A Wakefield spinning business that turned to hand knitting.

Sirdar’s own history begins in 1880, when, the company says, the brothers Tom and Henry Harrap founded a spinning business to supply the hosiery and fabric trade. English Wikipedia’s article on Alverthorpe, a district on the western side of Wakefield in West Yorkshire, says the brothers developed the business there as Messrs Harrap Bros. Ltd. from 1880 onwards, at Bective Mills — a mill site it describes, citing a 1998 local history, as more than two centuries old.

The turn to hand knitting came in the next generation. According to the company, it was Tom’s son Fred Harrap who saw the opportunity, and by the mid-1930s the business was supplying hand-knitting yarns to retailers exclusively, under the brand name Sirdar — a word the company glosses as “leader.” It says an in-house design team has written Sirdar patterns since 1930, so the brand has always sold the yarn and the instructions together.

The family stayed in charge for decades. The company says Tom Harrap’s granddaughter, Jean Tyrell, became chief executive in 1961 and chairman in 1970; that the business bought the rival yarn brand Hayfield; that it employed some 1,200 people in the 1970s, when it introduced machine-washable “Wash and Wear” yarns; and that by its centenary in 1980 Sirdar-branded yarn held about a fifth of the British hand-knitting market. Those figures are the company’s own and we have not found them in an independent source.

From Sirdar plc to Airea.

The corporate story is easier to check than the early one, because it is on the public register. Companies House shows that Sirdar plc, a company first incorporated in 1953, changed its name to Airea plc in December 2007. Airea, now a flooring group based at Ossett near Wakefield and listed on London’s AIM market, tells the same story from its side: the group “started life as a spinning business company later to become Sirdar,” moved into floor coverings by buying the carpet-tile maker Burmatex in 1984, and in 2007 “the original spinning business left the group, and the new name of Airea was adopted.”

The yarn business carried on under the Sirdar name. The register shows Sirdar Holdings Ltd, a textile wholesaler, incorporated in September 2007, and a company called Sirdar Spinning Ltd between 2000 and 2017, when it was renamed Tilsatec, the name of the group’s technical-yarn business. We have not found a dated, independent account of who bought the yarn business from the listed company in 2007, so we leave that open.

Ownership changed again ten years later. Companies House lists The DMC Group Holdings Ltd — the British holding company of the French embroidery-thread maker DMC — as the controlling shareholder of Sirdar Group Ltd from April 2017. DMC’s modern-slavery statement for 2025, dated March 2026, says the group owns Sirdar Group, including Tilsatec and Sirdar Holdings, “also encompassing the Rowan brand and ranges,” together with Wool and the Gang and DMC’s French business, which includes Anchor. It reports more than 400 staff across seven sites, with almost half of sales in North America.

Yarn brands and where they are made.

The seven brands in this group all sell yarn for hand knitting and crochet, and they come from seven countries: Sirdar from the United Kingdom, Lana Grossa from Germany, Ístex from Iceland, Manos del Uruguay from Uruguay, Brooklyn Tweed from the United States, Filatura di Crosa from Italy and Hjertegarn from Denmark. What sets them apart is less the colour card than the question behind every ball: where the wool comes from, and who spins it.

The answers differ widely. Some yarn is washed and spun by a national wool processor that takes in a country’s own fleece; some is made by artisan cooperatives, where the people who dye and twist the fibre share in the business; some comes out of an old spinning district, where generations of mills grew up beside the same rivers; and some is sold by brands that design the yarn and its colours but commission mills to make it. Each route leaves its mark on a brand’s name, its labels and the way it talks about wool.

Each guide also 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 Yorkshire name in a French-owned group.

Today Sirdar is one of three family-knitting labels the company sells, alongside Snuggly, for baby yarns, and Hayfield; it says the three together offer about 60 yarns. Its terms of sale, updated in July 2025, name Sirdar Holdings Ltd as the seller, with a registered office at the Sirdar Spinning premises in Alverthorpe, Wakefield, and its customer-help pages run on a DMC group system. That makes Sirdar the sister brand of Rowan, the Holmfirth yarn brand DMC bought in 2020 and now runs as a division of Sirdar Holdings.

Where today’s Sirdar yarns are spun is harder to pin down. The local histories cited by Wikipedia, from 1998 and 2000, describe the Alverthorpe mill as one of Britain’s main worsted spinning mills for hand-knitting wool, but they describe the mill as it was then. The company’s heritage pages that we checked do not say where current yarns are made, and DMC’s 2026 statement lists cotton and yarn vendors in the group’s supply chain and a target for all yarn suppliers to hold OEKO-TEX and BSCI certification by the end of 2026. We therefore do not claim that Sirdar yarn is still spun in Wakefield.

The name also needs care online. “Sirdar” is an old military and mountaineering title, and many unrelated companies use it; the knitting brand is at sirdar.com, while Airea’s own site is aireaplc.com rather than the similar airea.co.uk.

For a design guide, Sirdar shows how a mass-market craft brand can outlast the company that built it: the listed Sirdar plc became a flooring group, while the yarn name, its pattern tradition and its mill address passed into a new owner. Compare Rowan, its sister brand under DMC, and Debbie Bliss, another British yarn name now owned by a larger group. For this guide we use navy, undyed wool and a brick red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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