Here for the Long Run

There’s nothing quite like the Taihape hills. I grew up one valley away from Ruanui Station, where Andrew’s family farmed. He was a friend of my brothers. I went away to boarding school and then on to Massey University, completing a Bachelor of Horticulture before doing stints in America and England. I never thought I’d end up back in Taihape, but of course I fell in love with the boy next door! I returned from overseas and the rest is history.

Andrew and I have been married for twenty-eight years. The first twenty-odd years were dedicated to raising our four beautiful children, Olivia, 26, Sophie, 24, Lilly, 21, and William, 18. They’re what I’m most proud of in my life. Raising children at Ruanui Station has been so special– they’ve had the same rural roots that Andrew and I grew up with, and they love these Taihape hills as much as we do.

Our children will be the fourth generation on Ruanui Station. We run 17,000 Romney sheep, an Angus stud and red deer. Andrew’s family has put decades of breeding and work into the sheep, so seeing the wool industry decline over the years has been heartbreaking. Sick of being on the phone with our wool broker and leaving the conversation feeling so downtrodden, we’d talked about doing something with our wool for a while. So when Covid-19 hit, and wool prices plummeted further, I found myself digging around the internet for ways to make our own blankets. I grew up with Mum spinning raw sheep fleeces in our front lounge – we always had beautifully big, scratchy blankets that smelt like pure wool, so blankets were a natural fit for us. There are so many benefits of wool. It’s natural, biodegradable, odour- and fire-resistant, the list goes on. We really wanted to see it back in people’s everyday lives.

By November 2020 our first blankets arrived. We featured in TVNZ’s Sunday programme and launched the business that night. The publicity from the episode blew us away – we were off! Looking back, we were so naive about what we were doing. I don’t think I’d be able to create a business in five months now! We’re very lucky to have a marketing genius in our team – our oldest daughter, Olivia. She’s a graphic designer and does all of our social media and marketing. If it wasn’t for her, our brand wouldn’t be where it is.

We’re now in our fourth year of business and the growth of our range is amazing. We’ve done things like collaborate with Palmerston North jersey brand MKM, and it’s been really cool to meet others behind wool businesses in New Zealand. We have brilliant manufacturers here in New Zealand who make an exceptionally high-quality product for us. Our wool is scoured in Napier, milled in Lower Hutt and then woven in Auckland. Though we’ve been approached by some overseas factories, we believe it’s so important we use local businesses. We need them just as much as they need us.

Once everyone’s back from Christmas break, we do our main shear. January is our busiest month – it’s all hands on deck. It takes about two weeks to shear all our ewes and lambs, then the lambs’ wool is off to get scoured and the next round of weaving blankets begins. Times are pretty tough in farming right now, with high interest rates, poor market prices and an increasing amount of compliance, so the blankets have given our passion for farming a bit of a boost. Andrew and I design the blankets together. He likes to have his say and it’s lovely to have a sounding board – we bounce ideas off each other. Of course, my girls have opinions too! Though days on the farm can be hard and absolutely manic, and we don’t know yet how far the blanket business will take us, we’d love to hand it on to the children one day and see it continue.

Pre-Covid, our wool was shipped to China and we’d never know what it was made into. We would load it onto a truck and that was that. So having a tangible feel of our wool products is hard to describe – it’s really emotional. We name each blanket after our paddocks, so having a piece of Ruanui bring people joy is pretty cool. We like to say we’re bringing strong wool back one blanket at a time! We’re here for the long run with our wool.