A yarn label built by a former yarn-shop owner.

Kremke Soul Wool is a German yarn brand named after the couple who started it. Its website says the brand was founded by Britta and Carsten Kremke, and tells their story in a few lines. Britta, it says, has knitted since she was eight, in her mother’s wool shop in Hamburg, and in the early 1980s ran a yarn shop of her own near Lüneburg; the company calls her Germany’s youngest yarn-shop owner at the time. Carsten is described as an industrial engineer and marketing consultant who looks after the numbers. The website does not give a founding year for the brand, and we found no independent, dated account of its early years, so its origins rest on the company’s own story.

The name had a first draft. According to the website, the couple originally wanted to call the brand Kremke Slow Wool, after the Slow Food movement, because the point was the pleasure of knitting rather than a quick result. That idea still shapes the range: the company says you will look in vain for very thick quick-knit yarns or yarns with a high synthetic content, and that the brand’s hallmarks are fine, soft, natural yarns at fair prices. In the end they chose Soul Wool instead, which the website glosses as yarns “with and for the soul.”

For most of its history the brand sat inside a family business. A French-language page of the website archived in February 2019 described Kremke Soul Wool as the brand of the specialist distributor Schmeichelgarne, run by the company Kremke Handelsgesellschaft mbH in Garwitz, a village in the Lewitz area of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and added that knitters would find no acrylic there. Archived legal notices from 2019 to 2022 named Britta and Carsten Kremke as the company’s managing directors.

Designed in Germany, spun in Italy, Belgium and beyond.

Kremke does not say it spins its own yarn. Instead, its product pages state where individual yarns are made, and in October 2026 they named several countries. We give these as the company’s claims. The Merry Merino family, a set of GOTS-certified merino yarns in four thicknesses, is made from mulesing-free wool from Argentina and spun in Italy, the company says, as is its Edelweiss alpaca-blend sock yarn, whose fibre it says comes from South America. Its pure cashmere is described as Mongolian fibre spun and dyed in Italy.

Other yarns come from elsewhere. Kremke says its Baby Silk alpaca and silk yarns are spun exclusively for it in Belgium, that its Silky Kid mohair and silk is made for it in South Africa, and that a metallic yarn is made in Japan. Its recycled lines are spun in India, it says, by a family-run mill that makes both a recycled wool and a yarn made from old jeans. The homepage sums up the policy: all yarns are mulesing-free, mohair enters the range only with a Responsible Mohair Standard certificate, there is a large choice of vegan yarns, and recycled fibres belong in the range alongside unusual textures and colour concepts. Its closing line describes the brand as “designed with heart, produced with responsibility.”

The brand is built to be sold through shops. The website’s retailer finder covered more than 35 countries and territories in October 2026, from Germany, Denmark and the Nordic countries to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States, and named a handful of flagship stores, among them shops in Copenhagen, Reykjavík, Dublin and Antwerp. A trade section invites shops to become stockists, and the company offers them starter packages with full colour ranges, pattern booklets and wooden shop displays. Pattern support comes through printed booklets, including collaborations with independent designers, and an errata page in German, English and Danish.

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.

One company, three names.

The company behind Kremke has changed its name more often than its brand has. Its websites’ legal notices, read through archived copies, show the sequence. Until at least 2022 the business was Kremke Handelsgesellschaft mbH, trading as Schmeichelgarne, with Britta and Carsten Kremke as managing directors. By November 2025 the same company was trading as Soul Wool, and its legal notice named a single managing director, Reinhard Andre. An archived copy from June 2026, and the live site in October 2026, show a new name and address: Selected Yarns GmbH, trading as Soul Wool, in Neustadt-Glewe, a town in the same part of Mecklenburg. The legal notice gives the same commercial-register entry at the Schwerin local court throughout, which indicates the company was renamed rather than replaced. We found no announcement explaining the changes of name and management, and no report of a sale, so we do not describe one.

That explains the link with Erika Knight. The Erika Knight yarn brand’s website, erikaknight.com, is published by Selected Yarns GmbH “Soul Wool” — and archived copies show that in May 2024 and January 2026 it was published by Kremke Handelsgesellschaft mbH, the same company under its earlier name. Kremke and Erika Knight are therefore sister brands run by one German company: Kremke as its own label, Erika Knight as a British designer’s collection that it publishes, distributes and supports.

Selected Yarns presents itself as a wholesaler of hand-knitting yarns. In October 2026 its trade website listed more than a dozen brands, including Kremke, Erika Knight, the Danish label BC Garn and Manos del Uruguay. “Soul Wool” is also the name of its online shop for knitters, soul-wool.com, which sells those brands alongside others. The Kremke label itself is now often styled simply KREMKE on its product pages, while the company’s own About page still tells the story of Kremke Soul Wool.

For a design guide, Kremke Soul Wool shows how a family yarn label can keep its founders’ name and voice while the company around it grows into a multi-brand wholesaler. Compare Erika Knight, its sister brand under the same publisher, and Manos del Uruguay, which the same company wholesales. For this guide we use a deep green, mohair rose and merino cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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