Six generations of a New England textile family.

Berroco’s roots are older than the brand. The company describes itself as “six generations of quality,” and the Craft Industry Alliance, reporting in October 2021, traced that line to Jerry Wheelock, who joined the Daniel Day Mill in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, in the early 1800s. English Wikipedia says Daniel Day started the first woollen mill in Uxbridge in 1809, one of the earliest in the United States, in the Blackstone River Valley, which English Wikipedia calls the oldest industrialised region in the United States.

The family stayed in textiles. In 1905, the Craft Industry Alliance reported, Stanley Wheelock established Stanley Woolen Mills; English Wikipedia, which says the Uxbridge mill was known as the Wheelock Mill or Stanley Woolen from 1903, adds that it made military uniforms from the Civil War through the world wars and sold cloth to clothing makers including Brooks Brothers and Perry Ellis, and calls the business one of the longest-running family-owned textile firms in the country.

Hand knitting came later. In 1968 the family formed a hand-knitting subsidiary, Stanley Berroco. The name is not a place or a person: according to the Craft Industry Alliance, it combines the first syllables of the names of two sales agents, Berglass and Rosenberg. In 1987 Warren Wheelock, the sixth generation, and his wife Caroline re-established the company as Berroco, Inc., and Warren became its president. Berroco’s own website now dates the company to 1968 and credits Warren and Caroline Wheelock with creating “a fine yarn division that continues today.”

A wholesaler that designs, rather than a spinner.

Berroco does not spin its own yarn. Under Warren and Caroline Wheelock it became, in the Craft Industry Alliance’s words, one of the largest importers and wholesalers of hand-knitting yarns, patterns and supplies in the United States and Canada, importing yarn from Japan, Uruguay, Brazil, Peru, New Zealand and many European countries. The company says it partners “with mills and yarn suppliers worldwide.” In 2024 the Craft Industry Alliance’s Golden Scissors Awards gave Warren Wheelock a lifetime-achievement award, describing how, from 1987, he worked with spinning mills all over the world to develop yarn collections, and noting that he had since retired.

Berroco’s product pages state where each yarn is made. In October 2026 they gave Peru for Ultra Alpaca, a blend of alpaca and Peruvian wool, and for the hand-painted version of Vintage; Italy for Biella, a merino, silk and mohair blend; and France for Remix Wool. Remix, the company says, is a recycled yarn made by a low-impact process patented in France, from garments and knitted fabric panels left over from the ready-to-wear industry and collected across Europe; because the pieces are already dyed, it says, they need no further dyeing. We give those as the company’s claims.

The other half of Berroco is design. It publishes knit and crochet patterns, many free, which it describes as contemporary and size-inclusive, and sends a weekly newsletter of patterns from the Berroco Design Team. English Wikipedia says the knitwear designer Norah Gaughan was its design director from 2005 to 2014. Berroco also distributes other makers’ yarns in North America: in October 2026 it listed Lopi, Amano, Lang, WoolAddicts and West Yorkshire Spinners. Throughout, the company presents itself as a supplier to local yarn shops, which it calls “the backbone of the yarn industry.”

Yarn makers and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all sell yarn for hand knitting and crochet, and they come from six countries: Gepard Garn from Denmark, Berroco and Lorna’s Laces from the United States, Retrosaria from Portugal, Biches & Bûches from France, Kremke Soul Wool from Germany and Lanas Stop from Spain. Between them they show several very different ways of putting a ball or skein of yarn on a shop shelf.

Some yarn brands are the visible face of a mill or a family firm, and their names are bound up with a place, a fibre or a long run of pattern books. Others are design-led labels that choose fibres and colours and commission the spinning from someone else. Some dye by hand in small batches; some pass from one owner to another while the name on the label stays the same; and a few survive mainly as a name inside another company’s range.

Each guide 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.

From family firm to private-equity crafts group.

For most of its history Berroco stayed close to where the family began. English Wikipedia says it was headquartered at the site of Daniel Day’s original carding mill in Uxbridge until 2010, when it moved a few miles south to North Smithfield, Rhode Island, a mill village in the same Blackstone Valley.

In October 2021 the family sold. Premier Needle Arts, a portfolio company of the Cleveland private-equity firm Blue Point Capital Partners, announced that it had acquired Berroco, the Craft Industry Alliance reported on 14 October 2021. Premier Needle Arts, based in North Salt Lake, Utah, already owned the quilting-machine maker Handi Quilter and Crafts Group of Vancouver, Washington, home of Knit Picks and WeCrochet. Its chief executive, Mark Hyland, said Berroco would operate as a separate entity with its existing management, locations and sales channels. Warren Wheelock said the company had joined because of shared values, and that “Caroline and I will continue with the company.” The knitwear author Carol Sulcoski told the Craft Industry Alliance she was “sad to see another longtime family business being sold.”

The group has since been renamed. By 2025 the Craft Industry Alliance was calling it Local Crafts, “formerly Premier Needle Arts,” when it bought the Reno yarn retailer Jimmy Beans Wool, and in October 2026 Blue Point’s website listed Berroco among Local Crafts’ knitting and crochet brands alongside Knit Picks, Jimmy Beans Wool and WeCrochet, stating that Berroco was acquired in October 2021. In the same month Berroco’s own contact page gave a mailing address in Grand Prairie, Texas.

For a design guide, Berroco shows how a yarn brand can carry a family’s textile history while its yarns are made by partner mills on several continents. Compare Knit Picks, its sister brand under the same owner, and West Yorkshire Spinners, a British spinner Berroco distributes. For this guide we use a slate, brick and alpaca cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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