A blogger’s haberdashery in Lisbon.

Retrosaria is a yarn, fabric and haberdashery shop in Lisbon, and the yarn brand that grew out of it. “Retrosaria” is the Portuguese word for a haberdashery, and many unrelated shops in Portugal use it. This one trades as Retrosaria Rosa Pomar, after its founder, and sells its own yarns under the name Rosa Pomar.

Portuguese Wikipedia describes Rosa Pomar as an artisan, researcher, businesswoman, author and blogger from Lisbon. She is a daughter of the journalist and art critic Alexandre Pomar and a granddaughter of the painter Júlio Pomar. She studied history at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and did postgraduate work in medieval history. In 2001 she started a blog, A Ervilha Cor de Rosa, and sold handmade cloth dolls to its readers. In 2004, Wikipedia says, citing the weekly Sol, she organised what it calls the first knitting meet-up in Portugal.

The shop came next. Portuguese Wikipedia says she opened an online shop in 2008, and in 2009 she opened Retrosaria on Rua do Loreto in Lisbon as a shop with an atelier for workshops. Its sources include the newspapers Expresso and Sul Informação. The company’s own website header gives a different anchor, “Working with Portuguese wool since 2010,” which refers to its wool rather than to the shop. According to its website, the shop is now at a different address in Lisbon. It describes itself as “an online & brick and mortar shop based in Lisbon, Portugal, dedicated to selling top-quality fabrics, yarn and notions/haberdasheries.” Alongside its own yarns it sells other makers’ yarns, needles, books, kits and homeware.

In 2013 Rosa Pomar published Malhas Portuguesas: História e Prática do Tricot em Portugal with Editora Civilização. The book is a history and practical guide to Portuguese knitting, based on fieldwork on the mainland and the islands. Wikipedia says that while researching it she also created her own brand of wool made entirely in Portugal. In 2016 she co-wrote a book on the traditional patterned socks of Cabeceiras de Basto, published by the town council.

Native breeds, named by place.

The Rosa Pomar yarns are built around Portuguese sheep. A print of native breeds that the company sells says that “there are 16 native sheep breeds in Portugal, most of which are at risk of extinction.” It adds that the company’s yarn production currently uses the wool of seven of them. The company published its first map of the breeds in 2019. Its own range runs to about twenty yarns, and they are described by breed and place rather than by fibre blend.

The first, Beiroa, is described as made in Portugal for Retrosaria exclusively from the wool of free-grazing Bordaleira Serra da Estrela sheep. Later yarns use Portuguese Merino, whose origin the company says is verified by the breeders’ association ANCORME. Others use Campaniça, Saloia and Churra Badana, a breed from the Bragança region that the company describes as endangered. Some names come from tradition. Cobertor is the yarn used for the traditional papa blankets of Guarda, the company says, and Mondim is named after a village once known for knitting socks at home.

The company says where its yarn is made by naming places, not mills. For the industrially spun yarns it uses phrases such as “grown, scoured, milled and dyed in Portugal,” but it does not name the spinning mills, and we have not identified them. Some lines are spun by hand, and for those the company names the place. One is spun on a century-old great wheel from a small Merino flock in Odemira, in the Alentejo. Another is spun with distaff and spindle in the Minho, a third is hand-spun in the village of Nordeste on São Miguel in the Azores, and a linen is grown and spun in Sertã. Another yarn, Mungo, is recycled from the pre-consumer waste of Portuguese spinning mills, it says.

The company also says that its yarns are not superwash-treated or bleached, and that mulesing is not practised in Portugal. A plant-dyed version of one yarn is listed with OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certification. We give these as the company’s own statements.

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.

A shop, a book and a breed map.

Portuguese Wikipedia and the company’s website both present Retrosaria as Rosa Pomar’s business. We found no record of an outside investor or a sale in the sources we checked, and we have not checked the Portuguese company register. Her work also reaches beyond the shop. In 2013 she was a guest at a talk series at the Casa da Cultura in Loulé, in the Algarve, and Wikipedia describes her as a mentor of “Lã em Tempo Real,” a project that collects practices from the traditional wool cycle.

The brand’s look comes from that research. Its yarns carry breed and place names, and its shop has a section of needles for Portuguese-style knitting. The breed print is illustrated by Mariana Margarida Malhão, the company says. More recently it has developed yarn for its own clothing. Terno, launched in 2024, was made for the shop’s Casaco jackets and is described as “sourced, scoured, spun and dyed in Portugal.” The company says its felt bags are handmade locally in a small family-owned atelier, from felt made with waste from its yarn production.

For a design guide, Retrosaria shows how a shop can turn research into a brand: a book, a breed map and yarns named for villages and flocks. Compare Purl Soho, the New York shop that became a yarn brand, and Blacker Yarns, which spins breed-specific British wool. For this guide we use a tile blue, a cork brown and a fleece cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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