Cheap rent, good wool and a look south.

Cascade Yarns began in Seattle. The company says Bob Dunbabin founded it in 1987; an earlier version of its website, archived in 2022, put the start more loosely in “the late 1980’s.” Both versions tell the same story about the first premises: a vacant storefront in Pioneer Square, the city’s old downtown district, which served as office and warehouse. The company says the space was squeezed between a mission for the homeless and the main north–south rail line, and that Dunbabin picked it because it was cheap and well placed for shipping.

The reasoning, as the company tells it, was simple. Knitters, Dunbabin believed, cared more about the yarn than about the address of the firm that sold it, and money saved on rent could go into better yarn at a lower price. The company says it later moved several times within Seattle as the property market changed — four times, according to the 2022 version of its site — and today it still describes itself as a Seattle business.

The more important decision concerned sourcing. In the 1980s, the company says, most premium hand-knitting yarn sold in the United States came from England or Italy. Dunbabin looked instead to South America, where, it says, he worked with mills to upgrade their equipment and improve how the yarn was made. The company puts his view this way: it did not matter where a yarn was made, so long as the fibre was good, the spinning machinery right and the workers well treated. That is a company account rather than an independently reported one, but the early website bears out the direction of travel. A capture of cascadeyarns.com from May 2000 offered “alpaca/wool and alpaca/cotton blends from the Andes Mountains of Peru” alongside kid mohair and silk blends “from the spinners of Italy.”

Two hundred and twenty yards of Peruvian Highland wool.

The yarn most knitters know the company by is Cascade 220. The name is the yardage: each 100-gram hank holds 220 yards, or about 200 metres, of worsted-weight wool. The company says the yarn is spun from 100% Peruvian Highland wool, which it describes as coming from a cross of Corriedale sheep, originally from New Zealand, and Merino sheep, originally from Spain, giving loft, durability and clear stitch definition. It is a hand-wash yarn, not a superwash one, and the company pitches it for cables, lace, colourwork and felting.

Its age can be checked. The same May 2000 capture of the company’s website invited visitors to look at “111 colors in Cascade 220 alone”; by January 2006 the figure on the home page had risen to 185. The company now lists more than 150 shades, including the heathers — blends of several colours in one strand — for which the line is known. In a 2025 blog post the company called Cascade 220 a flagship yarn “for over thirty years.” Outside retailers describe it in similar terms: the yarn retailer WEBS calls it one of the most-used yarns it sells.

Over time the name has become a family. The company sells 220 Sport, 220 Fingering and 220 Grande alongside the original, plus a separate 220 Superwash range of machine-washable wool. It describes all of this as part of a deliberately classic catalogue; Shannon Dunbabin told the company blog in 2025 that each yarn should fit into “a family of yarns that complement one another,” rather than follow trends.

Where the yarns are made is told only in part. The company describes itself as a yarn distribution company working with partner mills rather than as a spinner. It says the owners visit those mills: its blog shows them looking at recycled fibres at a mill in India in 2025, and in 2026 it described a quality visit to a partner mill in Peru, following alpaca fibre from sorting and scouring through spinning and dyeing. The Cascade 220 page names the wool but not the mill.

Seven brands, seven origins.

The seven brands in this group all sell yarn for hand knitting and crochet, but they work at very different scales and come from seven countries. Between them they cover most of the ways a ball or skein of yarn reaches a maker: from a mill on an island, from a small hand-dyeing studio, from a family distributor, and from names sold widely on the high street and in craft chains.

Four come from continental Europe. Phildar is French, Scheepjes is Dutch, Katia is Spanish and Isager is Danish, and each guide sets out who founded the brand, who owns it now and what it says about where its yarn is spun. Two are smaller and rooted in place: Jamieson’s of Shetland, from the islands north of mainland Scotland, and Hedgehog Fibres, an Irish hand-dyer. The last, Cascade Yarns, is an American family firm in Seattle that sources its yarn from partner mills abroad.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A second generation and a dozen staff.

Cascade Yarns is still a family business. The company says Bob Dunbabin’s son Rob and daughter-in-law Shannon took over in 2011; the 2022 version of its website said they bought the business in January of that year. A 2025 company blog post described a team of just 12 people and said the owners take part in every side of the business, from visiting mills to talking to the shops that stock the yarn. “Keeping things human was important to my father, and it’s still how we do things today,” Rob Dunbabin said there.

The company’s stated mission is to support local yarn stores, and it sells through them rather than chasing scale; its website centres on a store finder and free patterns. Its range has grown from more than 80 yarns, as the 2022 site put it, to more than 90 today, in fibres from wool, alpaca and cashmere to cotton, linen and synthetics. It also distributes knitting needles and crochet hooks by PONY, and says its yarn is sold in Canada through Estelle Yarns, a family-owned distributor. In its early years the website also carried yarns from other makers, among them King Cole, which shows how much of the business has always been about choosing and supplying yarn rather than spinning it.

The brand itself is quiet. There is no documented logo story, house typeface or brand colour, and the company presents itself mainly through its yarns: long colour cards, solid and heathered shades, and plain, practical product pages.

For a design guide, Cascade Yarns shows how a single dependable product, a family name and steady service to independent shops can build a brand without much branding. Compare Bernina, the Swiss family sewing-machine maker, and Janome, the Japanese computerised-sewing pioneer. For this guide we use heather navy, fir green and rust with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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