A Japanese word, a Berlin importer.

ITO takes its name from the Japanese word ito, 糸, meaning thread or yarn — “ITO is Japanese for yarn or thread,” as the brand’s website has put it since its earliest archived version. The name is Japanese and the yarns, the company says, are made in Japan, but the business behind the label has always been German. It is not connected with other companies of similar name, such as the Japanese tea maker Ito En or the Tokyo stationer Itoya.

The earliest copy of the website held by the Internet Archive, from February 2011, is titled “ITO – Fine Yarn from Japan” and is written in German and English. Its legal notice names the importer and distributor as Tanja Lay & Michael Schindler GbR, a partnership based in Berlin. That page does not give a founding year, and we have not found one in the other sources we checked, so 2011 is simply the earliest date we can document, not a founding date.

The partnership was later replaced by a limited company. Register publications summarised by the company-data service North Data show ITO Yarn & Design GmbH entered in the Berlin commercial register in March 2014, and the website’s 2016 legal notice names that company, with Tanja Lay as chief executive. By 2018 it ran an ITO Showroom & Store in Berlin Mitte, near the main railway station, open a few afternoons a week, and said its range was “exclusively sold by selected retailers of hand-knitting yarns in Europe and North America.” Alongside the main collection it then listed an accessory yarn line called Masaki, a paper accessories collection, ready-to-wear pieces and knitting needles.

Silk, mohair, paper and steel.

ITO’s yarns are unusual for the materials they use. The 2011 site already listed Sensai, Kinu and Gima among about a dozen yarns; by 2015 the brand said its collection had 25 yarns, and by early 2023, 29. Its own descriptions stress paper and other uncommon fibres: in the company’s words, “dry chenille linen paper yarn with cotton core, moldable silk with stainless steel, ultra-soft silk mohair yarn, yarn made of the bast fiber ramie or super fine soft merino,” and “no less than five yarns made from paper,” which it presents as a sign of “the high value of paper for textiles and garments in the Japanese culture.”

The best-known yarns show the range. ITO describes Sensai as a mohair yarn with 40 per cent silk, offered in more than 50 colours; Kinu as a bourette silk, spun from the residues of filament silk, in 48 colours; Tetsu as mulberry silk with a stainless-steel filament, so that the knitted fabric “retains the shape it is put into”; and Kosho as a blend of merino from Uruguay with 10 per cent cashmere, which it says is carded and spun in Japan on a carriage spinning machine. The yarns are meant to be combined: ITO says its colours and fibres are coordinated “as one coherent system,” and its website offers a “Yarn Compass” for choosing yarns and promotes knitting with several strands at once.

The range has spread beyond yarn. Archived pages from 2023 show silk sewing and embroidery threads, Japanese dyes sold as Miyacozome, steel thread snips and interchangeable needles, and the shop also sells books, including Cecelia Campochiaro’s Making Marls, on knitting with several colours held together. Patterns come from the company and from outside designers, and its website invites designers to apply to work with its yarns.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all sell yarn for hand knitting and crochet, and they are linked to six countries: Paintbox Yarns and Erika Knight from the United Kingdom, Juniper Moon Farm from the United States, Lamana from Germany, Laines du Nord from Italy, De Rerum Natura from France, and ITO, a label run from Germany whose yarns, it says, come from Japan. What they share is less a place than a question: who actually makes the yarn that carries the name on the label?

Some yarn brands are, in effect, designer or retailer labels. The company chooses the fibres, sets the colour card, writes the patterns and builds the brand, but the spinning and dyeing are done by mills elsewhere, sometimes in another country, and the name on the ball tells you who designed it rather than who made it. Others are fibre-led, built around a particular wool, a flock or a mill, where the story of the yarn starts with the raw material and the place it was grown or spun.

Many brands sit somewhere between the two, and their own descriptions do not always make the line clear. Each guide therefore 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.

Made in Japan, run from Münster.

The business is now run from Münster, in north-western Germany. North Data’s summary of the register shows a separate company, also called ITO Yarn & Design GmbH, entered at the Münster local court in April 2023, with Torge Ruge as managing director; the website’s legal notice, in versions from October 2024 and October 2026, names that company and him. The same summaries show that the earlier Berlin company later took a different name and, in January 2025, moved its seat to Bochum. How the ITO business passed from one company to the other is not set out in the records we saw, and the current shareholders are not named in the sources we checked, so we do not describe it as a sale.

On where the yarn is made, the company is direct. “All ITO yarns are manufactured in Japan by specialized spinning mills with a long tradition,” its website says, and it describes those suppliers as “small, family-run workshops” and “traditional, owner-operated businesses” that its staff visit. It does not name the mills, and we found no independent source that does, so the Japanese origin is the company’s claim. ITO also says it uses mulesing-free wool from Uruguay, avoids superwash-treated yarns, and, at what it calls its “production facilities in Germany,” creates jobs for people with disabilities; it does not say what is produced there.

The shop now ships worldwide and keeps a stockist search and a reseller area, following the retailer-first model the brand described in Berlin. Its slogans have stayed close to the 2011 title: “Fine yarns from Japan,” the website says today, “With Heritage. With Stance.”

For a design guide, ITO shows how a brand can be built from a single word and a country of origin, with the design and selling done far from the mills. Compare DARUMA, the Osaka thread house, and Hamanaka, the Kyoto craft-yarn maker — two Japanese makers selling under their own names. For this guide we use a sumi grey, washi white and persimmon with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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