A waterfall, a carding mill and a collapse.

Ístex is a young company in an old building. Its spinning mill stands in Mosfellsbær, just outside Reykjavík, on a site where wool has been worked since 1896. Icelandic Wikipedia says the mill began that year when Björn Þorláksson, a farmer at Varmá, imported machinery and drove it with water from the Álafoss waterfall on the Varmá river; it began as a carding works and changed hands until the brothers Einar and Sigurjón Pétursson took control and widened its range of wool goods. English Wikipedia says the falls played a major role in the founding and growth of the town.

Before 1991 the business traded as Álafoss. In a 2017 feature in the Reykjavík Grapevine, Ístex’s then managing director, Guðjón Kristinsson, described the old company as having had about 200 employees and trading with Europe and the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he said, Álafoss lost about half its business, and it went into receivership in 1991.

Ístex — short for Íslenskur textíliðnaður, Icelandic Textile Industry — took over the operation that year. “Ístex was started for the farmers, to keep up their production,” Kristinsson told the Grapevine. The company itself says wool processing in Mosfellsbær has run without a break since 1896, “previously under the name Álafoss,” and Iceland Review, quoting the company’s website in 2023, gave the founding year as 1991. The old name survives in the yarn called Álafoss Lopi.

Scoured in the north, spun near the capital.

Lopi is the yarn Ístex is known for. English Wikipedia describes it as knitting wool made from the fleece of Icelandic sheep, whose coat combines long, coarse, water-resistant outer fibres with a soft, insulating undercoat; the two are processed together. Unspun lopi was first used for knitting around the 1920s, and lightly spun versions followed. The thicker lopi yarns are the usual material for the lopapeysa, the yoked Icelandic sweater, whose name simply means “lopi sweater.”

Ístex’s range runs from Plötulopi, an unspun strand sold in flat 100-gram plates that knitters combine to the thickness they want, through the bulky Álafoss Lopi and Léttlopi, which the company describes as half its thickness, to the fine Einband for shawls and lace. It says the yarns are made in hundreds of colours, alongside natural undyed shades of white, grey, black and brown. It also publishes numbered Lopi pattern books, sells single patterns through a separate pattern site, weaves blankets and cushion covers, and has added duvets filled with Icelandic wool.

The work is split between two places. The company says it runs a wool-scouring plant at Blönduós in the north and a spinning and yarn mill in Mosfellsbær, and that it buys wool directly from farmers and washes and processes about 99 per cent of all Icelandic wool; English Wikipedia and Iceland Review also describe it as processing most of the country’s wool. The Grapevine reported the same division in 2021: wool gathered by Ístex is taken to Blönduós to be washed and sorted. The company says the washed wool from Blönduós is certified to STANDARD 100 by OEKO-TEX.

On its 2017 visit the Grapevine described a 7,500-square-metre factory in Mosfellsbær where wool was dyed and blended into colour mixes, dried, spun and wound. Kristinsson gave figures for the supply: about 2,000 farmers shearing some 1,000 tonnes of wool a year, reduced to about 750 usable tonnes after washing, of which roughly 400 tonnes of the best went into knitting yarn and much of the second-class wool was exported to Britain, mainly for upholstery and carpets.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all sell yarn for hand knitting and crochet, and they come from seven countries: Sirdar from the United Kingdom, Lana Grossa from Germany, Ístex from Iceland, Manos del Uruguay from Uruguay, Brooklyn Tweed from the United States, Filatura di Crosa from Italy and Hjertegarn from Denmark. What sets them apart is less the colour card than the question behind every ball: where the wool comes from, and who spins it.

The answers differ widely. Some yarn is washed and spun by a national wool processor that takes in a country’s own fleece; some is made by artisan cooperatives, where the people who dye and twist the fibre share in the business; some comes out of an old spinning district, where generations of mills grew up beside the same rivers; and some is sold by brands that design the yarn and its colours but commission mills to make it. Each route leaves its mark on a brand’s name, its labels and the way it talks about wool.

Each guide also separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now and where its yarn is made — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A company owned by the people who supply it.

Ístex’s ownership has shifted towards its suppliers. In 2017 Kristinsson told the Grapevine that 47 per cent of the company was owned by three employees, with the rest owned by around 2,000 farmers “who are slowly buying it out.” By May 2023 Iceland Review reported that Icelandic farmers owned 80 per cent, and the company now says farmers hold more than 80 per cent and offers shares to the farmers who supply its wool.

That relationship shows in the news the company makes. In May 2023, Iceland Review reported, citing an interview in the farmers’ paper Bændablaðið, that the Ístex board had raised the price it pays farmers for wool by an average of more than 48 per cent, after a strong run of results; the chief executive, Sigurður Sævar Gunnarsson, linked the recovery to an evening shift added to knitting-yarn production in Mosfellsbær in the autumn of 2021, and named a new spinning machine as the year’s biggest investment.

Demand had swung sharply in the years before. In 2016 the Grapevine reported the company hiring and running double shifts as lopapeysa sales grew, and warning, through Kristinsson, about imported knock-offs sold as Icelandic. In November 2020 Iceland Review reported that wool exports had risen by 70 per cent during the pandemic, with Gunnarsson describing one or two forty-foot containers of hand-knitting yarn leaving each week; in May 2021 the Grapevine reported shortages in shops at home and abroad, and quoted him: “We do not have more machines.”

Two names nearby are easy to confuse with Ístex. The Álafoss name, which Ístex keeps on a yarn, is also used by a wool shop and gallery beside the falls in Mosfellsbær, a separate business. And the istex.fr domain belongs to a French platform for scientific publications, unrelated to wool.

For a design guide, Ístex shows how a brand can be built on a raw material and a place: a yarn whose name is the national sweater’s first syllable, sold in the colours of the sheep. Compare Jamieson’s of Shetland, another island mill spinning a native breed, and Sandnes Garn, a Norwegian mill with a long history. For this guide we use brown-black, fleece white, moorit and heather grey with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ístex’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.