Rug yarns, a mill and a Fassett kit.

Rowan began in West Yorkshire, long a centre of the English wool trade. Its own website today says the company was “established in 1978” above a grocery store in a village near Huddersfield, by Stephen Sheard and Simon Cockin, and that it first specialised in weaving supplies and knitting kits. An earlier version of the same website, archived in 2011, put the start in “the early 1980’s” and said the first products were yarns for rug-making kits, so we give both accounts.

The company says it wanted natural fibres in a “paint-box” range of colours, and that its Lightweight DK yarn was launched in 98 shades. It says the name comes from the rowan trees along the banks of the River Holme, and that its logos have always carried “a nod to the Rowan leaves” as they have evolved. In 1979, Rowan says, it bought Green Lane Mill in Holmfirth, which was its home for the next fifteen years; it now says only that it is “still in Yorkshire.”

The turning point came in 1982, when, by the company’s account, Stephen Sheard met the designer Kaffe Fassett. Their first big success was a mail-order kit on the cover of Woman & Home in 1983; orders far exceeded expectations, and in 1986 Rowan launched its own magazine. It says it partnered with Westminster Fibers to take the brand to the United States in 1985, and that it now sells in more than 30 countries.

Designers first, yarn second.

Rowan’s reputation rests less on any single yarn than on the designers who use it. Kaffe Fassett, an American-born artist who moved to London in 1964, is still named first among them; English Wikipedia, citing the Victoria and Albert Museum, says his 1988 one-man show there was the first the museum had given to a living textile artist. The current list on Rowan’s website adds Lisa Richardson, Martin Storey, Erika Knight, Brandon Mably, ARNE & CARLOS, Quail Studio and Georgia Farrell.

The magazine became the brand’s calling card. In 2011 the company described a magazine published twice a year, for spring–summer and autumn–winter, with an in-house design team then led by Marie Wallin, and marked its 50th edition; it said many back issues had become collectors’ items. Its website still has a section called “Our History in Covers.”

Among the yarns, the website lists Felted Tweed, Kidsilk Haze, Alpaca Classic and Big Wool among its best sellers, and in 2026 was marking 25 years of Kidsilk Haze. In 2019 it added MODE at Rowan, which it calls a “diffusion collection” of contemporary wardrobe staples, relaunched for autumn–winter 2024. The company says it works only with suppliers who assure it their wool is mulesing-free; it does not say on its main pages where each yarn is spun, so we make no claim about that.

Rowan says its core team is based in the United Kingdom, with a small marketing and distribution team in the United States, and it runs flagship stores and online knit-alongs.

Yarn, owners and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all sell the same basic thing — yarn for knitting and crochet — and come from seven countries: Rowan from the UK, DROPS from Norway, Malabrigo from Uruguay, Lang Yarns from Switzerland, Schachenmayr from Germany, Lion Brand from the United States and Noro from Japan. A ball of wool looks simple, but the businesses behind these names are not alike.

Among yarn makers in general there are family firms still carrying a founder’s name, brands that sit inside larger corporate groups, dye houses that colour fibre by hand in small batches, and companies that sell as much through free patterns as through the yarn itself. Some spin their own fibre; others design and dye, and buy in the spinning. Some sell direct, and some reach most of the world through distributors, so the company that makes a yarn and the company whose name appears in a shop are not always the same.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its yarns are spun and dyed — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Coats, AURELIUS, MEZ, then DMC.

Rowan’s ownership, as the company itself puts it, “has changed several times.” Its 2011 website, which then carried a Coats copyright line, said that in 1996 Rowan Yarns was acquired by Coats Crafts, joining brands including Anchor, Patons and Regia. In February 2015 the German investor AURELIUS agreed to buy Coats’ European handicrafts business — a German headquarters and warehouse and a production site in Hungary, with about 900 staff — and completed the deal with effect from 31 July 2015, according to its press releases. That business traded as MEZ, the group that also owned Schachenmayr, so for five years Rowan and the German brand were sister companies.

On 30 April 2020 AURELIUS announced that MEZ had sold its hand-knitting yarn business under the Rowan and Patons names to the DMC group, which it described as a subsidiary of the private-equity firm Lion Capital and a long-standing distribution partner of Rowan. It said that under its ownership Rowan’s British roots had been strengthened, the range streamlined towards natural fibres, a sub-brand introduced and flagship stores opened. English Wikipedia says DMC, the French thread maker founded in Mulhouse in 1746, was bought by BlueGem Capital Partners in 2016; Companies House records show Lion Capital-linked companies controlling the DMC group’s British holding company from 2019 until March 2026, when it passed to a newly formed holding company.

Today Rowan’s terms of sale name the seller as Rowan Yarns, a division of Sirdar Holdings Ltd, whose registered office is at the Sirdar yarn spinner in Wakefield, and, for orders in the United States and Canada, DMC’s American company; Companies House records show the DMC group taking control of Sirdar’s parent company in 2017. So the brand born in Holmfirth now sits beside another West Yorkshire yarn name, inside a French-rooted thread group.

For a design guide, Rowan shows how a yarn brand can be built on named designers and a magazine rather than on the fibre alone. Compare Schachenmayr, its former German sister brand, and Lang Yarns. For this guide we use a berry red, moss green and undyed-fleece cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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