durability.
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The wool is grown in New Zealand, and the products themselves are woven in Norsewood on high-tech Lonati machines that the team at the Norsewear factory have adapted to work on wool, but the in-between process – taking the raw fibres and scouring them, combing them and turning them into tops which are then spun into worsted spun yarn – can’t happen in New Zealand, because those factories don’t exist.
“We clearly grow the best wool in the world,” Deane explains. “But we have to get it scoured and spun offshore.” It’s just one example of the challenges faced by a company trying to make New Zealand products in New Zealand.
For Deane, it’s not about offering the cheapest socks; it’s an alternative, two-fold approach.
“We’ve taken a different track,” he says. “We have very high-quality yarn, which is made to our specification from New Zealand wool. We’ve got the latest Italian sock knitting technology with the most modern sock knitting machines in the Southern Hemisphere right now. We have very clever sock engineers.
“And then we have the provenance – it’s made in New Zealand, from New Zealand wool. When you add all those things together, consumers are willing to pay a little bit more because of the quality; because it lasts for a long time, the actual cost per wear is cheaper than buying a cheap, imported three-pack made of synthetics. It’s that trade-off around offering consumer value rather than just the cheapest price.”
Beyond just price, though, it’s about fostering a sense of community in this small town in rural New Zealand, and serving as a litmus test for what can happen when you invest in jobs around the country. A couple of senior Norsewear employees are on the volunteer fire brigade, dropping everything to run out and help as soon as the sirens ring. They continue to get paid for their time, whether they’re gone for one hour or five – it’s just part of small-town life.
“If you’re the major employer in the town, which we are, and the town knows that you’re important, when the chips are down, everyone rallies round,” Deane explains, joking that if a fire ever broke out at the factory they’d have the “fire brigade on tap”.
When it comes to trying to inspire others to do what Norsewear has done, Deane says the only way to change things is to demonstrate success and become a case study for what can be done.
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“To me, the best thing we can do is demonstrate that it works,” Deane explains.
“What we’re trying to do is bring goodness back home by taking Norsewear to the world. And that might sound twee, but we’re trying to grow our local economy, create local jobs, and add value to the wool so that we can pay farmers a bit more.”
It might, at face value, just look like some merino socks being made in a small, Norwegian-associated town in the middle of the North Island, but what Norsewear is doing is so much more than that. It’s about building New Zealand business, creating jobs, and fostering a world where manufacturing in New Zealand can be viable once again. It might be a town of just 150 people, but there’s big change happening in Norsewood.
As Deane says, “I wore Norsewear socks when I was 15. I’ve still got them. It would be such a shame to lose that.”
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