From Paisley mills to an American craft name.

Red Heart is one of the best-known names in American craft yarn: a mass-market line of mostly acrylic knitting and crochet yarns, led by Super Saver, which its seller calls “America’s favorite yarn.” For most of its modern life the brand belonged to a thread company rather than to a wool mill of its own, and its story is told less through a founding spinner than through the groups that owned it.

That thread company traces its roots to Paisley in Scotland. English Wikipedia records that James and Patrick Clark began a loom-equipment and silk-thread business there in 1755, and that Patrick Clark opened his first plant for cotton thread in 1812; James Coats set up as a weaver in Paisley in 1802 and opened a cotton mill at Ferguslie in 1826, the business passing to his sons as J. & P. Coats. Both families crossed the Atlantic. The Clarks made thread in Newark, New Jersey, from 1864, and in 1896 J. & P. Coats took controlling interests in Clark and several other firms.

In the United States the two businesses merged in 1952 to become Coats & Clark’s, Wikipedia says. The parent group went through further mergers — Coats Patons in 1961, Coats Viyella in 1986 — was taken private by Guinness Peat in 2003 and returned to the London stock market as Coats Group plc in 2015.

Red Heart’s current owner does not give a launch year on its brand page; it says only that “for generations, Red Heart yarn has been a trusted choice for knitters and crocheters of all skill levels.” What the record does show is the brand’s place inside Coats. In January 2016, redheart.com forwarded to Make It Coats, Coats’ North American craft website, whose list of “our brands” put Red Heart Yarns beside Anchor embroidery thread, Dual Duty XP sewing thread, Coats zippers, Susan Bates hooks and needles, and two yarn brands from Europe, Rowan and Schachenmayr.

A Canadian spinner takes over.

Coats let go of its craft businesses in stages. Its European handicrafts arm, home to Rowan and Schachenmayr, went to the German investor AURELIUS in 2015, according to AURELIUS’s press releases. The North American crafts business, with Red Heart, followed in 2019, and the buyer was a yarn company from across the border.

Spinrite is based in Listowel, in the municipality of North Perth, Ontario; English Wikipedia lists Spinrite Yarns among North Perth’s businesses. On its own history page, Spinrite says it was formed in 1952, the same year as the American Coats & Clark merger, by its founder, David Hay, “using the land and buildings initially operated under the name of Maitland Spinning Mills.” It says it bought the Caron brand from National Spinning in 2011, and that in 2013 it brought its online shops together under Yarnspirations.com. For 2019 its timeline reads: “Spinrite acquired Coats & Clark and added famous brands like Red Heart, Coats & Clark, Aunt Lydia and Susan Bates to its portfolio.”

The trade press dates the deal the same way. Craft Industry Alliance reported in January 2020 that Spinrite had “announced their purchase of Red Heart Yarns” after the Creativation trade show of 2019, and in July 2025 it wrote that the private-equity firm Comvest Partners “has owned major yarn player Spinrite since 2018, and acquired Coats’ North American business in 2019.” Spinrite now calls itself “the largest marketer of craft yarns and consumer sewing thread in North America,” which is its own description.

Where Red Heart is made is harder to pin down. Spinrite’s product pages describe some Red Heart lines, among them Heat Wave, Stellar and With Love Chunky, as made in the USA, but those are claims about particular yarns, and the Super Saver page we checked gives no country of origin. We found no independent source naming the mill that spins Red Heart today, so we do not name one. Spinrite says only that it has “several locations across North America.”

Seven countries, seven ways to spin.

The seven brands in this group all sell yarn for hand knitting and crochet, and they come from seven countries: Plassard from France, Opal from Germany, Holst Garn from Denmark, Rauma from Norway, Daruma from Japan, Lana Gatto from Italy and Red Heart from the United States. They sit at very different points on the map of the yarn trade, from small regional names to brands sold by the million.

At one end are regional spinners and family firms, whose names are tied to a town, a valley or a national wool tradition, and whose colour cards often grew out of what local mills could make. At the other end are mass-market brands, built for craft chains and online shops, where a yarn name can pass from one corporate owner to another while the label on the ball stays the same. Between them sit companies that design yarn and its colours but rely on others to spin it.

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.

A new home, under one roof.

Under Spinrite, Red Heart gave up its own front door. Its old address, redheart.com, now forwards to Yarnspirations, where a brand page tells customers that “Red Heart has a new home on Yarnspirations” and that accounts, past orders and wish lists have moved across. There it sits among the site’s “brand boutiques” with Bernat, Caron, Patons, Lily Sugar’n Cream, Anchor, Aunt Lydia’s and Susan Bates, a long run of North American craft names under a single owner.

The range is built for volume and colour. Super Saver is sold on practicality: its copy says the solid shades have no dye lots, so every skein of a colour matches, and that the yarn “will stand the test of time, wash after wash.” Around it Spinrite lists dozens of variations and newer lines, with All In One, Super Easy and Cotton Breeze among the top sellers, along with discontinued and clearance shades and free knitting and crochet patterns written for the yarns.

For a design guide, Red Heart shows how a yarn brand can outlast the company that built it: a name carried from a Scottish thread group to a Canadian spinner without changing its promise of durable, affordable colour. Compare Rowan and Schachenmayr, yarn brands that also sat in Coats’ craft portfolio before passing to new owners in Europe. For this guide we use a heart red, a deep cranberry and a skein cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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