A young yarn label in an old linen town.

LAMANA is one of the younger names in German hand-knitting yarn. The company describes itself as “a young wool and fashion label” founded in 2010 in Bielefeld, which it calls the Leineweberstadt — the linen weavers’ town, a nickname that recalls the city’s history in the linen trade. The firm writes its name in capitals, LAMANA, and we follow that.

The commercial register backs up the date. According to the register entries summarised by the company-data service North Data, the business was first entered in September 2010 as CRFT Trading GmbH, a limited company whose stated purpose is the import, export, wholesale and retail of yarns and textiles; its articles were changed and its name became LAMANA GmbH in March 2011, when a “LAMANA” word mark also appears in the record. The company’s own website names Benjamin Kopp and Johannes Mantei as its managing directors, the same two names listed in the first register entry. The register summary shows two shareholders but does not name them publicly, so we do not say who owns the company beyond that it is private.

The company has kept filing annual accounts each year, the most recent for 2024, which shows that the company is still trading under its own name. Its website is published in German and English under both lamana.de and lamana.com, and the company says it ships across Europe from Bielefeld.

Peruvian alpaca first, Italian spinning later.

LAMANA says it began by specialising in Peruvian yarns and now has its yarns spun “exclusively” by owner-managed traditional mills in Italy and Peru, which it says it visits regularly. It also says it has close family ties to Peru. It does not name the mills, and we found no independent record of them, so the place of manufacture rests on the company’s word.

Its fibre sourcing is set out in more detail. The company says its alpaca comes entirely from Peru; that the sheep’s wool in its Peruvian blends Merida and Lima comes from South America; that its superfine merino comes from Australian farms certified under the SustainaWool standard; that its cashmere comes from Mongolia and China and is certified under the Sustainable Fibre Alliance standard; that its mohair comes from a South African farm project belonging to Mohair South Africa; and that its Pima and organic Pima cotton comes from Peru. It says all its wool is mulesing-free and that the wool in its Italian production can be traced to the farm for each production batch. It also says its yarns are certified to OEKO-TEX Standard 100, and gives a certificate number that can be checked on the OEKO-TEX website.

Cotton gets the same treatment. The company says the Pima cotton in its yarns Perla, Cosma and Ica comes from Peru, and that Cosma and Ica are made from organic Pima. Its cashmere yarns, among them Modena, Milano and Verona, use the Mongolian and Chinese fibre described above, while its mohair yarn, Premia, uses the South African mohair. The pattern is consistent across the range: the company names the country of the raw fibre, a certification where one applies, and the country of spinning, but not the individual farm or mill.

The range is broad but consistent in tone. It runs, in the company’s words, “from delicate lace yarn to super-light quick-knit yarn,” and the yarns take Italian and Peruvian place names — Como, Milano and Verona on one side, Cusco and Piura on the other.

Craft, provenance 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.

A shared colour world across every fibre.

Two ideas define the product. The first is lightness: the company’s Superlight Collection uses what it calls innovative manufacturing processes to make yarns that knit into noticeably lighter garments, a claim about feel that we report rather than test. The second is colour. LAMANA says many of its shades run across the whole collection, so that the same colour can be had in alpaca, cashmere, mohair or cotton and combined, often holding two or more strands together, in different textures.

Patterns carry the brand as much as yarn does. The company designs its own garments and publishes them in numbered magazines — the LAMANA series has passed issue 18 — along with special issues for accessories, babies, menswear, basics and spring and summer knitting. It sells through independent yarn shops, listed in a stockist directory on its website.

Responsibility claims sit alongside the product story. Beyond its fibre standards, the company says its magazines and paper bags are printed on FSC-certified paper and that it ships carbon-neutrally across Europe; as with the spinning, these are the company’s statements.

For a design guide, LAMANA shows how a small importer can build a premium identity from provenance, colour and its own pattern magazines rather than from a mill of its own. Compare Lana Grossa, another German yarn house that has its yarns spun in Italy, and Rico Design, a neighbour from the same corner of Westphalia. For this guide we use alpaca brown, camel and cashmere white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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