A worsted mill on Funen.

Hjertegarn — the name means “heart yarn” — began on the island of Funen. Danish Wikipedia says the company was founded in Odense in 1926 by Carl Bremer, and that it was previously known as Odense Kamgarnspinderi, the Odense worsted-spinning mill. The company tells the same story on its own website, which gives its founding as 1926 in Odense “by Carl Bremer” and carries the line “since 1926.” An archived version of its history page from 2008 marked the anniversary as “80 years with Hjertegarn, 1926–2006.”

For its first decades, Danish Wikipedia says, production and the head office were together in the centre of Odense. In 1958 a new factory was built in the Odense M district, and in the 1960s the production employed more than 1,000 people, a figure Danish Wikipedia sources to the Funen photo archive Fynske Billeder.

That factory has since found other uses. Danish Wikipedia’s article on Odense Tekniske Gymnasium, a technical upper-secondary school, says the school has occupied new premises built into parts of the old Hjertegarn buildings since 1998, and its Hjertegarn article says the former factory now houses both that school and the vocational college Syddansk Erhvervsskole. The spinning mill that once gave the brand its name is, in other words, a campus.

The change came in 1992. That year, Danish Wikipedia and the company both say, Hjertegarn was sold and moved to Jutland, to Karup, where it remains.

No factories of its own.

When Hjertegarn left Odense it also stopped spinning. Danish Wikipedia says production moved abroad at the same time as the sale, and now takes place partly in Europe and partly in Asia. The company is direct about it: “Hjertegarn has no factories of its own,” its website says; “instead we work with loyal yarn producers. Half come from Europe and the rest from Asia.” It does not name those producers or say which yarns come from where, and we could not identify them.

What Hjertegarn does itself is choose, name, design for and sell. Its current range runs across wool, merino, alpaca, mohair and silk blends, cotton, bamboo blends and sock yarns, alongside knitting needles under its own name and needles from Addi. It publishes knitting patterns for babies, children, women and men, credits a roster of named designers on its website, and offers some patterns as free downloads. Its old history page describes the aim as patterns “in varying levels of difficulty” in yarns that follow current fashion in design and colour. The 2008 version of that page listed the yarns of the moment as thick flamé yarns, wool bouclé, mohair and ribbon yarn, beside classic smooth wools and cottons; the current version keeps the same text but drops the bouclé and ribbon yarn, a small record of how hand-knitting fashions have moved.

Its sales model is wholesale. An archived 2019 version of its website said that sales to private customers went through its stockists, and the site still directs buyers to a list of retailers. Outside Denmark, the company says, its yarns are sold in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, England, Germany and the Netherlands; Danish Wikipedia mentions exports to the rest of the Nordic region and Estonia. Its stated philosophy, in its own words, has always been to “sell at fair prices so everyone can take part.”

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 Jutland company with a Funen history.

Today the company trades as Hjertegarn A/S from Grønhøj, near Karup in central Jutland, according to its website, and describes itself as a family-owned business. It does not say which family, or who bought the company in 1992, and we could not confirm either from the sources we were able to check; we give the description as the company’s own.

Its claims about its size have become more modest over time. The 2008 and 2019 versions of its website called it Denmark’s largest supplier of knitting yarn; the current version calls it “one of Denmark’s largest.” One outside measure exists: Danish Wikipedia says the business newspaper Børsen named Hjertegarn a “gazelle” — its label for fast-growing companies — in 2004, 2006 and 2007, and the company still lists those years on its website.

A word of caution for anyone searching for the brand. In Danish, hjertegarn is also an ordinary technical term: Danish Wikipedia uses it for the fibre core, often of hemp, at the centre of some steel wire ropes. The company itself has used both hjertegarn.dk and hjertegarn.com.

Hjertegarn’s history follows a pattern seen across European yarn: a mill that once employed a thousand people becomes a design and distribution company, keeps its name and its pattern tradition, and buys its yarn from specialist spinners elsewhere. What it still makes, in the plainest sense, is the brand — the shade cards, the patterns and the name on the band.

For a design guide, Hjertegarn shows how a yarn brand can outlast its own mill by holding on to a name and a pattern library. Compare Isager, a Danish yarn house built around its palette, and Hobbii, a Danish brand that sells its own label online. For this guide we use heart red, rose and navy with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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