COVER’s second podcast is titled ‘Creative Matters Inc. on wool, trends and future plans’. COVER Editor Lucy Upward talks to Carol Sebert and Ali McMurter, two of the managing partners at Creative Matters Inc. Here is an excerpt

Carol, why did you get involved with the International Wool Textile Organisation?

Well, the IWTO has been around for ninety-two years and none of us has heard of them because their focus is wool,  animal husbandry and  mostly apparel, so Merino wools. They didn’t have a group focusing on interiors. There wasn’t a position before, so I am the first chair person of the working group for interiors for the IWTO. Wool carpeting is a huge part of the wool story. Our mandate is to talk about all the fabulous aspects of wool. I have learnt so much more about wool even though I have been working with it for thirty-five years. We knew it was one of the best fibres but we didn’t know why. So I have learnt about strong wool, which is mosly made in New Zealand and the UK. 

What does the group aim to do?

Our first project was to work out what the hurdles were for the industry. We did a survey and we found out that one of the big problems is that people believe that wool is hard to clean. We should be able to manage that, producing some information about cleaning wool, and hopefully it will go through from stakeholders right through thr supply chain to the end user. 

To listen to the full podcast ‘COVER Conversations: Creative Matters Inc. on wool, trends and future plans.’ see below: