Julia and Guillaume here, the founders of Loom. We’re picking up the pen today to tell you about an injustice that’s been weighing on us. It concerns the fine-knit sweater, whose 3rd generation has just come out. We first launched this piece in 2019, in 100% merino wool. Like any wool sweater, it looks good, it’s warm, it doesn’t fade and it doesn’t stretch out. But it has one big flaw.

Several customers tell us that, because it’s so fine, the sweater quickly wears through at the elbows. So we stop selling it. And we look for a solution. We dive into a whirlwind of lab tests and prototype launches to confirm or rule out every one of our hypotheses.

Hypothesis 1: Do other brands’ fine wool sweaters wear through as quickly as ours?  Yes, even the €39.90 one from Uniqlo.

Hypothesis 2 : Does adding a bit of synthetic fibre work? No.

Hypothesis 3 : Can we knit it with synthetic fibre added only at the elbows? Yes, but then the sweater becomes ridiculously expensive…

After a few months, we have to face facts: we need to launch this fine-knit sweater… in 100% cotton. Because when it comes to abrasion, it’s no contest: cotton is far more resistant than wool.

So in 2020, we release the 2nd generation of our fine-knit sweater, in Egyptian organic cotton with deep colours. This time, no more holes at the elbows… but we’ve lost the benefits of wool: odour resistance, warmth and shape retention. Don’t get us wrong: this sweater is really not bad (our customers give it an average rating of 4.8/5), but we just can’t bring ourselves to be satisfied with it. So, here too, we decide to stop selling it. We tell ourselves we’ll never manage to make a fine-knit sweater that’s both warm and durable, and we drop the project. Until one day in February 2024, when a factory tells us about a 53% wool, 47% cotton blend yarn. And then,  LIGHTBULB MOMENT: could this be the answer to a fine-knit sweater that’s warm, good-looking, and resistant to losing its shape AND to abrasion? Without a second thought, we develop a prototype and test it in the lab. The results:

Champagne! We hug, we cry, we start a conga line: at last, we’ve found the revolutionary process for making a fine-knit sweater that holds up. We can finally launch our 3rd-generation fine-knit sweater. Except that when we tell the rest of the team about this INCREDIBLE innovation, we get awkward silences at best, and more often than not, barely concealed mockery: “wow, you’ve made a sweater in a wool-cotton blend…”

Luckily, it’s all water off a duck’s back. We won’t be inviting them to the ceremony when we win first prize at the Concours Lépine, France’s famous inventors’ competition.

Julia & Guillaume