Our Story
Woolen Kin is a small, woman-owned business, which is the formal way of saying that it's me, a laptop, and a mill in northern Portugal that knows exactly what it's doing.
I'm Aleksandra. I live in the Seattle area, and I've thought about socks a great deal more than any reasonable person should. This is how that happened.
I didn't build a mill. I found one.
Or really, they found me.
I get a lot of emails from factories, and most of them are trying to sell me something I don't want. This one wasn't. It just said what they do, plainly: Italian wool, twelve years, socks and nothing else. No brand of their own, no interest in starting one.
I'll admit I was flattered. You spend years hearing about Western European quality the way you hear about weather somewhere you've never been, and then one morning it's sitting in your inbox asking if you'd like to work together.
What convinced me
I've been selling socks for eight years under my sister brand, Siberia Spirit. Those are goat hair, which is a different animal in every sense of the phrase, so I came to this knowing exactly what a well-made sock feels like in my hands and knowing almost nothing about this particular wool.
Then the samples arrived, and the question rather answered itself. Twelve years of making one thing and one thing only turns out to be something you can feel almost immediately.
Who does what
Every design is mine. All twenty in this first collection, drawn here and knit there. Nothing came out of anybody's catalog, and you won't find these patterns sitting on someone else's shelf under a different name.
They start as a grid on my laptop, in a program built for exactly this, one small square for every single stitch. It's slower than it sounds. I love doing it anyway, and not only because I like how the designs turn out.
It's the making of something where there was nothing at all, and then watching other people take pleasure in it. I've never found that feeling anywhere else, and I've gone looking.
There's a particular kind of pleasure in the moment a bee stops being a scatter of colored boxes and simply becomes a bee. Here's Honey Garden before it was a sock, and after.
The chart, and the finished pair.
Why it matters how a sock is made
Most socks are made to be replaced, and everybody involved knows it. Thin cotton, loose knit, six to a pack, bought in the full expectation of buying them all over again in a few months.
There's something quietly dispiriting about owning things that were designed to disappoint you on a schedule.
I wanted the opposite of that. A sock worth keeping is a sock worth wearing, and a sock made properly can be worn for a very long time indeed. That's the whole of it, really.
Made to be worn. Not stored.
Merino does a lot of the work here. It breathes, it resists odor all by itself, and it doesn't need washing after every single wear, which matters more than people realize, because washing is most of what wears a sock out in the first place.
The rest of it is the knitting, and the knitting is their part.
What's in the sock
70% merino wool, 27% polyamide, 3% elastane. The wool is spun in Italy. The socks are knit in northern Portugal, in small batches of 250 pairs per design. Everything else is drawn on my laptop.
That's the whole supply chain, and it's short on purpose.